The success of On the Beach in 1959 led to greater respectability of the genre and for established artists to work in the genre with films like The Birds, Dr. Strangelove, Seconds, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Planet of the Apes. Internationally, Antonio Margheriti was making mainstream space operas in Italy, auteurs in France made such films as Alphaville, Fahrenheit 451, and Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime, and medical science fiction and horror featured heavily in Mexican and Czechoslovakian cinema. Japanese science fiction films, in the words of Phil Hardy, from whose The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction (Overlook Press, 1995), this list (with some editions) is primarily derived, "became a fascinating mirror of postwar Japanese political history" (196). Hollywood made fewer science fiction films than they did in the 1950s but dubbed international films to pick up the slack, significantly exceeding the overall number of films released in the 1950s.
