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Ancient Rockets: Treasures and Train Wrecks of the Silent Screen
From Metropolis to the pre-technicolor Oz, this fantastical retrospective takes readers through the wildest frontiers of silent films. Glorious landscapes are explored from Tarzan's jungle and Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory to the Adventures of Prince Achmed and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Highlighting the earliest and cheesiest special effects, Kage Baker reviews 49 cinematic odysseys with acerbic wit and historical acumen. Contrasting the tour de forces with the utter train wrecks of the silver screen, these sci-fi movies are affectionately viewed, giving special recognition to the flimsy plots, terrifying fiends, and the best and worst directors that inspired generations of fans and filmmakers alike.
- GenresNonfictionHistoryFilmArt
206 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2011
85 people want to read
About the author
Kage Baker
162 books357 followersBorn June 10, 1952, in Hollywood, California, and grew up there and in Pismo Beach, present home. Spent 12 years in assorted navy blue uniforms obtaining a good parochial school education and numerous emotional scars. Rapier wit developed as defense mechanism to deflect rage of larger and more powerful children who took offense at abrasive, condescending and arrogant personality in a sickly eight-year-old. Family: 2 parents, 6 siblings, 4 nieces, 2 nephews. Husbands: 0. Children: 0.
Prior occupations: graphic artist and mural painter, several lower clerical positions which could in no way be construed as a career, and (over a period of years for the Living History Centre) playwright, bit player, director, teacher of Elizabethan English for the stage, stage manager and educational program assistant coordinator. Presently reengaged in the above-listed capacities for the LHC's triumphant reincarnation, AS YOU LIKE IT PRODUCTIONS.
20 years of total immersion research in Elizabethan as well as other historical periods has paid off handsomely in a working knowledge of period speech and details.
In spare time (ha) reads: any old sea stories by Marryat, the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brien, the Hornblower books, ANYTHING by Robert Louis Stevenson, Raymond Chandler, Thorne Smith, Herman Melville (except Pierre, or the Ambiguities, which stinks) Somerset Maugham, George MacDonald Frasier.
Now happily settled in beautiful Pismo Beach, Clam Capital of the World, in charming seaside flat which is unfortunately not haunted by ghost of dashing sea captain. Avid gardener, birdwatcher, spinster aunt and Jethro Tull fan.
http://www.sfwa.org/2010/01/rip-kage-...
Prior occupations: graphic artist and mural painter, several lower clerical positions which could in no way be construed as a career, and (over a period of years for the Living History Centre) playwright, bit player, director, teacher of Elizabethan English for the stage, stage manager and educational program assistant coordinator. Presently reengaged in the above-listed capacities for the LHC's triumphant reincarnation, AS YOU LIKE IT PRODUCTIONS.
20 years of total immersion research in Elizabethan as well as other historical periods has paid off handsomely in a working knowledge of period speech and details.
In spare time (ha) reads: any old sea stories by Marryat, the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brien, the Hornblower books, ANYTHING by Robert Louis Stevenson, Raymond Chandler, Thorne Smith, Herman Melville (except Pierre, or the Ambiguities, which stinks) Somerset Maugham, George MacDonald Frasier.
Now happily settled in beautiful Pismo Beach, Clam Capital of the World, in charming seaside flat which is unfortunately not haunted by ghost of dashing sea captain. Avid gardener, birdwatcher, spinster aunt and Jethro Tull fan.
http://www.sfwa.org/2010/01/rip-kage-...
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 27, 2025
First impressions: this is a book review that cries out for quotes! The book is just as her sister describes, below. Sadly, my Hoopla library copy is aggressively copy-protected, and I'm not about to re-type much of this stuff, so there!
Someday, I should learn how to use the Caliber(?) ebook 'ware to 'jailbreak' ebooks, not to pirate them, but just for quotes! Anyway, if you are a Kage Baker fan, you will want to check this one out. I'm not even an old-movie fan, and I'm still having fun! (Or was....) She had such a great, informal writing style. Gone way too young! Oh, how I miss her. Wonderful writer.
After about 10 short reviews --I'm currently stalled an a series of shorts by and about Houdini, who had his own production house for his own BAD stuff, like I care -- I'm coming to realize that even really good reviews written by one of my favorite writers, and even though there ain't gonna be any more from her, I just don't care about ancient silent movies, most lost, made a century or more ago. Now, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" -- per wiki, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptat... -- well. Too many to count! Kage starts with a rumored 1897 adaptation, then moves into the oldest surviving effort, from 1912, which she didn't much care for. Next up, Paramount's 1920 remake, starring John Barrymore which she has kind words for. Aside from sex & violence, the first mainly implied, she describes the Creature's emergence: "An immense spider-like creature crawls from under Jekyll's bed...." Whoa. Now, this one was worth reading!
