Every Thursday here at Den of Geek, we let an elder geek loose on the subject of one of the sirens of their youth – so far we have covered semi-covered ladies from Flash Gordon, Dr. Who, Gremlins and Buck Rogers In The 25th Century. There’s been much excitement and rattling of steradent tins, and I personally get through an entire inhaler every Thursday.

And through all this, Sarah Of The Dead rolls her eyes – partly because she doesn’t remember the eighties anyway, partly because it’s not very mature of us, but perhaps also because cult TV and movies are supposed to have significantly moved on from using women as ogle-bunnies. So I thought I’d cast my mind back over the years I have enjoyed wasting on bad sci-fi shows and old movies with rubber rocket-ships, and see how we arrived at the new Bionic Woman from…

THE 1930s-40s
…Dale Arden. Well, I guess there are two types of science-fiction: the first takes a look at the current world, extrapolates future possibilities, and shows us some of the more intriguing or frightening branches that our culture and species might fork into one day; the second just adds flying cars and laser guns to whatever the current culture is and goes to rescue the helpless heroine from the dastardly foreigner/alien.

And that would be Dale Arden in the original 1930s Flash Gordon series – ‘spunky’; ‘feisty’; ‘pretty neat for a dame’, Arden represented an emerging breed of post-depression American woman intent on independence and a career, but surrounded by the spectres of tradition: slave women in Ming’s palace/harem, accepting their lot as ornaments; Princess Aura, using traditional feminine wiles to gain power in the role of The Witch or Seductress, a reviled (but also admired)figure in the repressed sexual psychology of America as expressed in the Hayes Convention.

Ultimately the tomboy-ish Dale did get to bash a few villains over the head, so long as she did it in something sheer and silky and preened to the victorious Flash at the end of the serial.

THE 1950s
Interrupted by a bit of a scuffle in Europe, Sci-Fi Woman returned in the early 1950s as more window-dressing, in boisterous romps such as George Pal’s War Of The Worlds and It Came From Outer Space, but sadly also in much finer work such as Forbidden Planet, where Ann Francis was called on to do little but choose a lover from the noble, crew-cut men of Leslie Nielson’s ship and change her dress every two minutes. They also managed to sneak a nude pool scene in too; in space, women were still passengers.

However, let’s not wring our hankies excessively – in most cases the men of 1950s sci-fi were equally transparent ciphers, very often pipe-smoking scientists with male-model looks, effortlessly picking up and appropriating career-women (i.e. Night Of The Demon and This Island Earth). Often the female character was the daughter of a misunderstood scientist (Forbidden Planet)or already attached to the inevitable leading man (Village Of The Damned).

The sexual availability of a female character had to be ultimately resolved in most 1950s sci-fi, presumably as a potential threat to the ‘respectable’ populace; fears about ‘loose’ women were encapsulated in the 1958 low-budget Attack Of The 50ft Woman, where a spurned wife assumes gargantuan proportions by the usual pseudo-chemistry experiments and wrecks a city (well, in the poster, anyway; they didn’t have the cash to actually do it in the film).

THE 1960s
By the 1960s, things were generally not much better. Though medical scientist Raquel Welch didn’t exactly fall for Stephen Boyd in Fantastic Voyage, she was rescued from peril at least three times by the men of the Proteusand had to endure a humiliating ‘no place for a woman’ scenario before joining the crew.

The sixties was a relatively barren period for science-fiction until Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which refreshingly showed normal-looking, middle-aged female scientists helping their peer Leonard Rossiter grill William Sylvester about the problems at Tycho Base; unfortunately they are pretty much the only non-furry women in the film, discounting the gravity-defying stewardesses which smile their way vacuously through the vacuum of Sylvester’s musical journey to the moon.

Over in the horror genre, there was a portent of 70s/80s feminist backlash in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, but Hitchcock’s love of icily independent and powerful blondes was now perceived as fetishised and misogynistic. Though an ‘intergalactic agent’, Roger Vadim’s Barbarella was a mere inflatable-doll, and certainly no rocket-scientist; at sci-fi central, the women were still mostly making beverages decorously.

