It’s come a long way since those words. The idea of ​​intergalactic travel has captured our collective imagination and made the subgenre timeless. Full of theatrics and melodrama, space operas are as kitsch as the Met Gala, with a disregard for subtlety as blatant as the guests who attend. Although escapist, they’re still oddly difficult to pull off in the modern age.

The film that paved the way for the Prabhas and Deepika Padukone starrer, “Kalai Arasi’, begins with a long shot of an ox cart rolling past rice fields. The scratched black and white frame is quickly replaced by a cheerful song:Neelavaana pandhalin keezhe, nilamadandhai madiyin mele Kaladevan arasangam nadakudhada.’ (‘Beneath the blue skies and amidst the seas of the earth, men are subject to the rule of the Lord of Time.’) For a film more than half a century old that pioneered Tamil science fiction, the song is oddly apt.

‘Kalki 2898 AD’, an epic Telugu-language sci-fi film set in a post-apocalyptic world that follows a select group on a mission to save the unborn child of lab subject SUM-80. As the most expensive Indian film of all time (a whopping production budget of 600 Crore INR) is now streaming on OTT, we take a look back at some South Indian space operas that made it possible.