So I'm putting it aside, for the moment. I'll come back and skim some more. Maybe. Hopefully, more gems among the dross?
Closing it out for now as DNF, with a option to return -- my library copy came due. Since I was reaching the limits of my interest in *seriously* old movies, that may be never. But if you are a movie fan AND a Kage fan, you should definitely try it!
Here's why I tried it:
Kage spent much of the last year of her life watching and reviewing silent films. Many of her reviews were collected posthumously into Ancient Rockets: Treasures and Train Wrecks of the Silent Screen (2011), edited by her sister Kathleen Bartholomew. From the foreword:
"All these reviews were written during the last year of Kage’s life. I don’t think that affected her view much—sometimes she was so tired that watching films and composing reviews was all she could manage, so they got her nearly undivided attention. As the year wore on, more and more of them were composed ex tempore and dictated to me; I think there is a more conversational style in those, as we argued out the reviews. One she recited in a single long soliloquy in her hospital room; it was written that evening, as I doggedly transferred Kage’s voice from my head to paper. The last one is dated December 21, 2009. Three days later, we discovered her cancer had metastasized to her brain. A month later, she was gone."
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kage_Ba...
Someday, I should learn how to use the Caliber(?) ebook 'ware to 'jailbreak' ebooks, not to pirate them, but just for quotes! Anyway, if you are a Kage Baker fan, you will want to check this one out. I'm not even an old-movie fan, and I'm still having fun! (Or was....) She had such a great, informal writing style. Gone way too young! Oh, how I miss her. Wonderful writer.
After about 10 short reviews --I'm currently stalled an a series of shorts by and about Houdini, who had his own production house for his own BAD stuff, like I care -- I'm coming to realize that even really good reviews written by one of my favorite writers, and even though there ain't gonna be any more from her, I just don't care about ancient silent movies, most lost, made a century or more ago. Now, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" -- per wiki, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptat... -- well. Too many to count! Kage starts with a rumored 1897 adaptation, then moves into the oldest surviving effort, from 1912, which she didn't much care for. Next up, Paramount's 1920 remake, starring John Barrymore which she has kind words for. Aside from sex & violence, the first mainly implied, she describes the Creature's emergence: "An immense spider-like creature crawls from under Jekyll's bed...." Whoa. Now, this one was worth reading!
So I'm putting it aside, for the moment. I'll come back and skim some more. Maybe. Hopefully, more gems among the dross?
Closing it out for now as DNF, with a option to return -- my library copy came due. Since I was reaching the limits of my interest in *seriously* old movies, that may be never. But if you are a movie fan AND a Kage fan, you should definitely try it!
Here's why I tried it:
Kage spent much of the last year of her life watching and reviewing silent films. Many of her reviews were collected posthumously into Ancient Rockets: Treasures and Train Wrecks of the Silent Screen (2011), edited by her sister Kathleen Bartholomew. From the foreword:
"All these reviews were written during the last year of Kage’s life. I don’t think that affected her view much—sometimes she was so tired that watching films and composing reviews was all she could manage, so they got her nearly undivided attention. As the year wore on, more and more of them were composed ex tempore and dictated to me; I think there is a more conversational style in those, as we argued out the reviews. One she recited in a single long soliloquy in her hospital room; it was written that evening, as I doggedly transferred Kage’s voice from my head to paper. The last one is dated December 21, 2009. Three days later, we discovered her cancer had metastasized to her brain. A month later, she was gone."
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kage_Ba...
August 20, 2021
I picked this up in a bundle of some 50 ebooks and read it on the plane to Hawaii, for no reason except that I wanted something different. This collection represents essays Kage Baker wrote while in the final stages of illness, in many cases because she could not focus on long-form fiction. She chose a representative sample of silent films, some of them groundbreaking, some of them simply awful, and provides summaries and analysis of each.
I appreciated her summaries, which are marvelously written, given that while I was aware of maybe a third of the films she selected, I had seen none of them. Her analysis is also uniformly excellent, and she does a great job tying these early films (some of them extremely early and not at all what we consider film-length today) to the later movies they influenced.
