There was a period between the 1960s and early 1970s that was an age of super-heroes in film – specifically in the cinema and television. Before that there was the reign of the pantheon of super heroes who appeared in comic books and then in films – Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the super detectives like Dick Tracey who commandeered the imagination of the youth, and, for a slightly older audience, the popular novels such as other geniuses in crime detection, private detectives Mike Hammer and Donald Lam.
Modern society was rapidly changing with the fast moving advance of technology that fueled science fiction, but that appealed to the imagination and drove endless fantasy in fiction and on the screen. But in real life there was the rise of make belief with the creation of characters and situations that sensationalised a future technology with scientific wonders that were just slightly beyond belief because the society was developing so rapidly that they could nearly be true. The super hero genre was driven by a mentality that believed these wonders would soon be happening in reality.