By 1965 the genre was ready to be spoofed. In much the same way that a big-budget film series which once terrified millions of people ended up, 25 years later, in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, so the phenomenon that began with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days got to the point where it just couldn’t be taken quite seriously anymore. Not after Tab Hunter and a chicken named Herbert.

Director Blake Edwards conceived the idea: why not take the stalwart heroes and bumbling professors of classical Fireside and mix them thoroughly with the silent movie antics Mike Todd had only saluted? You’d include lots of improbable gadgets, of course, and a fantastic journey ‘round the world. But you’d also turn some really first-rate comic talent loose on it—people like Jack Lemmon and Peter Falk. Yes, it’d have to have submarines and rockets and hot air balloons. But it would also need blackout gags, and mustache twiddling villains, and the pie fight to end all pie fights. Jules Verne meets Mack Sennett in other words. And thus The Great Race was born—dedicated, in its charming magic lantern prologue, to “Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy.”

The set-up is simple enough: the impossibly good-looking and excessively virtuous hero, The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis at his comic best) embarks on an around the world automobile race from New York westward to Paris (including a short jaunt over the frozen Bering Strait to Asia). Leslie's arch-rival, the black-hatted and entirely sympathetic megalomaniac Professor Fate, determines to thwart him at all costs and thereby affirm his own rather shaky sense of self-worth. Along the way there are madcap adventures in the Old West, on the Arctic Sea, on the steppes of Russia, and in the intrigue-ridden European Duchy of Potsdorf. Basically, it’s Around the World in Eighty Days with the funny knob cranked all the way up. And many of us do find it extremely, extremely funny. The Great Race may not have been (as it was billed) “the greatest comedy of all time” but it is one of the greatest comedies of the Sixties and that’s saying quite a bit. The principals are joined by Natalie Wood, who shows fine comic flair, and Keenan Wynn, as Leslie’s faithful manservant Hezekiah. Composer Henry Mancini plays a vital part, too. The score for The Great Race is one of his very best and crucial to the success of the movie.

Many people find the extended episode in Potsdorf—a lengthy, clever spoof of The Prisoner of Zenda—to be fatally overlong. I’m not one of them. In theatres, this nearly three hour comedy came with an intermission. Potsdorf opens the second half, and does so at just the moment when audiences had started craving a more substantial story to sink their teeth into. This section of the film also includes one of the greatest swordfights ever filmed—a classic saber duel, played perfectly straight, between Tony Curtis and the late, great Ross Martin. If the movie does have a serious weakness, it’s the finale. I don’t see how it could have ended any differently myself, so I’m no one to be giving advice (and you won’t read any spoilers here); let’s just say that the outcome of the race fails to completely satisfy…

Oddly enough, this film which signals the end of the original Fifties/Sixties Fireside craze managed to give birth to a whole little sub-genre of it’s own—a sub-genre of the sub-genre, I suppose. These were the multitudinous (and consistently inferior) Great Race imitators. They came by the dozens for the next five years or so: everything from big screen spectacles like Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes (1965), Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon (1967), and Monte Carlo or Bust (1969) to TV spin-offs for kids; stuff like Wacky Races (1967) and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (1970). A strange end-of-the-trail, isn’t it?—for a film series that began with MGM’s most expensive film ever and included along the way a Best Picture winner and several all-time classics.

Yes, Fireside Science Fiction died out in spoofs there in the late Sixties. But if you’ll promise to keep your eyes open for Part Two of this article you’ll see it reborn in the Seventies. And you’ll see it slowly evolve into a thriving genre that is still packing cinemas here at the turn of a whole new century.