As The Telegraph put it, "The genre had always been a little disreputable, and its popularity tended to flare up around times of social unrest." In these uncertain times, disaster movies may just rock Hollywood once again. Still, just because they're not omnipresent doesn't mean disaster movies have gone extinct. The likes of 2012, San Andreas, and Geostorm have been successful enough to show that the disaster movie trend still has life left in it. The likes of Armageddon may have been lucrative, but they didn't spawn franchises like then-newbie blockbusters Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. However, as the new century began, disaster movies didn't vanish, but the trend did decline in prominence as Hollywood's priorities for big-budget fare shifted. Volcanoes, meteors, and twisters all threatened everyday people in this decade while generating massive paydays at the box office. Groundbreaking visual effects technology allowed massive calamities to be rendered like never before. During the 1950's many new technologies were being developed for the motion picture industry. Bwana starred Robert Stack and Barbara Britton and was based on the book, The Lions of Gulu, a story of big-game hunters tasked with defeating man-eating lions in Africa. Though the disaster movie was superseded at the end of the decade by all-ages blockbusters like Star Wars, it got a new lease on life in the 1990s. Bwana Devil or, 'The Ghost and the Darkness' circa 1952 Updated 11-28-2001. The resulting film, Bwana Devil, was the first feature-length 3-D color film and is considered a pioneer in the 3-D film market. This is most explicitly seen by the recent Disney Channel movie Teen Beach Movie, a beach party homage that instills the hallmarks of the genre into a whole new generation of moviegoers. The beach party trend didn't last long, but its ripple effects on pop culture still resonate today. When the likes of Easy Rider and Bonnie & Clyde began to enter the American film scene, moviegoers traded out sunny escapism for visceral reality. As the 1960s wore on, audiences wanted to see young adults in grittier fare. The first film shot in 3D finds an inebriated Robert Stack pining away for his fianc and trying to get a railway constructed in the heart of Africa at the turn. As Closer Weekly put it, "Letting teens feel they were at a real party was what made these silly films classics." In other words, when kids left the theater, they felt like dancing.īut the dominance of the beach party film provided only temporary. The appeal of these films was simple in that they indulged in specific teen interests (like surfing and popular music) while giving them something upbeat to watch. The producers of Beach Party produced 11 follow-ups to their sleeper hit film while rival studios produced the likes of Surf Party and Palm Springs Weekend.
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