Snap/ShutterstockIn the blockbuster movie summer of 1991, which was arguably kicked off by Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in June and eventually dominated by Terminator 2: Judgment Day in July, one pulpy sci-fi hero attempted to capture the magic of a classic Disney adventure film and a bygone era of pulpy sci-fi superheroes at the same time. At the time, The Rocketeer was a throwback of a throwback, a Disney film based on a 1982 comic book by Dave Stevens, which itself was inspired by the 1930s and 1940s golden age of pulp heroes like Doc Savage and The Shadow. This is the same primordial soup of a genre that allowed Indiana Jones to become a hit in 1981 with Raiders of the Lost Ark, but a decade after the debut of Indy, and two years after The Last Crusade, the nostalgia of The Rocketeer failed to connect with a large audience. Against a budget of $35 million, The Rocketeer only grossed $46 million overall, and, during a competitive summer, couldn’t even get ahead of City Slickers at the box office.And yet, 35 years later, The Rocketeer is the perfect example of how nostalgic, pulp sci-fi adventure can be done well, without a single need to wink at the audience. Today, using the term “pulp” to refer to the sensational fiction of a bygone era borders on meaningless, and Quentin Tarantino’s excellent 1995 film Pulp Fiction didn’t help with this nomenclature confusion. What is pulp fiction anyway? Well, after the “penny dreadfuls” of the early and mid-1800s, pulp magazines were called “pulps” because of the cheaper, rough paper on which they were printed — you could see the wood pulp in the pages, hence, pulps.However, as the creator of The Shadow, Walter B. Gibson, pointed out in 1979, by the 1930s, this term was basically a misnomer, and if you track down “pulp” magazines from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the paper is certainly cheaper than the glossy magazines of the time, but it’s also not, physically, pulpy. To put it another way, pulp magazines like The Shadow or Doc Savage don’t have low-quality pages per se, but because the content was considered by some to be overtly commercial or cheap, the term stuck. Today, this term connotes some narrative that is hyperbolic, over-the-top, and corny, and is sometimes — somewhat inaccurately — conflated with hard-boiled or noir fiction, which were genres that also ascended during the same period, but weren’t always the same thing. (Is the recent series Spider-Noir truly noir? Or is it a hard-boiled pulp adventure? Self-aware pastiche? None of the above?)TLDR: Just like science fiction isn’t really a genre, but rather, a field that contains other genres (horror, mystery, romance, et al.), the notion of a “pulp” could be reframed as one thing: The type of short novel that was written quickly to be read quickly. And, in this way, the 1991 film The Rocketeer is a near-perfect work of pulp science fiction.Timothy Dalton as Neville Sinclair in The Rocketeer. | Disney/Kobal/ShutterstockInterestingly, The Rocketeer’s nostalgic pulp roots are based on another nostalgia play, the original comic book created by Dave Stevens in 1982. In the comic, the rocketpack isn’t created by historical figure Howard Hughes (played by Terry O'Quinn in the film), but rather, by pulp sci-fi genius Doc Savage, who, along with The Shadow, appears in slightly different guises to avoid copyright issues. The comic book also had the hero Cliff Secord’s girlfriend be named Bettie, who was very clearly supposed to be the actual Bettie Page. For the film, Jennifer Connelly embodied a PG-friendly version of the character, Jenny Blake, who was an actress, not a pinup model. In terms of adaptation from comic book to film, these details are the microcosm of the 1991 Rocketeer; it was a PG family film, very clearly with a Disney stamp of approval, that, nonetheless, featured plenty of Tommy guns. And in the final act, The Rocketeer fights a mini-army of actual Nazi troops, hidden by actor-turned-spy, Neville Sinclair (played by Timothy Dalton in one of his biggest scenery-chewing roles of all time). Here, Dalton tops his own pulpy performance in Flash Gordon, a decade prior. A detail from The Rocketeer comic by Dave Stevens. In this part of the story, Cliff meets a cleverly disguised version of The Shadow. | IDWIf you hadn’t noticed, the entire cast of The Rocketeer is utterly perfect. From Alan Arkin’s take on Cliff’s friend and mentor, Peevy, to Paul Sorvino as Eddie Valentine, the mobster with a heart of gold, there’s not a single face on camera who doesn’t feel perfectly suited to this period. This includes leading man Billy Campbell as Cliff Secord, a young stunt pilot who accidentally stumbles upon the rocketpack at the very beginning of the film. For sci-fi fans, Campbell is also remembered for his strange turn in Star Trek: The Next Generation as “The Outrageous Okona,” a faux Han Solo character TNG tried to soft-launch in 1988. The problem with Campbell’s performance in TNG is that he seemed too nice to be a scoundrel, a fact which benefits him in The Rocketeer, where he’s the perfect gee-shucks hero.As in a pulp novel, every moment in The Rocketeer leads to something important that changes the plot. In fact, the movie is also very aware of just exactly how much time has passed. In a great gag toward the third act of the movie, when Cliff tells Jenny that he is the Rocketeer, she has no idea what he’s talking about because only a few days have passed and she hasn’t had time to read the papers. The breezy and tightly plotted nature of the movie has few major plot holes, unless, of course, you reject the idea that Timothy Dalton’s evil Nazi villain was able to hide a full-on zeppelin behind the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. Things happen in The Rocketeer because those events need to happen; characters are motivated by true love, love of flying, or evil. And, in one of the more charming turns of the movie, even the dangerous mobsters side with the FBI, Tommy guns blazing, to take on the Nazi incursion. "I may not make an honest buck, but I'm 100 percent American,” mob boss Eddie Valentine tells Sinclair in the third act. “And I don't work for no two-bit Nazi." To be clear, Eddie Valentine is coded as the movie’s secondary villain in the beginning, but at the end, when he turns his mob on the Nazis and sees The Rocketeer flying into battle, with a glint in his eye, this cliche 1930s mobster grins and says, “Go get him, kid.”Jennifer Connelly and Billy Campbell in The Rocketeer. | Ron Batzdorff/Walt Disney/Kobal/ShutterstockPunctuated by James Horner’s perfect score, these kinds of moments make The Rocketeer more wholesome than its comic book roots, and certainly less hardcore than the actual pulp adventures of Doc Savage, or The Shadow, the latter of which rarely showed sympathy to gangsters of any kind. The rose-colored glasses about the nature of pulp adventures are firmly in place throughout the entirety of The Rocketeer, making it less of a 1990s film and more of a film that seems to belong to the 1980s, when Lucas and Spielberg proved this kind of thing was viable with Indiana Jones.Would The Rocketeer have benefited from having been more hardcore, more overtly violent? Perhaps a sharper-edged PG-13 version might have worked just as well as what we got, with a tone that matched the slightly terrifying visage of the Rocketeer’s helmet. Clearly, director Joe Johnston took his experience on film and later applied it to his expert direction of 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger, a low-key remake of The Rocketeer if there ever was one.But as it stands, The Rocketeer feels like the kind of movie that has very few peers, save for perhaps Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a movie that dares to be straightforward, silly, and full of heroes that make you feel like a kid again. The Rocketeer streams on Disney+.