BETTER SIGNS
We can’t move into the 1970s without acknowledging the earlier films that showed their true quality by depicting major female characters with personality and humanity…

- In Christian Nyby’s The Thing From Another World, headliner Margaret Sheridan took the lead both in the credits and acting stakes as the ‘hero’s’ ex-infatuation, a sassy, intelligent and witty scientist who didn’t take a dive for the chump chasing her and was useful in the fights to come (even if she did invent one thing-defeating method from a recipe metaphor).

- Kate Reid’s ornery and secretly epileptic scientist in Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain is an interesting, three-dimensional character who stands out against a rather faceless cast.

- Robert Wise pulls another excellent female sci-fi character out of the hat in The Day The Earth Stood Still; Patricia Neal’s war-widow and single-mother is brave, inventive, pivotal to the plot and a match for Michael Rennie’s superbly-played Christ-cipher, Klaatu.

But it’s not a bumper crop, is it? So onward to…

THE 1970s
If sci-fi made any progress in the newly-enlightened 1970s, a lot of it was through sci-fi/horror hybrids; Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives found feminist Katherine Ross fighting robotic barbie dolls with enhanced chests in a lodestone of pro-feminist cinema; a thousand media-studies theses were conceived when Ridley Scott agreed to make the lead character in Alien a woman; though putting females through the ringer was (and remains) de rigeur in the horror genre, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley was a tough individual carving out her territory with intelligence and bravery.

If they hadn’t made her take her t-shirt off and go back for the cat, it would have set women in sci-fi forward ten years.

Over in TV-land, Lindsay Wagner’s original Bionic Woman was kicking ass and taking names without the dad-friendly display of flesh that Lynda Carter was exhibiting in Wonder Woman, but also without the egalitarian and refreshing feminist philosophy that endeared the latter character to many female viewers. Then Star Wars came out…

THE 1980s
There is a well-worn anecdote among Star Wars fans that George Lucas had Carrie Fisher’s breasts taped down in the first two movies, since there ‘wouldn’t be a jiggle in outer space’. Then he put Fisher in the ‘Metal Bikini’ in Return Of The Jedi and took a popular, gutsy female character straight back to the Dale Arden days.

It was the age of the double-Y chromosome assault flick, and female characters would have to keep up or better their male counterparts in order to get any prominence; with the exception of Ripley, few were up to it.

Supergirl flopped to complaints that she only got to save her boyfriend while Superman got to save the world; cult actresses such as Cynthia Rothrock and Sybil Danning attempted to forge a taste for action-heroines, with little success, but they were arguably ten years too early (see below); the advent of disco and nostalgia narratives from Star Wars onwards caused a break-flood of atavistic film and TV, with women as thinly-disguised window-dressing, and the most interesting female characters were probably to be found in soap operas such as Dallas and Dynasty. It took the eighties a long time to get over the influence of Buck Rogers In The 25th Century.

THE 1990s – NOW
With Xena – Warrior Princess and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the age of the action heroine had finally dawned; Anne Parillaud’s gritty performance as Nikita spawned a dreadful US remake and an interminable Australian/US TV series; Trinity stepped up to the plate in The Matrix and its disownable sequels; there were mixed showers in Starship Troopers; Demi Moore took everything Ridley Scott misogynistically dished out in Private Jane; Sharon Stone didn’t die at the end of Basic Instinct; and suddenly we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

Nor have we seen Kansas since; in the new Battlestar Galactica, the female Starbuck is as tough as Jack Palance’s jaw, the new Jamie Somers a bionic assault machine with two speeds – deadly and dead; the long-standing apartheid of science fiction is apparently over, and it’s a coin-toss who makes the tea after the battle.

But perhaps it wasn’t an evolution, a process of wearing away the pipe-smoking patriarchals over 80 years of movies and television; despite its predictive aura, sci-fi always reflected current gender values and issues, and though it may often have inspired, it rarely led the way. The UFO actress Gabrielle Drake was quoted in 1970 as saying that science-fiction was all very well, but she didn’t think women should try and take over too much…

If the fully-dressed women of modern sci-fi are deadly, street-smart and intelligent, and win their victories through force majeure, have they finally found their power, perhaps retained their ‘femininity’ – but lost their humanity?

Martin writes his (mostly) sci-fi column every Friday at Den Of Geek. Check out the complete list of his columns.