By Joshua Tyler & Drew Dietsch | Updated 1 hour ago

The sixties were a turning point in American culture and in science fiction.

For sci-fi movie lovers, it’s now remembered as the decade that brought us Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking 2001: A Space Odyssey, the beloved adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and one of the greatest twists ever in Planet of the Apes. 

Unfortunately, much of the decade’s other great science fiction films haven’t stuck around with modern audiences and are slowly being forgotten. Not if there’s anything we can do about it!

Let’s hop into our time machine and head back to an era when the ideas were bigger and better than most of the special effects they could pull off but nonetheless left their mark on movie history. These are the 1960s science fiction movies that are still worth watching.

Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965)

You know Doctor Who as a television show, but in 1965 the good Doctor got a big screen feature film called Dr. Who and the Daleks. It was the first time The Doctor had ever been seen in color. 

Best of all, The Doctor is played by Star Wars’s own Grand Moff Tarkin, Peter Cushing.

The movie is an adaptation of one of the earliest Doctor Who serials, “The Daleks.” It features Dr. Who and his three young companions traveling to the planet Skaro to face off against the evil Daleks. 

In this continuity—always intended to be separate from that of the show—The Doctor is actually named Dr. Who. And he’s not a time lord, he’s a human inventor who builds the TARDIS rather than stealing it. Most of the other changes are cosmetic in nature, but this still stands as a unique piece of sci-fi history any fan will want to check out.

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

Before Richard Matheson’s landmark novel I Am Legend was turned into a Will Smith blockbuster and a Charlton Heston cheesy delight, the legendary Vincent Price starred in the original adaptation, The Last Man on Earth. After a plague turns the population into vampiric undead, Robert Morgan holes up and tries to survive after the world has changed.

The Last Man on Earth is a bleak, small movie that is surprisingly effective at its grim tone, thanks to an anchoring performance from the always excellent Price. It would go on to inspire George Romero’s game-changing Night of the Living Dead, so if you want to see where that movie came from, The Last Man on Earth is a must-watch chiller.

Barbarella (1968)

Barbarella is not the steamy space babe movie its reputation would lead you to believe. 

Sure, the movie does contain a moderate amount of nudity, but it’s done in such a naive and innocent way that at times, you almost don’t notice. 

Barbarella stars Jane Fonda as a solo space pilot traveling the cosmos in a distant future where Earth has progressed past the need for barbaric things like violence and war. They’ve also gotten rid of sex, replacing it with a pill.

With that context, Barbarella is sent to track down a galactic villain with plans to bring back violence and warfare. Early on in her journey, she discovers that this sex thing humans don’t do anymore is actually pretty good. It’s also useful, since whenever she does it, the man she couples with often ends up inspired to greater heights. Barbarella literally helps an angel get his wings by making love to him.

That sounds pretty sleazy, doesn’t it? But check out what one of those sex scenes looks like, totally uncensored, in the video at the top of the article.

The sex all happens off-camera, and what you’re actually watching is a series of beautifully constructed sci-fi set pieces in which actors of varying abilities wear lovingly crafted and totally unusual costumes. It’s clear their goal here was to create something more than a space movie. They were trying to create a very ‘60s kind of free-love visual art.

Do they succeed? That’ll be up to you but we can say for sure that there is no other movie like Barbarella and it’s a staple of the decade for a reason.

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

Italian genre maestro Mario Bava made one of the biggest impacts on sci-fi cinema with Planet of the Vampires. The story involves a spaceship crew responding to a distress signal on an unexplored planet where they end up finding the remains of a long-dead giant alien species.

Sure sounds like another sci-fi horror movie you might know, doesn’t it? Planet of the Vampires certainly inspired Alien but it’s more of an alien zombie movie than a vampire one. The usual Mario Bava colorful design and poppy tone make it a fun and important piece of sci-fi cinema history.

First Men in the Moon (1964)

Shortly before humans landed on the moon and found out what it’s actually like, Hollywood produced this H. G. Wells adaptation which uses a nifty framing device to hold it all together.

Imagine if Neil Armstrong took his one small step, and then found a note written by someone from 1899 telling him he wasn’t the first. 

First Men in the Moon soon flashes back to that original, secret 1899 mission and explores what it might have been like if man had gone to the moon during the Victorian era. The answer is they might have ended up underground and encountered a secret moon interior full of awesome Ray Harryhausen stop-motion monsters. Oh, who doesn’t love some Ray Harryhausen stop-motion monsters?

The movie was never a box office hit, but it soon became something of a cult success. It’s now regarded as one of the best adaptations of H. G. Wells’s work. George Pal’s The Time Machine gets tons of deserved love and attention, but First Men in the Moon is another ’60s adaptation of classic science fiction you won’t want to skip.

