Science fiction cinema had its commercial golden age in the late 1950s and 1960s, when studios on both sides of the Atlantic were racing to put rockets, monsters, and alien worlds on screen. The posters and promotional materials that came out of that period were painted by hand, often by artists working in national traditions with distinct visual signatures. Italian release posters, for instance, frequently went to illustrators whose work rivaled the films themselves. Period originals from that era are genuine artifacts of the genre's first wave.