I can't quite give this five stars, because some of the essays are a little too brief for my taste and by comparison to other essays in the collection. But I can recommend it with pleasure to anyone interested in silent film, the history of moviemaking, or in adding depth to their reading of Baker's excellent novel Mendoza in Hollywood.
I appreciated her summaries, which are marvelously written, given that while I was aware of maybe a third of the films she selected, I had seen none of them. Her analysis is also uniformly excellent, and she does a great job tying these early films (some of them extremely early and not at all what we consider film-length today) to the later movies they influenced.
I can't quite give this five stars, because some of the essays are a little too brief for my taste and by comparison to other essays in the collection. But I can recommend it with pleasure to anyone interested in silent film, the history of moviemaking, or in adding depth to their reading of Baker's excellent novel Mendoza in Hollywood.
October 10, 2020
I’ve never read Kage Baker before – not exactly. Back in the Stone Age I started a Wattpad version of her first Company time-travel novel, In the Garden of Iden, but didn’t get far because, frankly Wattpad was a terrible format for e-books. I liked what I read enough to be open to trying her again, and as it happens, my first opportunity to do so wasn’t her fiction, but this collection of silent film reviews.
Baker wrote these for Tor.com in 2009 – which, sadly, turned out to be the last year of her life before she died of cancer in January 2010. It’s a neat premise – Baker was a cinephile who noticed that many silent films drew heavily on SF/F sources, and started a blog series reviewing whatever SF/F silent films she could find copies of. Méliès’ A Trip To The Moon is the obvious starting point, and Metropolis an obvious example, but as the series goes on, she expanded the criteria of SF/F to include anything involving vampires, dinosaurs, magic, Oz, horror and Tarzan.
Anyway, Baker does a good job of highlighting how so many silent filmmakers were poaching Verne, Wells, ER Burroughs and Poe for material, if only because of the visual possibilities. Her reviews are blog-style – i.e. punchy, snarky and opinionated. But she does a good job of not only summing up the plots and evaluating the good and the godawful, but also giving advice on where to find copies of them and (more importantly) which copies to watch, as many surviving copies of these films are missing reels (leading to incoherent narratives) or are in poor condition (though of course that info is likely outdated). If nothing else, her fan-girl enthusiasm for the better films is genuine enough to make you actually want to look for some of these (provided you like silent films).
Baker wrote these for Tor.com in 2009 – which, sadly, turned out to be the last year of her life before she died of cancer in January 2010. It’s a neat premise – Baker was a cinephile who noticed that many silent films drew heavily on SF/F sources, and started a blog series reviewing whatever SF/F silent films she could find copies of. Méliès’ A Trip To The Moon is the obvious starting point, and Metropolis an obvious example, but as the series goes on, she expanded the criteria of SF/F to include anything involving vampires, dinosaurs, magic, Oz, horror and Tarzan.
Anyway, Baker does a good job of highlighting how so many silent filmmakers were poaching Verne, Wells, ER Burroughs and Poe for material, if only because of the visual possibilities. Her reviews are blog-style – i.e. punchy, snarky and opinionated. But she does a good job of not only summing up the plots and evaluating the good and the godawful, but also giving advice on where to find copies of them and (more importantly) which copies to watch, as many surviving copies of these films are missing reels (leading to incoherent narratives) or are in poor condition (though of course that info is likely outdated). If nothing else, her fan-girl enthusiasm for the better films is genuine enough to make you actually want to look for some of these (provided you like silent films).
February 12, 2017
As Kage Baker was dying of cancer in 2009, she wrote this series of love letters to the original sci-fi and fantasy movies that started so many tropes and inspired so many future story tellers.
It was astonishing, to me at least, that there were enough silent films in these genres to be able to create an entire series of essays, reviewing all of them in her uniquely snarky tone both on their own merits and how they fit into a bigger historical context.
Also, she is a true professional, giving no spoilers to the films’ plots, dangling a carrot of mystery to the reader, encouraging them to go out and seek these movies themselves, to see what happens…
March 20, 2020
Kage Baker wrote these summary reviews of silent films throughout the year 2009. She passed away in early 2010, so her sister got this published for her. The reviews sometimes feel of their time, with Baker mentioning upcoming DVD releases of Up and the 70th anniversary edition of The Wizard of Oz. When talking about The Thief of Baghdad, she even mentions how something like Disney's Aladdin could not be made today, which is kinda funny now that we're almost a year removed from the Disney remake.