Fantastic Voyage (1966)

Long before Ms. Frizzle took the Magic School Bus into one of her students and the Futurama crew traveled into Fry’s bowels, Fantastic Voyage explored the inside of a Soviet defector. The movie won multiple awards, features a star-studded cast, and has provided the visual language for every film or television show you’ve seen that goes inside the circulatory system.

Released in 1966, Fantastic Voyage is a technical marvel of its day. The movie’s original trailer heralded it as “a new kind of moviegoing experience,” and for once, that wasn’t hyperbole. It was a fact.

Isaac Asimov, one of the greatest sci-fi authors of all time, wrote the novelization of the film, which came out before the movie.

Today, Fantastic Voyage stands out as a turning point in sci-fi movies by exploring a brand new setting that had never been done on this scale before. It still holds up as a technical advancement and a wonderful adventure.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

Imagine Matt Damon’s The Martian if it had been filmed in the 1960s and teamed him with a spacesuited monkey. You’d have Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

The movie’s main character isn’t named Robinson Crusoe, but other than that, it’s a pretty straight adaptation of the Daniel Dafoe classic novel, if it took place in space.

Most of Robinson Crusoe on Mars was filmed in Death Valley, but you’d never know it. The production design is excellent for the era, and it does its best to find a level of realism consistent with science’s very limited knowledge of what it might be like on Mars. And even the unrealistic parts are actually fun.

Check out the wacky way these alien spacecraft move in the video. I love it.

As a bonus, Adam West appears briefly in the movie as a cocky astronaut. He’s there just long enough to make you wonder why he wasn’t cast as the movie’s lead. Still, Robinson Crusoe on Mars was notable enough to get restored and released by the Criterion Collection. That should tell you it’s a worthy watch.

Seconds (1966)

In Seconds, screen icon Rock Hudson gives one of the best performances of his career as an aging stoic lured in by a secret company that can change his identity and make him younger, as a means to find happiness without responsibilities.

In his new identity, he soon falls in with a bunch of naked hippies and finds himself entangled with an unsettling woman who has also fled her boring life. And he still isn’t happy. 

Seconds was adapted from a novel by David Ely and directed by legendary Hollywood luminary John Frankenheimer, who set out to use off-kilter compositions to give his movie an unsettling feel and he definitely succeeded.

Seconds plays out like an especially good episode of The Twilight Zone, and it’s always worth watching The Twilight Zone. Seconds is no different.

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

Roger Corman is responsible for tons of sci-fi flicks over the years, and one of his all-time best is X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Ray Milland plays a scientist who wants to experiment with expanding the powers of human sight. He develops eye drops that give him x-ray vision that he’s able to control it at first. But soon, he can’t sleep because he can see through his eyelids and things get worse from there.

Thanks to Milland’s full commitment and the nightmarish descent the movie spins into, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes takes what could be a horrible gag premise and treats it with serious sci-fi scrutiny and horror.

The Nutty Professor (1963)

Steve Urkel tried to copy it.

Eddie Murphy tried to top it.

But Jerry Lewis’s original 1963 version of the classic nerd turns-cool, mad science tale is still the best version.

Lewis plays a geek who does everything he can to stop being a geek. He even tries working out. It goes so badly that his doctor tells him to give it up. 

But a man of science never gives up. He finds a chemical formula that transforms him into the confident person he’s always wanted to be. Unfortunately, all that confidence quickly turns him into a total jerk. 

Jerry Lewis both co-wrote and directed the movie. He used video playback after each scene to meticulously evaluate what he’d done. That’s commonly used now, but he was one of the first to do it back in 1963.

The result was an immediate hit. The Nutty Professor is now regarded as one of Lewis’s best movies and one of the greatest comedies of the decade. Not a bad way to spend less than two hours.

Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

Released as Five Millions Years to Earth in the US, Quatermass and the Pit is actually part of a series of sci-fi horror classics surrounding the character of Professor Bernard Quatermass, but this is the best of the bunch.

An ancient Martian spaceship is unearthed in London and inside are the corpses of insect-like aliens. Discoveries about the history of human evolution are revealed and by the end, a Martian psychic energy ghost is driving civilization into an apocalyptic frenzy. It’s one of the most incredible and influential sci-fi stories ever put on screen, and if it’s stuffier than you might be used to, just wait until that stupendous finale. You won’t regret it.

Do you have any favorite sci-fi movies from the 1960s? Leave your picks in the comments and make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel for even more videos from us here at Giant Freakin Robot.