this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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As someone who lived through those decades, I don't think it was so much being useful stooges, but rather each decade was very different in social tone and was a reaction to the current events.
The 1950's was about the successful end of WW2 and the bright future ahead of humanity. Good always wins over evil. We were going to have unlimited nuclear power and powerful computers to supply all our wants and needs. And rockets? Well, they were new and exciting. The future looked bright.
The 1960s brought real fear of nuclear Armageddon to everyone. If you think the world political situation is bad today, we all thought we were going to die at any moment. I can remember doing nuclear blast drills as a 5 year old in school. We invented the nuclear clock...... And the Cuban Missile Crisis was on. But, we were going to land a man on the moon before it was all over. But for SciFi, the Plucky Human arrived. Star Trek exemplified that. Captain Kirk foiled Evil Aliens(tm) while screwing every hot green or blue chick with two legs in a short skirt or skimpy furs across the (Un)known Galaxy.
The 1970's were simply more of the same. SciFi had expanded on the "Plucky Human" schitick with Battle Star Galactia. But Buck Rogers made a brief return also. But if you look closer, government has become more authoritarian yet somehow benevolent. Big Brother(tm) knows best was the unspoken motto. And a SciFi darkness started to show. Logan's Run, A Clockwork Orange, Roller Ball, and Soylant Green are just a few of the darker tend.
Which is kind of the path we are still following today I think. A strange mixture of r/HFA! and the dark ambiguity of Batman.
And for fun. I will leave you with this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio
Philip K. Dick was writing stories about nuclear armageddon in the late 1940s-early 1950s. Even the few stories he did about humans inventing space travels usually involved humans meeting an alien race that is more advanced than us, and eventually defeating us.
I can beat that. "Atomic Weight 500" is a book of nuclear power written in 1925 by a guy born 1870 about nuclear power - and nuclear war. Though his nuclear war was "different". Even Hans Dominik didn't expect Chain Reactions being so quick as they really were. But the basic idea of creating a critical mass to generate uncontrollable amounts of energy was implemented perfectly.