As Hollywood acclimated to the talkie era in the early 1930s, studios leaned heavily on the aural majesty of musicals and the rat-a-tat bliss of screwball comedies to dazzle audiences. The future of motion picture entertainment had arrived almost overnight, and filmmakers were fairly certain they knew what moviegoers wanted to hear. When it came to non-spoken sound, people lined up to hear bullets bang and whiz in both gangster movies and Westerns; they were blown through the back of the theater by the ferocity of King Kong's roar and scared silly by the screams of Count Dracula's victims.

The still young science-fiction genre should've thrived in the early sound era, but the studios and the public generally viewed the dream-big tales of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs as kids' stuff. Though Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film "Metropolis" is viewed today as a medium-altering masterpiece,...