75 years after the first mysterious sightings in the United States, the flying saucer returns in Jordan Peele’s new film No. Nicholas Barber returns to one of popular culture’s most memorable objects.
only appears briefly in the trailer for Jordan Peele’s new horror film No, but he’s there: a flying saucer. Judging by the twists in Peele’s previous films, “Get Out” and “Us,” it’s impossible to tell whether he’s real or fake, whether he’s from Earth or outer space, but this glimpse of shiny silver is tantalizing . Maybe, just maybe, “No” will be a real flying saucer movie, a tribute to one of the most iconic and frightening forms in the history of popular culture in 1
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“In the late 1950s,” says Andrew Shail, film lecturer at from the University of Newcastle, “this particular form had become an abbreviation for ‘spaceship piloted by otherworldly beings’, accessible to all practitioners of the visual arts.””Without a doubt, flying saucers have marked mysterious visitors from Mars and beyond in countless films, television series, novels, comics and even hit albums, from Mulder’s ‘I Want to Believe’ poster to ‘The X-Files’ to…” Popular Picture book for children, “Aliens love underpants”. The flying saucer is a design classic: the archetypal, unknown flying object. But it didn’t fly until the 1950s, when the world went crazy for flying saucers.
Science fiction artists had long drawn circular spaceships Before: An early Flash Gordon comic from 1934 depicts a swirling “squadron of deadly space gyroscopes.” However, if you flip through copies of Startling Stories, Super Science Stories, and other magazines from this period, you’ll see that in the first half of the 20th century, aliens preferred their modes of transportation to resemble submarines and airships.