In 1923, the Cohn Brothers and their partner changed the name of their studio from Cohn-Brandt-Cohn to Columbia Pictures and began a push to make it more of a major player in the industry. Counting that -- and ignoring any other changes along the way -- Columbia is 100 years old. Turner Classic Movies is celebrating that this month. Alas, not like last April's wall-to-wall Warner Brothers, but on every Wednesday, starting in prime time and running into the wee hours of the morning. So, the question is: what sci-fi and fantasy movies do we get, and what could we have gotten? Only two that I can count: part of the one-two punch of 1977 sci-fi that was the inflection point of the genre: "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and the wuxia blockbuster, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," (and we could sidestream in "The China Syndrome"). From this sample we can conclude that Columbia's identity in the fantastic was for long titles beginning with the letter C. Well, half a day each week is only 1/14th the examples we could be getting; what else have they done?

Starting with shorts, Columbia's main claim to fame is The Three Stooges. The shorts pulled inspiration from the zeitgeist of the time, from '30s horror to '50s flying saucers. (When they finally went to features, two were about space travel, and one about time travel!) For cartoons, they distributed Disney's Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies from 1930 to '32, picking them up from an even smaller distributor, and losing them to United Artist just in time to miss out on "Flowers and Trees," the first Technicolor cartoon, and the one Uncle Oscar invented the Best Animated Short category for in order to give it a statue. Columbia created their own animation department: Screen Gems. (You may remember the brand name was later re-used for their TV output.) Remember their stars, The Fox and the Crow? They ended up shuttering the department and distributing for UPA, who gave them the breakout star Mr. Magoo, and Gerald McBoing-Boing, the boy who talked in sound effects. Gerald McBoing-Boing went to the Planet Moo, and UPA also made what may be the most faithful adaptation of Poe: "The Tell-Tale Heart," abstract animation set to James Mason reading the first-person narration. Like fellow "minor-major" Universal, Columbia was not too proud to make serials. Universal had Flash Gordon, Columbia had his "Defenders of the Earth" companions, Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom, and his newspaper competitor, Brick Bradford. Also The Shadow and The Spider, the first small-screen-to-big-screen transition with an adaptation of Captain Video, and, most important, Batman and Superman.

As to features, let's see... in the horror boom of the '30 and '40s they hired Boris Karloff to star in "The Black Room," a period story of a royal curse. They brought him back five more times, playing mad scientists of some kind in more modern tales. These have a minor place in horror. I've only seen the last, a horror-comedy "The Boogey Man Will Get You" with Peter Lorre.

In the '50s and into the '60s, we meet the persons who gave Columbia whatever sf personality it had. Sam Katzman, William Castle, Charles Schneer + Ray Harryhausen. Katzman was the tightfisted producer of the B movie division, Schneer worked under him and became a producer himself, Castle came in as a director (in genre, several movies in "The Whistler" series, based on a radio program which often brushed the edges of the unknown) and went on to be producer for his own production company (Columbia distributed his "The Tingler" and "Thirteen Ghosts"). In addition to those and Dynamation, we have "The Werewolf," "The Creature with the Atom Brain," and a number of Arabian Nights fantasies (at some point I may want to look into comparing these to Harryhausen's Sinbad movies: I've always thought the older Hercules in his "Jason and the Argonauts" was a response to the Italian Hercules imports) . Then there are a few more somber movies -- I don't want to say "serious," because I'm not sure the science in them is any better, or that the character's behavior deeper than to produce the effect wanted: in the B movies, excitement, in these, worry. "Five," "Invasion: USA," and "The 27th Day" are examples. Mention should be made of 1956's "1984," produced in England and distributed in the US by Columbia. Reading a few online articles, I haven't found out if Columbia contributed pre-production money or influenced the production -- the articles were more interested in another company's investment in it.

As the '50s fade into the '60s I could mention two special cases of imports: films from Hammer and Toho. Those two studios have a reputation among fans and Columbia (like Universal before it) released the films they hold distribution rights to in a box set for each.

I'm told Columbia passed on distributing the Bond series, and had to try to create their own superspy series on the books about Matt Helm. And we end the '60s with the contemporary/near future "Marooned."

The '70s[*] still had the exciting movies (two of Harryhausen's Sinbads,) but the major attention was going to the more somber extrapolations of the present into future dystopia. "The Stepford Wives" was Columbia's entry here.

The Eighties had a few attempts at catching another Star Wars: "Krull," "Space Hunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone," and the imported "Yor: Hunter of the Future" but also the freer spending of money on fantastical ideas: "Heavy Metal," "Ghostbusters," "Starman."

Nineties: I happened to see "Flatliners" in the theater, so I'll always think of it as a "Major Motion Picture." With that lineup of stars, that's what they were trying for, anyway. That and "Gattaca" and "The Thirteenth Floor" from the other end of the decade represent one type of sf flim, while "Men in Black" and "Godzilla" represent the big, loud films.

The 2000s opened with "X-Men" resurrecting the superhero movie. (You may ask: "Was the superhero movie dead? 'Batman & Robin' came out in 1997." I would say, "You've answered your own question.") This was followed by "Spider-Man," and through Sony and another production company, even "Hellboy." Interesting trend, with dueling Easter Eggs in the X-Men movies, it has no coherent backstory or continuity, each movie is basically a selection of mutants in its own story. The Spider-Man series has explicitly had its continuity rebooted. Not quite a mathematical progression, but the first reboot was after three films, the next after two more, and with "Into the Spider-verse" they rebooted the series during the movie!

Now here's a thought, but it would take more research into the whole remake/reboot/re-imagining trend. Had the examples shown above put Columbia in the forefront of that movement? (Yes, there seems to have always been a search for a formula for success, or a machine to crank out hits, up to the recent AI scare all pushing aside the importance of any particular writer, producer, director or actor, this seems to be an experiment in erasing the personality of the characters themselves with no fixed history or relationship to other characters!) Are they particularly active in it? They've also tried to extend Ghostbusters and Men in Black as franchises not tied to any particular creative person or headlining character. They also bought into co-producing "Blade Runner 2049," as well as remaking "RoboCop" and "Total Recall," though apparently they let Paramount try a third xXx movie.

The oddest are what I can only guess are attempts to chase the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I think "Bloodshot" is one of a stable of characters from Valiant Comics that they acquired the rights to. The strangest is their Plan B for their Spider-Man rights. They are taking villains or other costumed characters and making movies about them unconnected (or not yet connected) to Spider-Man. Two Venom movies and one on Mobius so far, with Madame Web upcoming. So strange; they still have the rights to Spider-Man, why not just make a Spider-Man film? Then there was "The Dark Tower" not a story in itself, but every Stephen King horror rolled into one.

[*] For sci-fi film, the '50s begins conveniently enough in 1950 with "Destination Moon." The transition into the '60s is a bit blurrier, but that decade ended with "2001" in 1968, or more broadly, in July of 1969. We landed on the Moon, but were not invited into some clubhouse of cosmic consciousness, so cinematic concentration turned to how horrible the world was, and how it could get worse.

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-Jack