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How science fiction films in the 1950s were marketed and helped create the broader genre itself. For Hollywood, the golden age of science fiction was also an age of anxiety. Amid rising competition, fluid audience habits, and increasing government regulation, studios of the 1950s struggled to make and sell the kinds of films that once were surefire winners. These conditions, the leading media scholar J. P. Telotte argues, catalyzed the incredible rise of science fiction. Though science fiction films had existed since the earliest days of cinema, the SF genre as a whole continued to resist easy definition through the 1950s. In grappling with this developing genre, the industry began to consider new marketing approaches that viewed films as fluid texts and audiences as ever-changing. Drawing on trade reports, film reviews, pressbooks, trailers, and other archival materials, Selling Science Fiction Cinema reconstructs studio efforts to market a promising new genre and, in the process, shows how salesmanship influenced what that genre would become. Telotte uses such films as The Thing from Another World , Forbidden Planet , and The Blob , as well as the influx of Japanese monster movies, to explore the shifting ways in which the industry reframed the SF genre to market to no-longer static audience expectations. Science fiction transformed the way Hollywood does business, just as Hollywood transformed the meaning of science fiction.

This chapter contains sections titled: Becoming a Mantis What Manteis Did How They Did What They Did Bibliography

In the archeological record, the presence of smaller-bodied species is often assumed to indicate a decline in higher-ranked, larger-bodied prey and broadening of the diet to include lower-ranked items with higher handling costs. This shift is typically considered to be a product of a “broad spectrum revolution” that gave rise in many regions to increased sedentism, subsistence intensification, and investments in farming at the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary. However, recent evidence suggests that the use of small, fast prey may have emerged much earlier in hominin evolution than previously appreciated. Here, we assess ethnographic, historical, and actualistic observations of European rabbit hunting to explore whether such small, fast prey are inherently lower-ranked than larger ones. We find that, in combination, the type of procurement method and the population density of rabbits substantially affect foraging returns and the definition of prey types. When rabbits are locally abundant and mass-captured in the open, on-encounter returns are predictably high, sometimes higher than those of large-bodied ungulates. We suggest that rabbit hunting may have been locally and intermittently common during the European Middle and Late Pleistocene as rabbit densities waxed and waned.

In this study, we examine the role of foxes in Palaeolithic economies, focusing on sites of the Middle Palaeolithic, Aurignacian, Gravettian and Magdalenian of the Swabian Jura. For this purpose, we used published faunal data from 26 assemblages from the region, including new information from the Magdalenian layers of Langmahdhalde. We explore how the abundance of foxes changes over time, how they were used by humans, and how they were deposited at the sites, with a special focus on fox hunting methods. To evaluate these hunting methods, we use the prey choice model of optimal foraging theory (OFT) and simulate possible hunting scenarios, which we test based on the published faunal assemblages. Our research indicates that foxes were hunted since the early Upper Palaeolithic for their meat, fur and teeth, possibly with traps. We find that the abundance of fox remains in the archaeological record of the region increased continuously starting in the Aurignacian, which cannot be explained by taphonomic factors. The trend of foxes to adapt to human-influenced environments with commensal behavior may also have contributed to them being hunted more often.

This paper presents new zooarcheological data examining the relative abundances of artiodactyl and leporid remains from Holocene-aged sites in the Bonneville basin. Prior scholarship derived largely from sheltered sites suggests favorable climate conditions during the late Holocene increased foraging efficiency and supported a focus on hunting high-value artiodactyls. Using theoretical rationale from foraging theory and empirical data, we re-evaluate the trade-offs between the risk of hunting failure and energetic returns associated with the procurement artiodactyls and leporids, the two most common prey groups found in the regional zooarcheological record. The trade-offs between risk and energy show that while small in body size, leporids are a low risk, reliable food source rather than an inefficient resource targeted only when high-ranked prey are unavailable. We present faunal data from more than 80 open contexts in the Bonneville basin dating to the late Holocene that show a relatively stable exploitation strategy centered on leporids, especially hares ( Lepus sp.). Additional data from open and sheltered sites in neighboring areas show a similar pattern. The prehistoric reliance on small game is consistent with divergent labor patterns observed in the ethnographic and historic records of the area. We advocate for the evaluation of the trade-offs between risk and energy of different sized prey within a regional context, and the use of zooarcheological data derived from a large number of sites and different site types to infer prey exploitation patterns.

Disarticulated fish remains are frequently recovered from late preHispanic and early historic archaeological sites in the Middle Rio Grande basin of central New Mexico, but they are rare during earlier time periods. Increased aquatic habitat quality brought on by wetter climatic conditions may have impacted Ancestral Pueblo foraging goals related to risk minimization, leading to an uptick in fish exploitation. Wetter stream conditions can increase the number of different energy channels that help support fish populations and increase ecological stability, which makes fish less risky to pursue for human foragers. Here, we illustrate how to identify stable ecological communities in the archaeological record using stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values of fish bones recovered from archaeological sites in the Middle Rio Grande. We find that energy derived from terrestrial C 4 plants—a stabilizing “slow” allochthonous energy source—was important for the Middle Rio Grande aquatic food web during the late preHispanic/early historic period. This result suggests that fish populations were supported by a broader resource base and were thus more stable and less risky to pursue for Ancestral Pueblo people.