The reviews themselves are pretty amusing, complete with gag captions under still photos. Most of the films listed are films that I have not seen. The first selection, A Trip to the Moon, was one that I was only aware of because it was a huge part of the film Hugo (based on the novel of the same name). I was actually surprised that she did not love Metropolis in any form. I actually love that film (even the version with the Georgio Moroder soundtrack). Despite my disagreement, I respect her opinion and was not put off by her assessments. I'm also intrigued that she found Faust to be better than F.W. Murnau's earlier film Nosferatu. Being a big fan of that vampire movie, I am actually curious and might check out Faust at some point. It's also an interesting perspective viewing Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge as precursors to The Lord of the Rings books and films. When reading about Gertie the Dinosaur, I also surmised that perhaps Gertie from Marvel's Runaways is named after this film since she actually has a dinosaur.
While some may have their own ideas of what the earlier films about Oz, Tarzan, Frankenstein, etc. might have been, this book brings attention to earlier gems (or disasters, depending on how Baker viewed them). This book actually makes me want to go back and watch some of these somewhat obscure selections. As such, this might be a good primer for anyone looking to venture into silent film viewing experiences.
The reviews themselves are pretty amusing, complete with gag captions under still photos. Most of the films listed are films that I have not seen. The first selection, A Trip to the Moon, was one that I was only aware of because it was a huge part of the film Hugo (based on the novel of the same name). I was actually surprised that she did not love Metropolis in any form. I actually love that film (even the version with the Georgio Moroder soundtrack). Despite my disagreement, I respect her opinion and was not put off by her assessments. I'm also intrigued that she found Faust to be better than F.W. Murnau's earlier film Nosferatu. Being a big fan of that vampire movie, I am actually curious and might check out Faust at some point. It's also an interesting perspective viewing Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge as precursors to The Lord of the Rings books and films. When reading about Gertie the Dinosaur, I also surmised that perhaps Gertie from Marvel's Runaways is named after this film since she actually has a dinosaur.
While some may have their own ideas of what the earlier films about Oz, Tarzan, Frankenstein, etc. might have been, this book brings attention to earlier gems (or disasters, depending on how Baker viewed them). This book actually makes me want to go back and watch some of these somewhat obscure selections. As such, this might be a good primer for anyone looking to venture into silent film viewing experiences.
September 6, 2022
A collection of reviews from Tor.com, covering sf movies from the silent era. Amusingly written, covers a time ignored by most except devoted cinephiles. She included info on where to find them (admittedly quite some time ago), which is good. Some of them sound fairly entertaining.
April 17, 2020
Read it slowly and try to look the movies up on YouTube and internet archive. Most of them are easy to find.
The book is a great read for science fiction movies fan.
The book is a great read for science fiction movies fan.
Read
February 23, 2022An interesting look at special effects in silent movies, if you're into that sort of thing.
July 20, 2022
Very enjoyable - Kage Baker had a keen wit and made want to see these films - she will be missed
July 4, 2013
Where did I hear about this book?
In my office I have a framed image from the 1916 silent film Intolerance hanging on the wall. A new employee noticed it one day and it turned out he was also a silent film buff. He mentioned that I needed to watch a French silent film called Le Voyage dans la Lune. At that point I remembered that Kage Baker, the author responsible for turning me into a silent film fan, used to write a column about science fiction silent films called Ancient Rockets. While searching for this website I saw that her articles had been compiled into this book.
Why did I decided to read it
For me, Kage Baker and Silent Films are like peanut butter and jelly.
So what did I think?
Great stuff! Baker is hilarious and she really brings it as she lambasts some of the silly plot devices (she takes Metropolis to the wood shed). It's really cool to see the origins of some of the movie cliches still used today. After reading this I have a ton of silent films I have to see and I can't wait to get started.
In my office I have a framed image from the 1916 silent film Intolerance hanging on the wall. A new employee noticed it one day and it turned out he was also a silent film buff. He mentioned that I needed to watch a French silent film called Le Voyage dans la Lune. At that point I remembered that Kage Baker, the author responsible for turning me into a silent film fan, used to write a column about science fiction silent films called Ancient Rockets. While searching for this website I saw that her articles had been compiled into this book.
Why did I decided to read it
For me, Kage Baker and Silent Films are like peanut butter and jelly.
So what did I think?
Great stuff! Baker is hilarious and she really brings it as she lambasts some of the silly plot devices (she takes Metropolis to the wood shed). It's really cool to see the origins of some of the movie cliches still used today. After reading this I have a ton of silent films I have to see and I can't wait to get started.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews