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10 months after Walt Disney's death did this movie premiere in theaters
This is probably the most fun and breeziest Disney classic
downplaying the toll of colonialism, but taken on its own

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The old ways were on the way out in the 1960s film world. The cynical noirs and escapist epics were slowing down, replaced by ambitious formal experiments like those found in the French New Wave. Around the world, Japanese cinema flourished and Italy found itself making a name in horror and-somewhat inexplicably-Westerns.

Easy Rider and 2001: A Space Odyssey would signal a change in cinema as the decade came to a close, but over the course of the 1960s, everyone from Kubrick to Kurosawa to Hitchcock to Bergman to Leone to Ford to Godard were making masterpieces. Fighting back against the rise of TV with subject matter and artistry not yet found on the small screen, filmmakers found a welcoming youth audience and an environment that allowed them some flexibility with the advent of the MPAA. One of the most exciting decades in the history of movies, it tracked the evolution of design, story, theme and production impacting the artform around the globe.

Here are the 100 best movies of the 1960s:

100. Carnival of Souls (1962)

Director: Herk Harvey

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

98. Rocco and his Brothers (1960)

Director: Luchino Visconti

Boxing is an accidental vehicle to fame and riches in this masterful Italian melodrama. Luchino Visconti's 1960 film starred Alain Delon as one of four Southern Italian farm boys who relocate to Milan with their mother. These country boys in the big city are soon lured in and spoiled by the thrills of the big city-girls, crime and the fight racket. The film features boxing not only as representative of the dangers (and spoils) of urban life, but as a litmus test for moral strength. When Rocco's brother Simone becomes a lazy boxer, lacking discipline and moral rigor, Rocco himself-a better, kinder human being-steps in and soars to success.- Christina Newland

Director: Robert Downey Sr.

Director: Wolfgang Reitherman

95. Blood and Black Lace (1964)

Director: Mario Bava

Director: Orson Welles

93. The Magnificent Seven (1960)

Director: John Sturges

92. The Face of Another (1966)

Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara

In some ways Hiroshi Teshigahara was a proto-Cronenberg, a sharp intellectual with a taste for pulp and the ability to dissect our affinities for the filth we drape around us. Body and psyche are always depicted in pulsing communion in Teshigahara's films, and if Woman in the Dunes operated as a disarming vision of the sacrifice of transcendence to the hungers of human need (a thematic cousin to Cronenberg's Shivers), then The Face of Another is about how the outer determines the inner-about our modularity, malleability and mundanity. It's Teshigahara's Dead Ringers. And in Armageddon / Deep Impact mode, it came out the same year as the very similar Seconds. No bother, both movies rule: They are the Dead Ringers to each other, echoes of echoes about the echoes that make up our identity. Maybe that's all identity ever was: A memory of a word that one's body once spoke, that it still speaks, but maybe not always in the same voice, and maybe the word's not what you once thought it was. In the beginning was the Word? "Yup," says The Face of Another, barely stifling a scream. Teshigahara's rendering of Kobo Abe's story strips a man of his face and gives him a new one. At some point we realize the man is gone, but also realize that we never knew him to begin with. In 2014's Phoenix, Christian Petzold uses a similar premise to construct a melodrama. Nothing of that sort interests Teshigahara, however. At their harshest, his pictures are cold, still horrors; at their most tender, elegies for the existential. The Face of Another is both. -Chad Betz

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

90. Shoot the Piano Player (1960)

Director: François Truffaut

89. A Shot in the Dark (1964)

Director: Blake Edwards

88. A Thousand and One Nights (1969)

Director: Eiichi Yamamoto

Created by Mushi Productions, the studio behind such classics such Astroboy, Kimba the White Lion and Dororo, and produced by none other than anime patriarch Osamu Tezuka, One Thousand and One Nights was the first installment in what would later come to be known as the Animerama series, a trilogy of thematically linked experimental erotic films created for adult audiences. Directed by Eiichi Yamamoto and written by Tezuka with the assistance of Kazuo Fukasaka and Hiroyuki Kumai, the film's initial release in Japan was championed for its abstract animation, experimental live-action footage, adult storyline, and psychedelic rock music score. One Thousand and One Night would later be dubbed and receive an American release, predating the adult animated film phenomenon sparked by Ralph Bakshi's 1972 Fritz the Cat, only to flop and receive a limited release. The English dub of One Thousand and One Nights is thought to be lost to the annals of history, with only the film's original subtitled version to stand as a testament to one of the most bizarre and intriguing experiments in Japanese animation.- Staff

87. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Director: George A. Romero

Director: Kineto Shindo

Director: Antonio Pietrangeli

Director: Roman Polanski

83. A Raisin in the Sun (1961)

Director: Daniel Petrie

Director: Ken Annakin, Darryl F. Zanuck, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki, Gerd Oswald

81. Eyes Without a Face (1960)

Director: Georges Franju

80. Planet of the Apes (1968)

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner

"What will he find out there, doctor?"

"His destiny"

79. Come Drink With Me (1966)

Director: King Hu (with Sammo Hung)

Director: Mel Brooks

Director: Peter Watkins

In the final moments of this film, a child, dripping with blood and coated in ash, says, "I don't want to grow up to be nothing." Based on interviews with leading professionals, extensive research and a heady dose of well-educated speculation, Peter Watkins' The War Game exists in a sort of interstitial reality between documentary and drama. Using mostly non-actors to portray Watkins' estimation of what a nuclear holocaust in the UK would be like, the film conjures up an alternate reality in which an unsuspecting population freefalls into total annihilation. What's scarier than the images Watkins depicts of people burning alive or of a riot erupting in the midst of the desperate institution of martial law-all (obviously) dramatized but all very difficult to watch-is also one of the film's most trenchant truths: The lack of awareness most citizens have of the devastation our elected leaders have at their disposal. If we became suddenly aware that our future generations could grow up to be nothing-to mean nothing in the grand scheme of things-we'd have no idea how to prevent it. -D.S.

76. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968)

Director: William Greaves

Director: J. Lee Thompson

74. The Honeymoon Killers (1969)

Director: Leonard Kastle

73. A Hard Day's Night (1964)

Director: Richard Lester

That opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night" is iconic on its own, but when it's paired with scenes of the Fab Four gleefully outrunning a crowd of screaming fans? Forget about it. The first Beatles movie-a mockumentary filmed at the height of Beatlemania-also happens to be their best; it's funny, silly, weirdly melancholy at times (it's hard not to see the foreshadowing when Ringo temporarily quits the band after feeling unappreciated) and full of some fantastic early performances. It manages to poke fun at the fame machine from the inside, and we always get the sense that no one found it funnier than John, Paul, George and Ringo.- Bonnie Stiernberg

Director: Masaki Kobayashi

Director: John Frankenheimer

70. How the West Was Won (1962)

Directors: John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall

A vestige of MGM's traditional epic Western era, this multi-chapter, multi-director classic spans 50 years, four generations, a cross-country saga and a legacy cast featuring Henry Fonda, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Eli Wallach, Jimmy Stewart, Walter Brennan, Debbie Reynolds, Lee Van Cleef and George Peppard (for starters), and narrated by no less than Spencer Tracy. Malden is the patriarch of the Prescott family, who ventures west from the Erie Canal and through 19th-century American history, including the Civil War, California Gold Rush, the Pony Express and the railroad boom. John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall co-direct, filming in the spectacular (but intricately problematic) curved-screen three-strip Cinerama process that made such a monumental narrative undertaking even more grandiose onscreen. Life and death, cowboys and Indians, riverboats and stagecoaches, frontiers and cities, How the West Was Won leaves no genre motif unturned-there's even a 1960s-set epilogue to drive home the themes of expansion and industrialization, American-style. James R. Webb's screenplay deservedly won an Oscar, as did the editing-consider a story and production of such scale assembled into a cohesive and riveting two and three-quarter hours-and Alfred Newman's score is among film's most iconic. For Wayne, Fonda and Stewart onscreen together for the first and only time, for the insanely detailed Cinerama, for the accomplishments of cast, crew and plot, this is once-in-a-lifetime filmmaking. -A.S.

69. The Great Escape (1963)

Director: John Sturges

The nonfiction, real-life mass escape from a Nazi detention camp in Poland was presumably nowhere near as charismatic as John Sturges' awesomely cast film adaptation, but that's okay. The film doesn't bring anything especially new to the cinematic examination of the war. That's okay. It's escapism? Well, it's about escaping. What makes this film a high-stamina classic is largely its amazing ensemble cast, which includes Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Garner, James Coburn and Donald Pleasance. This band of POWs work together as a film ensemble as well as they work together to execute their impossible escape-each character bringing a different skill set and a different viewpoint to an effort that can only succeed if they all accept their differences and work together. The film has a rather slow start, which some people feel is a weakness, although it's arguably valid for the character development and relationship development that are key to our desire to see these guys succeed. Despite its laconic pacing in the first half (which one could argue is a thematic underscoring of the frustrating and frightening suspension of being a POW, only diffused and channeled into action when they see a potential path to freedom), it remains a masterpiece of the action genre. It was also the film that put Steve McQueen on the map. I'm sure uncountable numbers of young men walked out of the cinema determined to buy a motorcycle after watching McQueen's iconic escape ride. They don't all make it, but they sure make you feel invested in their plan. -Amy Glynn

Director: Robert Drew

Director: Lindsay Anderson

Malcolm McDowell stars as an errant schoolboy in If..., one of the legendary British films of the '60s. This send-up of boarding school values pushes back against the dictatorial and suffocating standards of the English ruling classes, Lindsay Anderson directs McDowell as an incorrigible loon-and the locus of the unfolding student rebellion. Disaffected teens and guns are never a good combination, and in some ways the film eerily presages the school shooting age. But in 1968, this satirical allegory was much more about anti-authoritarianism and the urge to ruffle the feathers of the old guard. With its gleeful anarchy, it's a proto-punk movie if ever one existed.- Staff

Director: Mike Nichols

In the undisputed king of movies for those headed out into the real world, a hyper-accomplished recent grad (Dustin Hoffman) panics at the prospect of his future and falls into an affair with the much older wife of his father's business partner (Anne Bancroft). It helped define a generation long since embalmed by history, but the sense of longing for an alternative hasn't aged. - Jeffrey Bloomer

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

By the standards of his New Wave years, this was a "lesser" Godard film-more absurd, more confusing and perhaps a sign of the disjointed Marxist period to come. As Roger Ebert wrote back in 1966, "...the parts don't fit together-but they add up to an attitude." Precisely: This is a film to watch after you've become familiar with Godard, after you've given yourself over to his rhythms and eccentricities, and after, perhaps, your fourth or fifth Godardian epiphany. (Don't go straight from Breathless to Pierrot, in other words.) But once you cross that threshold, you'll find ample reward in this road movie starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, loosely tied together by a gangster-heavy plot ( Pierrot is saturated with violence) and the theme of lost love. To experience it purely as metaphor, too, is to find a way in to Godard's earlier, more accessible films. - Shane Ryan

Director: Jack Clayton

Director: Sam Peckinpah

62. Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962)

Director: Ralph Nelson

As its title suggests, few boxing films are quite so unrelentingly melancholy as this Rod Serling-penned story. Anthony Quinn is a roughed-up old heavyweight whose final head injury in the ring incapacitates him for further fights. Forced to the unemployment office after decades of boxing, he realizes he has little to show for his years of dedication but a cauliflower ear and an empty pocket. This is a film which makes a pointed effort to show the way prizefighters are cruelly put out to pasture once they no longer serve their purpose; Quinn's turn as the punch-drunk dope is so kindly it's difficult not to watch without fierce empathy. Jackie Gleason, in a serious guise, is fantastically conflicted as Quinn's longtime manager, and Julie Harris equally formidable as a sweet unemployment office clerk. Requiem for a Heavyweight is one of the greats.- Christina Newland

Director: John Frankenheimer

Director: Richard Brooks

Richard Brooks' adaptation of In Cold Blood is a hallucinatory nightmare from
which there is no escape. Brooks has always been a masterful filmmaker with entries such as Elmer Gantry and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, so it comes as no surprise that he could capture the sheer range that Truman Capote's nonfiction novel offers. Robert Blake and Scott Wilson give performances of a lifetime, although it is Blake's Perry Smith that shines. The shock and frenzy of this troubled man seep through the frames, as Brooks uses both hallucination and flashback to capture such a fragile psyche. Quincy Jones' jazz score also elevates the action on screen and creates a smooth mood not unlike most noir masterpieces. The performances are poetically underplayed; no one shows off here. Juxtaposed with the jarred and fractured, yet linear, narrative, we see the psychological framing of our two protagonists shatter, reform, shatter again, and culminate in a truly moving and intense film. -Nelson Maddaloni

59. Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968)

Director: Alain Resnais

Director: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin

The Maysles' ode to the can-do attitude of the so-called "Greatest Generation" is an ever-saddening study in charisma: Who has it, what it is and just how deeply, unintentionally ingrained it is in our whole model of the American Dream. In following four Bible salesmen, each with an animalistic nickname to handily keep them apart, we're able to observe the pitch process from seemingly every persuasive angle. Some salesmen are wise and respectful, others enthusiastic and joking, and still others resort to bullying nervous stay-at-home moms or emasculated husbands into signing a pay stub. Couple that ethical conundrum with the product they're hocking-the original "Good Book," apparently-and it's no surprise when one of the salesmen (Badger, who hits a streak of shitty luck, never living up to his name) loses all hope in his vocation and spends every night in his shared hotel room complaining to his fellow salesmen that what they're doing is existentially bound to fail. And yet, Rabbit has no trouble keeping his sales up, and the Bull always walks out with scribbled-on chits. Badger just happens to be a dying breed of salesman, a guy whose charisma refuses to adapt. What's worse: He's got no one to blame but himself. -D.S.

Director: Billy Wilder

Filmmaker Billy Wilder had perhaps one of the greatest, most diverse track records in film history from 1944 to 1960. In this period, he tackled an Oscar-winning drama about alcoholism ( The Lost Weekend), two well-regarded film noirs ( Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard), a war drama ( Stalag 17), two light-hearted rom-coms ( Sabrina, Seven Year Itch) a gripping murder-mystery ( Witness for the Prosecution) and perhaps the funniest American movie of all time ( Some Like It Hot). Yet, of all these golden credits, one Wilder's most beloved and memorable achievements was 1960's The Apartment. Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, an ambitious office worker who, desperate to climb the corporate ladder, allows his bosses to use his apartment to carry on discreet affairs with their mistresses. Things get complicated, however, when he discovers that his office crush, quirky elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), is one of his bosses' mistresses. While it actually gets quite dark at times, The Apartment strikes a perfect balance between laugh-out-loud comedy and emotionally honest drama. Following the career highlight that was his drag-heavy performance in Some Like It Hot, Lemmon here proves that he can play the low-key, straight man with equal dexterity. Likewise, MacLaine's charming portrayal as the damaged, yet lovable Kubelik would provide the model for manic pixie dream girls for years to come. - Mark Rozeman

Director: Masahiro Shinoda

Director: Haskell Wexler

Elusive, sly, and dazzlingly shot, Haskell Wexler's directorial debut is one of the great American counterculture films. Starring Robert Forster as an ambitious young news cameraman who gets caught up in the riots at the '68 Democratic Convention, Medium Cool is focused on the slow politicization of an initially disinterested youth. Traveling through the company of Black radicals, Nixon supporters, indifferent television executives and impoverished single mothers, Wexler slowly proves that the personal is deeply political. When the carnage of the Chicago riots unfold in one searing, hypnotic long take-actual footage filmed by Wexler on the day-the transition is complete. This is a quietly revolutionary odyssey through the turmoil of a divided nation.- Staff

Director: Seijun Suzuki

53. Ride in the Whirlwind (1966)

Director: Monte Hellman

Filmed back-to-back with The Shooting, an equally superb Western, Ride in the Whirlwind is the more traditional movie on the surface. Written by actor Jack Nicholson, who also stars in The Shooting, Whirlwind's story focuses on three cowboys riding the range back home who seek shelter for the night with a gang of outlaws. When a posse of vigilantes circle the cabin and a gunfight ensues, Nicholson and Cameron Mitchell flee into a canyon for safety, chased by the vigilantes who believe they're members of the outlaws. They find temporary sanctuary with a family of homesteaders, including Millie Perkins as the daughter, but Nicholson and Mitchell's quest for freedom is cast in existential despair. Nicholson's script is filled with fantastic, well-researched details of life in the West, and director Monte Hellman tightens his characters' dire predicament with an almost unbearable dread. For all of its modest low-budget production, Ride in the Whirlwind is masterful in its naturalistic straightforwardness. The Shooting, also brilliant and featuring many of the same actors, weirds things up and has the reputation of being the better movie. Don't believe it. Both are exceptional, but Ride in the Whirlwind is one of the true gems of the post-classic American Western. -D.H.

52. Chronicle of a Summer (1961)

Directors: Jean Rouche, Edgar Morin

51. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

Director: Robert Aldrich

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Director: Ousmane Sembène

Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène grew up a French citizen in the final throes of his country's centuries-long period of colonialism, almost 40 when Senegal joined French Sudan to gain independence. Made six years after France transferred power, Black Girl, Sembène's first feature-length film as writer and director (based off of his own short story), aches with wounds still lifetimes away from healing, worsened by the shallowness of a people (French) who just want to move on and with the humiliation and resentment of a lot more people (Africans) who physically live everyday-in their language and social structures and economic lots-surrounded by the reminders that they for so long were not their own. Sembène makes this divide dreadfully clear, telling the story of quiet Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), hired by a French family to serve as their nanny in Dakar, until they move back to the Riviera and encourage (expect) Diouana to go and live with them. Of course, once she arrives, the bitter, malicious Madame (Anne-Marie Jelinek) expects her to cook and clean, callously stretching the bounds of Diouana's duties as nanny into a kind of indentured servitude, exacerbated by Diouana's inability to read and lack of money. She is, literally, stuck in France. Meanwhile, Sembène cuts to memories of Diouana's life before she left Senegal, in which she lived in relative poverty but had family and boyfriend (Momar Nar Sene) to support her, telling her not to leave but still needing the money she could potentially earn. Juxtaposing these two realities, Sembène slowly crafts a vision of post-colonial slavery in a post-war world, building a tension that gives Diouana no choice but to tragically get out the only way she knows how. Despite whatever the Madame and her family had in mind, Diouana's story could have ended no other way. -Dom Sinacola

48. The Sorrow and the Pity (1969)

Director: Marcel Ophüls

With tragedy still stinging, and wounds still fresh across Europe, Marcel Ophüls crafted something of a four-hour harangue about the Vichy government's collaboration with Nazi Germany during the bulk of World War II. Assembled from interviews with officers, sympathizers, resistance fighters and bystanders-perspectives originating from every angle- The Sorrow and the Pity reveals many excruciating truths about France during the occupation, but none more plangent than the idea that war has no sides, no good guys, no winners. There's only the sorrow, and then the pity-and everything else is just a series of long, heartsick discussions about right and wrong and how there's pretty much no difference. -D.S.

47. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

Director: George Roy Hill

The top-grossing film of 1969 and four-time Oscar winner was an anachronistic wonder that poked at the stoic bravura of the traditional Western: Consider the broad buddy humor between its pitch-perfect leads, Paul Newman and Robert Redford; the poppy, Burt Bacharach-Hal David-penned score and that theme song, "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head"; and William Goldman's wry, self-aware script. From the first sepia-saturated moments of George Roy Hill's take on the Old West, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid rewrote history, literally: Author Goldman famously wanted to tell the story of the titular outlaws' flight to South America but didn't want to do sufficient research for a novel-length treatment. And thus, "Most of what follows is true," the film winks at its start. Gorgeously shot by Conrad Hall, the film is a deftly balanced mix of reverential genre elegy and sometimes deadpan, sometimes slapstick comedy. At its heart is then box office superstar Newman and comparatively small-potatoes actor Redford, the latter taking over after Steve McQueen backed out, balking over whose name would be billed first in the credits. As the Kid's girlfriend, Katharine Ross complicates the duo's relationship and lends nuance to what is essentially a love story. Curiously, Butch and Sundance's posse, the Hole in the Wall Gang, was known as the Wild Bunch in real life but was changed for the screen to avoid confusion with another Western set for release a few months prior to its own premiere. -A.S.

46. One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)

Director: Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, Wolfgang Reitherman

Despite ushering in a few new cost-cutting techniques to keep budgets down, One Hundred and One Dalmatians has style. A lot of that comes down to Cruella De Vil, of course; her alabaster skin, skunk hair, and love of big fluffy coats makes her one of the most strikingly designed characters in the Disney canon. It's more than just her, though; the way the movie uses bright splashes of color to both make its characters pop against the background but also to reflect their emotional states is inspired. Some of the dynamics feel off today, as happens with almost any movie from 60 years ago-it portrays a motivated, outspoken, unmarried woman as an almost literal devil who wants to murder puppies, in contrast to Roger's wife Anita, who is pretty and docile and a complete non-character. It also has surprisingly sly humor you might not expect from an old Disney animated feature, like the TV game show where a panel has to guess a criminal's crime, or the shrill, saccharine, unending jingle in a dog treat commercial. There's so much to recommend here, from De Vil's fantastic theme song, to the legitimately hilarious banter of her lackeys, to the exciting Twilight Bark sequence. It earns its rep as a true Disney classic.- Garrett Martin

Director: Akira Kurosawa

One of the recurring themes of Kurosawa's dramatic work is compassion, namely how little of it exists in our world, and how much even a single individual can affect change for good with the simplest of deeds. Roger Ebert even wrote in his "Great Movie" review of Red Beard, "I believe this film should be seen by every medical student." The story, a sprawling drama struck by black-and-white, widescreen cinematography, is centered on a young, self-important medical intern (Yuzo Kayama) learning to connect with his patients on a personal level, but not without the help of a small town doctor (Toshiro Mifune) with a dogged passion for healing the poor. The doctor, affectionately nicknamed Red Beard, doesn't let anything stand between him and the opportunity to tend to a patient, even if it means kicking mucho gangster ass to do so. That sequence, the film's sole martial arts set piece, also works as the clearest reminder of the film's lesson of compassion being an omnipresent quality: After beating up the gangsters, Red Beard provides them with assistance in healing the wounds he created.- Oktay Ege Kozak

Director: Robert Aldrich

43. The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Director: Gillo Pontecorvo

Director: D.A. Pennebaker

"When I made Dont Look Back with Dylan, we just shook hands," documentary icon D.A. Pennebaker said in 2011. "It was 50/50 ... I think that bond means you will be fair about money, but it also means you're not making the film just for yourself. You're making it for the subject because it's all he'll ever have of that experience, and it should be as true for him as it is for you." Far from a disposable fan item, Don't Look Back is a bracing portrait of an artist colliding headlong with both his growing fame and the confusion of those in the press who don't know how to approach this mercurial young man-or the generation he represented. Most famous for its iconic, much-parodied non sequitur opening-Dylan flipping white cards with lyrics from "Subterranean Homesick Blues"- Dont Look Back somehow manages to capture the promise of the decade's counterculture movement, all embodied in a willful little genius who loved tormenting reporters and Donovan with equally bratty gusto. Explaining the movie's eternal appeal, Pennebaker used an analogy. "In the '60s, every kid would buy certain records," he once explained. "To their parents, the record covers were just pictures. But for [the kids] it was a whole secret symbolic language that told them what kind of dope to smoke, where things were hidden, where to go and all kinds of things they naturally needed to know. Film is one more way you can convey secret information. Dont Look Back provided coded information for people who didn't want the other generation to know what they were really into. When the older generation looked at it, all they saw was out-of-focus, shaky pictures they weren't used to." -Tim Grierson

41. In the Heat of the Night (1967)

Director: Norman Jewison

The racial animosity depicted in director's Norman Jewison's Best Picture winner, about Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), an African-American homicide detective from Philadelphia who stumbles upon a murder mystery in a podunk Mississippi town, tips over into a poignant commentary on art imitating life. Poitier refused to shoot on location, fearing retaliation from southern racists, and even a quick pickup shoot in Tennessee was cut short after Poitier began receiving threats. The genius in Sterling Silliphant's adaptation of John Ball's novel, then, is in the borderline anal manner in which he balances social commentary and plot progression. Pretty much every scene contains a new piece of information towards solving the murder case, as well as a damning portrait of racial animosity. The contentious working relationship between Virgil and the local chief of police, Gillespie (Rod Steiger), never resolves cleanly; In the Heat of the Night is smart enough to know that prejudices entrenched within multiple generations will not disappear overnight, if at all. Even moments of bonding between colleagues never steer clear of the racial divide between them. There's a glimmer of hope in the very final moments, but Jewison always has a handle on his uncompromising tone. -Oktay Ege Kozak

40. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

While attempting to adapt Peter George's novel Red Alert for the big screen, director Stanley Kubrick found that he kept needing to cut out certain real-life details about the emergency nuclear bomb procedures because they were simply too absurd to work in a serious drama. Deciding to rewrite the project as a dark comedy, he recruited renowned satirist Terry Southern to help pen the script. From there, it's all history. To this day, Peter Sellers' three very different (and very funny) performances remain a feat by which few actors have matched. Moreover, the image of Slim Pickens riding the bomb to its destination as well as the final montage of destruction set to the wistful "We'll Meet Again" are the stuff of movie legend. Worldwide Armageddon has never been so hilarious.- Mark Rozeman

39. The Sound of Music (1965)

Director: Robert Wise

38. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Director: John Ford

Director: Jacques Tati

36. Ivan's Childhood (1962)

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Director: Sergio Corbucci

Ah, Django. Who can say no to that soundtrack? Who can pass up the grizzled mug of Franco Nero, or the filmic stylings of Sergio Corbucci? Quentin Tarantino certainly couldn't, and thus we have Django Unchained as a delightfully violent relic of 2012. More importantly, we have Django and we have Django, a righteous, coffin-dragging, gunslinging, erstwhile Union soldier wandering the United States-Mexico border who winds up caught between tattered remnants of the Confederacy and Mexican revolutionaries. Django cuts a figure of cool reserve, the kind we've come to associate with the Spaghetti Western's antihero archetype; he's out for a cause, his own cause, and he sees his cause realized through the subterfuge and manipulation favored by his forebears ( A Fistful of Dollars, and by extension Yojimbo). But as great as the character is, it's Django's level of violence plus Corbucci's gifts as a craftsman that make the film indelible. If it's tame by our standards today, then consider that Django was a new ceiling in screen bloodshed back in 1966, and rife with pissed-off political and social subtext to match. Corbucci's pastiche of spiritual hypocrisy, unveiled rancor for the Ku Klux Klan, and contempt for glorified misogyny make for a dizzying, surreal genre experience against his mud-caked, bloodstained backdrop. Django isn't just one of the best Spaghetti Westerns of all time. It's one of the best Westerns of all time, period. -A.C.

34. The Red and the White (1967)

Director: Miklós Jancsó

One of the most gorgeously fluid films ever made, Miklós Jancsó's Russian Civil War snapshot is a Soviet production by way of a fiercely independent Hungarian auteur-all the opulent production and Herculean skill with the camera that characterized the best of the Communist Bloc's filmmaking, minus the didacticism of its worst. Mosfilm for some reason agreed to finance it (before later re-editing, then banning it); it's hard to see how the film's fatalistic conceit, the narrative baton constantly passing from one faction and one character to the next as soldiers die at the hands of their "red" or "white" enemy, could ever have been viewed as anything other than explicitly anti-war. It's a gallery of horrors-officers jumping to their deaths rather than being taken prisoner, captive soldiers used as moving target practice, civilian women forced to dance for their captors-made hypnotic by Jancsó's sheer technique. Better than perhaps any other, Jancsó's film makes the case for the utter wastefulness of war. All this death, and after 90 minutes, not a lesson learned. -Brogan Morris

Director: Robert Stevenson

As portrayed by the iconic and formidable Julie Andrew, Mary Poppins has never met a problem a song can't solve. She whips the Banks children into shape while helping their father understand that what children need most from their parents is their time and attention. There are so many delightful musical numbers but I have a soft spot for Dick Van Dyke's Bert and his fellow chimney sweepers tap dancing on the roof tops of London in "Chim Chim Cher-ee." Released over 55 years ago, songs like "A Spoonful of Sugar" and "Super-cali-fragil-istic" still feel fresh and new. There's a joy to this movie that is infectious. I would say they don't make movies like this anymore but 2018's Mary Poppins Returns came very close to capturing the spirit of the original. Would that we all had a nanny like Mary Poppins. - Amy Amatangelo

32. Woman in the Dunes (1964)

Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara

Director: Luchino Visconti

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Director: Dennis Hopper

Director: François Truffaut

Widely regarded as a French touchstone, François Truffaut's classic WWI-era love triangle is based on a semi-autobiographical novel of the same title by Henri-Pierre Roche, which Truffaut stumbled across in a Paris bookstore in the 1950s. The adaptation tells the tragic story of Jim (Henri Serre), a French Bohemian, Jules (Oskar Werner), his Austrian friend, and Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), Jules' girlfriend/wife. The two men are besotted with Catherine, who bears an eerie resemblance to a statue they both love. She marries Jules. The war breaks out, and the two men, on opposing sides of the conflict, struggle with the fear that one might unwittingly kill the other in battle. (What actually happens is arguably worse.) Both survive, and later, Jim visits Jules and Catherine in their Black Forest cottage. Jules confides he's miserable, that Catherine has constant affairs, has left him and their baby, Sabine, for months at a time, and that he lives in terror of losing her. Catherine tries to seduce Jim. The three try an experimental situation where Catherine is with both men, but tragedy only ensues from there. Perhaps a definitive example of the French New Wave, the film incorporates a vast lexicon of cinematic techniques-newsreel footage, stills, wipes, panning shots, freeze-frames, voiceover narration (by Michel Subor)-though shades of its towering influence in subsequent films, television and music are almost innumerable. - Amy Glynn

27. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Director: Sergio Leone

Arguably the greatest of the Italian Westerns, but also one of the finest Westerns ever made. Leone's penchant for turning the genre's sacred themes and obsessions inside out goes full tilt here. Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef are back for this third Dollars movie, but the addition of Eli Wallach adds a significant amount of caustic humor and even more cynicism to the mix. Set during the Civil War, though in a dry, barren landscape resembling the surreal panels of a Krazy Kat cartoon more than historical reality, Leone's epic is the sublime, gloriously cinematic creation that he was always gunning for. Composer Ennio Morricone's score ties it all together, particularly in the orgasmic "Ecstasy of Gold" finale. The director may have gone even more baroque with his subsequent Once Upon a Time in the West, but this is still his greatest achievement. Pop culture and the genre were never the same. -D.H.

26. Band of Outsiders (1964)

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Director: Akira Kurosawa

24. Midnight Cowboy (1969)

Director: John Schlesinger

In this film by British director John Schlesinger, Jon Voight plays a Texan with a troubled past who comes to the big city trying to make a career as a gigolo. Enter his pal, Ratso Rizzo, played by the great and grating Dustin Hoffman. Midnight Cowboy was rated X upon release for homosexual content that would hardly raise an eyebrow today, and remains the only film of that category to ever win an Oscar, much less the Best Picture award it captured in 1970. (The only other X-rated film to be nominated was Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.) Second on the list of the decade's greatest actors is Dustin Hoffman. Along with Midnight Cowboy, he starred in the seminal The Graduate, the western epic Little Big Man, Sam Peckinpah's terrifying classic Straw Dogs, the controversial Lenny (a hopeless Best Picture nominee in the 1974 class with The Conversation and The Godfather, Part II), All the President's Men, Marathon Man and Kramer vs. Kramer. But his incredible turn as Ratso Rizzo is still the greatest performance of his career, and the chemistry between him and his physical opposite is one of the best and most unusual friend dynamics in film history, hilarious and ultimately heartbreaking. -Shane Ryan

23. The Human Condition (1959-1961)

Director: Masaki Kobayashi

Masaki Kobayashi's near ten-hour monolith requires commitment. One must prepare not just for the epic length, but for the film's relentless assault on the notion of human goodness, by the end obliterated by a mountain of evidence to the contrary as experienced by one man. Newly married and fresh out of university, Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai) soon discovers it's a lonely world for a righteous utopian. On his journey through the cold, authoritarian quarters of Asia in WWII, Kaji unsuccessfully tries to bring his socialist ideals to his role as supervisor of Chinese prisoners at a Manchurian forced labor camp; suffers through all manner of indignities and physical trauma when he's conscripted into the Japanese army; and finally finds himself wandering through a war-ravaged China into a Soviet POW camp, his body frail and his soul corrupted. It's all realized in ravishing monochrome, but Kobayashi's film can't help but be a difficult watch, as is to be expected from a filmmaker committed to covering the proverbial life, death and everything in between over the course of 579 minutes. Renowned British film critic David Shipman called The Human Condition "unquestionably the greatest film ever made," which is a matter for debate, but anyone willing to invest the time and energy will indeed find an unparalleled experience. -Brogan Morris

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

When I think of Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 Contempt, my mind immediately goes in two directions. First, to the lovely, melancholy theme by George Delerue (which I often seek out like a favorite memory), and second, to the images of the startlingly blue Mediterranean and the sheer cliffs on the Italian coast. On some level this is a superficial recollection, because there is so much more to this subtly structured film-within-a-film, and the "contempt" of the title is what the (agonizingly beautiful) Camille Javal (Brigitte Bardot) feels for her screenwriter husband (Michel Piccoli) when he seemingly offers her companionship to a gauche producer (played with terrific sleaze by Jack Palance) in order to improve his position. But like the best Godard movies of the New Wave period, the emotion of loss pervades, and in that sense the persistence of the music and the Capri coastline makes sense: When the details fade, the poetry remains, and in his prime Godard could capture the intangible, fleeting sense of lost time like nobody else. - Shane Ryan

21. Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Director: Roman Polanski

The banality of evil isn't a concept new to the horror genre-look to recent shock-plagued entries like The Eyes of My Mother, or, say, Mickey Keating's interminable Psychopaths to watch bad things happen for no other reason than that they can-but in Roman Polanski's troubled hands, that banality is an unadulterated expression of a deep-seated, institutionalized horror, one so ingrained in our society it becomes practically organic. With Rosemary's Baby, the body of young Rosemary (Mia Farrow) is the institution through which Satan's malice gestates, a body over which everyone but Rosemary herself seems to have any control. At the mercy of her overbearing neighbors (played by a pitch-perfect Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer), her Ur-Dudebro husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), and the doctor (Ralph Bellamy) recommended by her high society cadre of new friends, Rosemary is treated as if she's the last person who knows what's best for her and her fetus-a position she accepts as a matter of fact. She's only a woman, a homemaker at that, so such is her lot. Of course, the worse she feels and the more fraught her pregnancy becomes-as well as the recurring flashes of a ghastly dream she can't quite shake-the clearer Rosemary begins to suspect she's an unwilling pawn in something cosmically insidious. She is, is the absurd truth: She is the mother of Satan's offspring, the victim of a coven's will to worship their Dark Lord much more fruitfully. More than the director's audacious Hollywood debut, not to mention the omen of what New Hollywood would be willing to do to tear down tradition, Rosemary's Baby is a landmark horror film because of how ordinary, how easy, it is for everyone else in Rosemary's life to crush a woman's spirit and take her life. "It's alive!" Rosemary screams, echoing Frankenstein with outsize aplomb, her declaration hardly one of triumph, but of disbelief that such a nightmare is the life she's just going to have to accept. -Dom Sinacola

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

19. The Tale of Zatoichi (1962)

Director: Kenji Misumi

Blind, doddering and soft-spoken, the masseur Ichi (Shintaro Katsu) doesn't look like he can butcher entire gangs of swordsmen. The fact that he can, that his meekness is just a deception hiding an unstoppable, righteous whirlwind of dismemberment, is the reason The Tale of Zatoichi spawned 26 films, the vast majority of them starring Katsu in the title role. The stories wallow in the dirt and danger of the Edo Period, when crime and intrigue replaced the war and treachery of the samurai as the greatest dangers to the common folk. The zato, or anma (masseurs, a role traditionally for the blind), of feudal Japan were considered lowly and servile. If Toshiro Mifune's famous Sanjuro samurai-with-no-name is the genre's strutting badass, Katsu's Ichi is a far more deceptive and cunning champion of the underdog. This inaugural romp sees Ichi hired by local toughs as the ringer in a gang war, and introduces the world to his humble-looking walking stick and the nasty blade it conceals. It's a slashing, clashing, gritty start to a cinema phenomenon. -Kenneth Lowe

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

17. Titicut Follies (1967)

Directors: Frederick Wiseman

"At the time, I was teaching classes in legal medicine and family law," Wiseman once recalled. "And in order to make the things more interesting for both me and the students, I took them on field trips. I thought I would make the cases a bit more real by taking them to trials, parole-board hearings, probation hearings and mental hospitals. One of the places I took them to was Bridgewater, a prison for the criminally insane. ... It seemed fresh material from a film point of view and visually very interesting." From that came Titicut Follies, his 1967 documentary about Bridgewater State Hospital. Writing a proposal for the film, Wiseman stated that he wanted to "give an audience factual material about a state prison but also give the film an imaginative and poetic quality that [would] set it apart from the cliché documentary about crime and mental illness." He succeeded: Titicut Follies is a harrowing look at the treatment of the prisoners-including scenes of one naked inmate being force-fed intercut with the same inmate's body undergoing preparation for burial-although Bridgewater's overseers initially didn't have a problem with the depiction of their facility. That changed once Titicut Follies was shown to reviewers, who mentioned the inmates' harsh treatment. It was then that the governor of Massachusetts blocked the release of the film, citing invasion of privacy for the Bridgewater prisoners and violation of an oral contract that the state would have final approval over the film. (Wiseman, for his part, insisted no such agreement was ever in place.) "Making the film was one thing, and the litigation was something else," Wiseman told Filmmaker in 2012. "The litigation was basically a farce, because the effort to ban the film-even though they succeeded for quite a while-was just an example of political cowardice and stupidity. I always thought of it as political theatre." After appealing to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, he was able to show the movie in certain places, but only under incredibly strict conditions. "They decided that the film had value but could only be seen by limited audiences: doctors, lawyers, judges, health-care professionals, social workers, and students in these and related fields, but not the 'merely curious general public,'" Wiseman recalled to Vice. "And this was on condition that I give the attorney general's office a week's notice before any screening and that I file an affidavit after that everyone who attended was, of my personal knowledge, a member of the class of people allowed to see the film." -T.G.

16. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Director: Arthur Penn

Director: Costa-Gavras

14. Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Director: Luis Buñuel

In one of Luis Buñuel's most acclaimed and popular films, Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve) has a loving but sexless marriage, and so becomes a high-end call-girl while her husband is at work. Instead of a "Belle de Nuit" or "Lady of the Night," Séverine takes the alias "Belle de Jour" (which is also the French name for the daylily, a flower that only opens during daylight), and for a while she seems to come to life in a whole new way (even finally being able to have sex with her husband), until things inevitably get...complicated. Always a filmmaker preoccupied with the intersections of the opulent and the grotesque, the elegant and the surreally nasty, Buñuel found a pretty perfect muse in the icily beautiful Deneuve, whose turn as a bored and un-turn-on-able housewife with BDSM fantasies is stunning in its contrasts of calculation and sentiment, seducer and seduced, humanity and commodity. At times it's unclear what's happening in Séverine's mind and what's happening in real life- Belle de Jour is a brilliant piece of erotica, a richly detailed treatise on the power of fantasy, a radically ambiguous and artistically masterful film that hasn't lost an ounce of allure or relevance since it was released. -Amy Glynn

12. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Director: Jacques Demy

Director: Masaki Kobayashi

During a time when chambara films were pretty much getting churned out regularly, their factory settings still showing, heralded auteur and political firebrand Masaki Kobayashi won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes with his heartbreaking take on the "sword-fighting" genre, Harakiri. Many Japanese filmmakers were at a commercial crossroads in the '50s and '60s: The studios paying for their projects were built on the bread and butter of genre expectations-particularly of the jidai-geki, or "period piece," of which the chambara is a subset-which could no longer provide the emotional and political bandwidth for the kinds of deeply felt stories they were trying to tell. A few of his contemporaries became icons: Seijun Suzuki, Yosujiro Ozu, and Akira Kurosawa all broke free from their expectations as studio filmmakers to exercise a new creative freedom apart from tradition. They created their own traditions, building myths from the ruins of their reality. And so, in Kobayashi's tale of poor ronin Hanshir? (Tatsuya Nakadai), who sets out to take elaborate revenge on the feudal ruler who essentially forced his son-in-law to commit ritualistic suicide using nothing but a bamboo sword (in perhaps one of the most grueling scenes of chambara cinema), the director rails against the institutions of his time. Hanshir? isn't just fighting a clan of samurai, he's fighting the hierarchical structures that drove massive wedges between Japanese political and social groups in the '50s and '60s. He's fighting the zaibatsus, or corporations, that set up their own kind of modern mid-century feudalism. He's fighting the film industry that takes a singular vision and stamps it beneath consumerism. He's fighting the hypocrisy of codes and systems that do anything but foster community. And, in tune with the best chambara the decade had to offer, his fight is a spectacularly beautiful one.- Dom Sinacola

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Director: Agnès Varda

8. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Director: Sergio Leone

Director: Ingmar Bergman

6. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Director: David Lean

"And introducing Peter O'Toole." Talk about a debut. Look up the word "epic" and you just might find David Lean's marathon masterpiece about T.E. Lawrence in the Arabian Peninsula in WWI. Its run time is 222 minutes, so if you've somehow managed to get to this point without having seen it, plan accordingly but do see it, because there are really good reasons why this film was nominated for 10 Academy Awards (of which it won seven). Though somewhat romanticized and with some conflated or added or subtracted characters, this is a fairly nonfictional account of Lawrence's story, in which he finds his loyalties divided between the Arab tribes and the British Army (Clashing cultures was a noteworthy preoccupation in Lean's films, and opinion is somewhat divided on how successful he is at depicting them). A kooky maverick as far as the British are concerned and an untrustworthy outsider to the Arabs, he wins the favor of Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness), and leads a dangerous and daring attack on the Turkish military Aqaba with a multitribal Arab force led by Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif). And that's all before the intermission. Lean was a director's director with a fascinating visual sensibility, and the brutal, lethal Arabian desert is not only captured brilliantly by cinematographer F. A. Young, but in large part by composer Maurice Jarre's brilliant score. There's not a bad performance from the powerhouse cast, but what one has to wonder is what would have happened if the studio's first choice had accepted, and Lawrence had been played by Albert Finney. O'Toole was an unknown when he was thrust into a demanding and intense lead role, and he is so riveting it's hard to imagine anyone else under those robes. By turns bold and shattered, insouciant and wild, refined and desperate, he remains above all believable and deeply human-an unapologetically flawed hero (and wow, not too hard on the eyes, either). Yes, Lawrence of Arabia is an important, canonical film for its scale, its score, its technical achievements. But what really matters about it in the end is pure, and utterly masterful, storytelling. -Amy Glynn

Director: Akira Kurosawa

4. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

Director: Robert Bresson

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

The big one. The biggest one, perhaps, though if not, it's still pretty goddamn big. 57 years after Alfred Hitchcock unleashed Psycho on an unsuspecting moviegoing culture, finding new things to say about it feels like a fool's errand, but hey: We're fools. Five decades and change is a long time for a movie's influence to continue reverberating throughout popular culture, but here we are, watching main characters lose their heads in Game of Thrones, their innards in The Walking Dead, or their lives, in less flowery language, in films like Alien, the Alien rip-off Life, and maybe most importantly Scream, the movie that is to contemporary horror what Psycho was to genre movies (and to the movies in total) in its day. That's pretty much the dictionary definition of impact right there (and all without even a single mention of A&E's Bates Motel). But now we're talking about Psycho as a curio rather than as a film, and the truth is that Psycho's impact is the direct consequence of Hitchcock's mastery as a filmmaker and as a storyteller. Put another way, it's a great film, one that's as effective today as it is authoritative: You've never met a slasher (proto-slasher, really) like Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), and no matter how many times the movies try to replicate his persona on screen, they'll never get it quite right. He is, like Psycho itself, one of a kind. -Andy Crump

Director: Federico Fellini

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

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The old ways were on the way out in the 1960s film world. The cynical noirs and escapist epics were slowing down, replaced by ambitious formal experiments like those found in the French New Wave. Around the world, Japanese cinema flourished and Italy found itself making a name in horror and-somewhat inexplicably-Westerns.

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They are used everywhere today
They are in everything including your computer and some car headlights
Today they are the most effective lightbulb

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This is one of the most popular shows ever
It canceled with only 79 episodes and 3 seasons
It was a sci-fi film made in the 60s

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Why does Star Trek have a huge following? originally appeared on Quora: the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by Robert Frost, Instructor and Flight Controller at NASA, on Quora:
The Star Trek franchise will be celebrating its 50th anniversary this September (8 September, 2016). Over that 50 years, more than 700 episodes and thirteen movies have been made. One could watch Star Trek for more than 500 hours without seeing anything twice.