Applications of lagomorph indices to faunal assemblages in the American Southwest have produced a complex series of hypotheses and explanations for the changing ratio between Sylvilagus (cottontail rabbits) and Lepus (jackrabbits) in the archaeological record. Archaeologists attribute shifts in the lagomorph index (LI) to variation in the natural environment, modification of the landscape by Native Americans, changes in human hunting behaviors, and depression of Lepus populations through differential hunting. Couched within the logic of human behavioral ecology (HBE), LI attempts to connect species representation to environmental change and human decision-making. The varied ecosystems, cultures, and environments of the American Southwest complicate this connection and make some interpretations better suited to different subregions. In this paper, we report results from the analysis of faunal remains from Room 733 at Homol’ovi I, an ancestral Hopi site near Winslow, Arizona. Room 733 dates to the Late Homol’ovi Phase (LHP) 1385–1400 but also includes dates from the Early Homol’ovi Phase (EHP) 1330–1365. We calculate the LI for both phases to evaluate different explanations for shifts in the LI relative to regional moisture patterns. We find that while most explanations for changing LI are interconnected, changing environmental moisture, human hunting behaviors, and depression of Lepus populations do not fully explain the shifting LI. We suggest that human niche construction provides the most satisfactory explanation for changing lagomorph representation in the assemblage from Homol’ovi Room 733.

Like Morrison and the Doors, Marcus likes to set the reader up and then go his own way, and when I say he's a writer's writer, I mean that he has a knack for saying whatever he wants but in a way only he can pull off. [...] in mid-book he riffs on lesser-known bands (Moby Grape) and movies (\"Pump Up the Volume\") and completely obscure novels (Wayne Wilson's \"Loose Jam\").

After such a paring down, a less pretentious book might have emerged, one called, say, \"American Noir.\" Mr. [Greil Marcus] does know pop culture and might as well stick to it without over-reaching. He makes (some) sense of the splintered logic of \"Lost Highway,\" for instance. And when he departs the podium and becomes a fan, his writing unclogs: He compares a rock song's rhythm to \"a car trying to start on a cold morning,\" while a guitarist is \"one of Dr. Moreau's mistakes.\" But in the final pages, when Mr. Marcus calls punk \"a sense of humor and a sense of doom,\" he unintentionally reminds the reader that this book could have used a lot more of the former and a lot less of the latter. \"The Shape of Things to Come\" is still waiting for its own shape to arrive. It aims to be breathtaking in its range, but really it's just a breathtaking mess, desperately trying to unite, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr. and the obscure Cleveland rock band Pere Ubu or Abraham Lincoln and \"Twin Peaks.\" In the book's acknowledgments, rock critic Greil Marcus thanks his editor for \"never losing sight of a book's argument (or finding one when the author could not).\" That is indeed one talented editor.

In one memorable passage, [Greil Marcus], then a 30-year-old writer for Rolling Stone magazine, sometime American studies lecturer at UC Berkeley and the inspired hoaxster behind \"I Can't Get No Nookie,\" the highlight of a 1969 LP by the Masked Marauders (an alleged supergroup made up of Bob Dylan along with various Beatles and Rolling Stones), distilled the essence of Elvis in performance: \"Something entirely his ... is transformed into an energy that is ecstatic -- that is, to use the word in its old sense, illuminating.\" At its best, Marcus' work, which takes as much inspiration from Elvis as it does from Alexis de Tocqueville and 20th century literary critic F.O. Matthiessen, has always been ecstatic, channeling the drive and irreverence of rock 'n' roll into a mission to illuminate the furthest -- and often the most obscure - - reaches of American culture, from hillbilly singers to B-movie directors to the likes of Puritan leader John Winthrop, President Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The semi-forgotten figure of [Laura Palmer], the murdered homecoming queen in \"Twin Peaks,\" presides over the vast Sargasso at the center of the book. We're told that [Sheryl Lee]'s cinematic turn as Laura is \"the most bottomless female film performance of the latter days of the twentieth century,\" that when Laura says \"gobble, gobble\" (like a turkey), it's her way of saying \"sex is death\"; that, for her, \"[t]he fantasies come like fish; they could all be true.\" Elsewhere, the reader may be alarmed to encounter, without warning, an allusion to Martina McBride's Wal-Mart-country classic \"Independence Day,\" while the sudden appearance of Don Henley's \"The End of the Innocence\" -- making a reprise from Marcus' book on Bob Dylan's \"Basement Tapes,\" \"The Old, Weird America\" -- might elicit a flat-out \"ew.\" (In general, Marcus shows a lazy willingness to rehash from his earlier works.) In his introduction to a reprint of Constance Rourke's \"American Humor: A Study of the National Character\" (1931), Marcus praised Rourke for reimagining the story of America so vividly that \"you can sense her presence in whatever scene she might set.\" The same can be said of Marcus, who for three decades now has been putting his idiosyncratic imprint on the American scene. He also faulted Rourke, in her later works, for \"pressing her subject rather than being carried by it,\" a characterization that sums up Marcus in \"The Shape of Things\" all too well. He no longer seems so much carried along by his subjects as just carried away.