Three decades ago, modern science fiction movies made leaps and bounds

There are certain years that can always be looked at in the movies that act as turning points. I look at 1994, for example, as a year that really started the wave of quality quirkiness when offbeat met gritty with such movies as Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, and Forrest Gump. For science fiction, the year was 1982. As Boing Boing points out, it was a year loaded with trend-setting movies that helped to continue what Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had built up in previous years.

This 1982 preview of the summer’s big science fiction movies seems to prove that things did, in fact, used to be better. I means, what a [redacted] year: Blade Runner, Poltergeist, ET, The Thing, Wrath of Kahn, and Tron.