Star Trek stories are humanistic; they are founded in Gene Roddenberry's belief in the perfectible human. They provide an optimistic vision of our future. Star Trek tells us that no matter how crazy the world may look today, it will get better. We will get better. There will be a time in which doing great things will be the norm.

Contrary to the common perception, Star Trek did not perform poorly when it aired on NBC between 1966 and 1969, but it didn't perform strongly enough to justify its very high cost. After airing its third season during a time period in which its core audience wouldn't be home, NBC canceled the series. Three seasons of a show used to be an important benchmark, because it made the show a valid candidate for syndication sales. During the mid-1970s, UHF stations all over America purchased the rights to re-air those three seasons. It began to air daily and found audiences that missed out the first time. The popularity of the show grew immensely, particularly amongst juveniles and young adults. Vietnam was over and man had walked on the Moon. There was a vast sea of young people that found the bright future of Star Trek inspirational.

Star Trek depicts a meritocracy. The characters were cool not because of looks, wealth, or social position, but because they were very good at their jobs. It is a rare television show that sends the message that it is cool to be smart.

Star Trek's optimistic view of the future stands as a contrast to the bulk of science fiction. Most television and cinematic science fiction depicts varying dystopian futures. Dystopia provides writers with shortcuts to conflict; it's easier. When just making it through the day provides conflict, writers don't have to generate as many new ideas. Star Trek thrives on those new ideas.

Star Trek 's "Wagon Train to the stars" construct meant that each episode found the crew in a new place. Each new world enabled the writers to imagine new scenarios to challenge the crew of the Enterprise. The veil of new species and new civilizations allowed the writers to tell issues stories and create moral plays that probed our contemporary views without overtly criticizing them.

The ridiculousness of racism could be exposed through the artifice of an alien white on one side of his body and black on the other in conflict with an alien black on one side and white on the other. The Vietnam War and the Cold War could be criticized by putting the Federation and the Klingons in the position of arming less developed planets in the buffer zone between them. The roles of technology and automation could be examined in an episode that depicted a computer replacing the captain of the ship. Our very humanity could be examined by telling stories about an outworlder from the planet Vulcan or a man-made android.

Star Trek excelled in its characters and casting. The original series focused on a trinity of characters. At the center was the classic hero, Captain Kirk, a dashing and passionate adventurer burdened with the responsibilities of command. Like angels and devils on his shoulder, were his advisors, Spock, the logical Vulcan, viewing the world through a cerebral lens, and McCoy, the ship's physician, the very embodiment of heart, compassion, and morality. Surrounding them was a spectrum of diversity that showed us people of different backgrounds working together, seamlessly.

Star Trek showed blacks, Asians, and women in roles of respect in a time when that was not the norm. Whoopi Goldberg has talked about freaking out when, as a child, she tuned into Star Trek and saw that black women were part of the future. Nichelle Nichols has told the story of how when she was contemplating leaving the show, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told her not to, because her character was a symbol of hope for equality.

I came to Star Trek long before I understood the concept of race. The fact that Uhura's skin was browner than Scotty's or that Sulu's eyes were different than Chekov's was shown as being no more significant than the fact that Scotty's hair was a darker color than Captain Kirk's hair.

Twenty-one years after Star Trek premiered on NBC, a new television series called Star Trek: The Next Generation began airing in syndication. It was a huge success and ran for seven seasons. It continued the formula of a bright future, a highly competent crew, and moral plays.

Three more television series followed, but the concept had been saturated. For eighteen years, Star Trek appeared on television on a weekly basis. It lost its casual audience and was surviving off of only the die-hards. So, Star Trek took a four year break.

The strengths of Star Trek make it best suited for television and less well suited for the cinema. It has had mixed success on the big screen. The multiplex is about spectacle. When Star Trek returned to the big screen in 2009 it was welcomed by a large audience, but it wasn't quite Star Trek. Star Trek is more about thinking and talking than blowing things up. In 2017, Star Trek will return to its native format and hopefully that audience will be hungry, again.

This question originally appeared on Quora. Ask a question, get a great answer. Learn from experts and access insider knowledge. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:

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There's A Reason Why Star Trek Remains So Popular

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Why does Star Trek have a huge following? originally appeared on Quora: the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. Answer by Robert Frost, Instructor and Flight Controller at NASA, on Quora: The Star Trek franchise will be celebrating its 50th anniversary this September (8 September, 2016).

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The Ford Mustang was a sensation since it came out
This car was almost called Thunderbird.
This car had the most successful launch

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When is a half a half? Throughout the years many cars have made mid-year introductions. The 1970 1/2 Camaro and Firebird come to mind. There are others too, like when Chevrolet re-introduced the 1977 1/2 Z/28 when performance was all but dead in America. But one introduction, now more than 40 years ago, is likely the most famous of all, and the car is still being built today, granted in many ways different due to a changing world.

We're talking about the 1964 1/2 Ford Mustang, probably the most successful new car debut in history and certainly one with a wanting public. There's a saying "if a car is popular when it's new, it will be popular when it's old." The original Mustang is a restorer's dream. Just about every part to fix up a rusty old example is available from a variety of suppliers, many of them found in the Mustang section of Hemmings Motor News.

HISTORY

Lee Iacocca is credited with creating the Mustang and started to sell his idea to Ford execs in September 1962. There were, of course, many others involved in creating the Mustang, but he seems to get the accolades. The car was designed to break through the boring barriers of conservative design and appeal to the many young buyers who were now flooding the marketplace for a new car.

Iacocca was given the task of studying buyers' moods and his research showed the market was ready for a new, luxurious smaller car to compete against the growing import market in the early 1960s. His solution - build a car with a shorter wheelbase, lengthen the hood, shorten the rear deck and lower the roofline. But first build an affordable car and offer a buyer as many options as possible. Ford's established parameters included that it not be more than 180 inches long, weigh no more than 2,500 pounds, cost under $2,500, and have a standard six-cylinder engine.

The first Mustang rolled off the assembly line March 9, 1964, and it made its national debut on April 17. With a list price of $2,368, by the weekend, 22,000 cars were ordered and some 303,408 were built that first year. Through 1966, Ford sold more than 1.4 million of them. There were up to 70 options available. Initially offered only in hardtop and convertible models, a new model was introduced in September 1964, the Fastback 2 + 2, which debuted as one of the three 1965 models.

Model year 1965 took off just like 1964 1/2 did with more than 550,000 sold. So, why change a good thing? The 1966 model was basically a carryover and on March 2, 1966, less than 24 months after its introduction, the one-millionth Mustang was built. Certainly Ford made up for the Edsel fiasco.

In 1964, the standard engine was the 170-cu.in. straight-six with 101hp and had a 8.7:1 compression ratio. There were three optional V-8s beginning with the 164hp/260-cu.in. engine and a 210hp/289-cu.in. V-8. The top performer was the 271hp/289-cu.in. V-8. This engine featured 10.5 compression, four-barrel carb with manual choke, solid lifters and dual exhaust. The original Mustang came standard with a three-speed manual floor-mounted transmission. An optional 4-speed was available, as was a Cruise-O-Matic automatic, except with the 271hp V-8.

The front suspension featured coil springs, ball joints, strut-stabilized lower control arms and a rubber-bushed ride stabilizer. The rear suspension was comprised of longitudinal leaf springs and diagonally mounted shock absorbers. The rear axle was a semi-floating hypoid and featured permanently lubricated wheel bearings. The steering was recirculating, ball-type with an overall ratio of 27 to 1 and a turning diameter of 38 feet. Brakes were self-adjusting drums, fore and aft. Standard tires were blackwall rayon cord 6.50 x 13. The overall length was 181.6 inches, width was 68.2 inches and height was 51.1 inches. A hardtop weighed in at 2,562 pounds and the convertible was a little heftier at 2,740 pounds.

