It’s almost quaint now to envision a time when superhero films weren’t financially viable. Throughout the 1970s to the 1990s, the major comic houses (Marvel and DC) kept afloat primarily through the strength of their print serials and limited commercial tie-ins. Adapting these stories to celluloid had only yielded eye-gougingly awful results. Google the Fantastic Four film from 1994 to meet the true face of direct-to-video.

This dearth of credibility finally ended when the acclaimed Bryan Singer (Usual Suspects, Apt Pupil) picked up the reigns to helm a mysterious adaptation of Marvel’s most recognizable entity other than Spider-Man — X-Men.

Beginning its run as X-Men #1 in 1963, the monthly publication chronicled a team of allied mutants, called “X-Men” due to their possession of the extra X-gene which grants them extraordinary and varied powers.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s transcendent Stalker anticipated Chernobyl. James Bridges’ The China Syndrome preceded the Three Mile Island accident by a mere 12 days.

Gareth Edwards’ ambitious re-imagining (I hate the term reboot) of Godzilla feels no less uncomfortably prescient.

One’s mind cannot help but wander to the apocalyptic predictions aimed at the spent fuel rods housed within the unstable reactor #4 of the tsunami-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

It may sound far-fetched, but this massive undertaking breathes the same toxic air as the populist American filmmaking of the 1970s — a time when mainstream cinema had a social agenda and sought to educate as well as horrify.

Godzilla began its genesis in 1954 as a harbinger of nuclear holocaust; the United States personified in a post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki environment that became one of the most enduring icons of Japanese pop culture.

Residents of Peterborough and Port Hope have a chance this June to see Scottish roots rockers The Black Diamond Express — only days after they perform at the annual North By Northeast Festival and Conference (NXNE) in Toronto.