DRIVING IMPRESSIONS

Those who own these first-generation Mustangs said when they were new the cars handled great and stopped on a dime. But that was the technology available at the time, and several owners admit in contrast to newer Mustangs, there is no comparison in handling and braking capabilities. The older Mustangs had reliable engines, both the straight-six and V-8, and performance is good because the cars are light. "They are actually very nice cars to drive; you just have to be alert with the brakes and handling. We're used to disc brakes and ABS now and there is a world of difference," said Tony D. Branda, who has been in business 30 years in Altoona, Pennsylvania, as founder of Branda Mustang and Shelby Parts.

MAINTENANCE/SUPPORT

People in the know, like Branda, say there likely isn't a part that's not available for Mustangs, old or new. "I can't think of anything that isn't available. You can build an entire car from scratch, just about." In addition to thousands of aftermarket parts from numerous suppliers, one can find rare NOS parts by scanning the pages of Hemmings Motor News, where you can routinely find at least a dozen pages dedicated to Mustang parts and services from various restoration shops. And for technical assistance, there are numerous Mustang clubs available to help. The largest is the Mustang Club of America, which has more than 8,500 members in more than 150 regions. Branda says some of the hardest parts to find are original AM/FM radios and convenience options such as a tissue dispenser and factory compass.

CONSIDERATIONS

As with practically every car produced in the 1960s, one of the biggest caveats in buying an early Mustang is the rust problem. Rust is prevalent in the floors and front and rear frame rails, say Branda and Mustang restoration expert Fred Glazier, who in 30 years has restored more Mustangs than he can remember at Glazier's Mustang Barn in Souderton, Pennsylvania. Branda adds that the base of the cowl can have hidden rust as well as the inner fenders. "These cars are getting quite old and always need something. Most of the suspension holds up pretty well, but rear leaf springs tend to wear out faster than some other parts." Glazier echoes Branda's sentiments. "You have to remember these cars are now 40 years old and, more times than not, they've been repaired over the years and some so long ago the cars were not considered collector cars and the repairs were shoddy and the cars just patched up and cobbled together," Glazier says. "That's the biggest problem we see, cars that have been poorly repaired and need to be done over." Glazier says all the parts needed to repair the common rust-prone areas on early Mustangs are available, such as floor pans, frame rails, shock towers, aprons, trunk lids, fenders and quarter panels. About the only parts not available are the cowl, windshield frame and B pillar where the door latch would be. He adds it is getting harder to find good 1964 to 1966 Mustang restoration candidates.

Another area of concern is the original manual transmission shifters, but Glazier says many of them were thrown away and wrongly replaced with a Hurst shifter when new bushings and a few other parts would have fixed that sloppy shifter. "The Ford shifter was a good one, but what did wear out was the shifter handle. There are bushings, springs and trunnions that wore out. By replacing them, you had that brand-new tight feeling again. In fact, the entire cars were very well made. Ford never intended them to last, say, more than seven or eight years, but how many are still around."

If contemplating the purchase of an early Mustang, Glazier stressed "originality." "Just because someone tells you it's a 1965 K model with the original engine, don't believe it. There are reproduction door tags available and people can make a car other than what it was originally. The problem with the 1964 to 1966 models is the Ford records are lost. It is very important to ask for documentation. Convertibles are now selling for up to $40,000, so it pays to do your homework." The original door tags were riveted at the trailing edge of the driver's door and show the car's VIN, body style, color code, trim code, build date, domestic special order district or DSO code that denotes which district ordered the car. For example, 23 would indicate a car was ordered from the Philadelphia area. There were 42 possible numbers including Canada, government, Home Office Reserve, American Red Cross and export cars. The door tag also indicates what axle and transmission were in the car with numbers. The VIN also was stamped into both inner fenders, adjacent to the hood opening.

The engines in the first-generation Mustangs are practically bullet-proof, says Ray Bohacz, who has built many Ford engines during his automotive career. "There really isn't anything that breaks on those old engines. Of course, they had to be maintained by having frequent oil and filter changes and changing the coolant." Bochaz says the six-cylinder and Ford V-8 engines are easy to work on, the parts are relatively inexpensive, except for high-end speed parts. "They were very reliable engines. There are no real issues with them." Glazier agrees, but says after, say, 150,000 miles, they will need re-boring, but cautioned against going over .030 because the engines then tend to overheat. As for actual restoration work, Glazier says the early Mustangs are relatively easy to work on and there are no computers to deal with, he adds. He says their popularity will never go away and that a 1965 Mustang still looks somewhat modern. "They still have visual appeal and don't look antiquated."

DESIRABILITY

Early Mustangs were well-made, good-looking cars with simple mechanicals and their restoration parts, in contrast to, say, Corvette or Mopar parts, are cheap. Secondly, just about everything needed to restore a Mustang is available, Good, restorable cars are getting harder to find, but they are out there. Remember to shop smart, ask for documentation and if you don't know what to look for, take along someone who does if you are considering a purchase. Prices of early Mustangs have always been stable and rarely, if ever, fluctuate.

VALUES

Early Mustangs have always been popular and are an American icon. And while not as pricey as, say, Corvettes or anything with a Hemi under the hood, values of early Mustangs, especially convertibles, are gaining steadily. Prices of 1964 1/2 Mustang hardtops range in price from about $6,000 to $25,000, with the average value being $18,000. Certain options such as a four-speed transmission increase its value $1,000 and if it has 289/271hp V-8, add another 30 percent. Convertibles are more pricey with a range of about $9,000 to $34,000, depending on options.

Prices for 1965 models are about the same with hardtops fetching between $5,0000 and $20,000, 2+2 Fastbacks bringing between $7,000 and $30,000 and convertibles the most with a low of $10,000 and a top end price of about $34,000. The 1966 prices, for whatever reason, are substantially lower with hardtops bringing between $5,000 and $18,000. A Fastback is worth about $7,000 to $28,000 and convertibles, of course, bring the most from $9,000 to about $25,000. Having a four-speed transmission and factory GT wheels and GT package add about $3,000 to the final tab.

PARTS PRICES

Battery tray - $8

Carpet set - $99

Dash pad - $149

Decal kit - $17.50

Door handle kit - $59

Exterior door handles - $25/pair

Fender - $155

Floor pans - $140

Front bumper - $84

Front end rebuild kit - $169

Fuel tank - $139

Seat covers - $114

Quarter panel - $180

Rear package shelf - $16

Shifter repair kit - $24

Wiring harness - $495

CLUBS

Mustang Club of America

3588 Highway 138 PMB 365

Stockbridge, Georgia 30281

770-477-1965

Dues: $40/year; Membership: 9,000

Early Mustang Club

PO Box 21706

Denver, Colorado 80221

303-430-0433

Dues: $25/year; Membership: 150

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When is a half a half? Throughout the years many cars have made mid-year introductions. The 1970 1/2 Camaro and Firebird come to mind. There are others too, like when Chevrolet re-introduced the 1977 1/2 Z/28 when performance was all but dead in America. But one introduction, now more than 40 years ...

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He was a pro athlete
He played tennis and had a lot of wins called grand slams
He was the first to win 12 major singles titles

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In the 1960s, when an endless array of Australian men's tennis players dominated the major tournament circuit, winning 32 of 40 major singles championships, Roy Emerson was the ring-leader, winning 12 of them himself. His name was linked to a male record 28 major titles (16 won in doubles), during his ten-year stretch of near invincibility on all surfaces.