Retrospective: Barbarella (1962)

"Your hardware and my software interface perfectly!" ... so says travelling space adventurer Barbarella after making love to a robot in the original 1962 comic strip. That's after dallying with several men, women and an angel... If you are familiar with the movie adaptation staring Jane Fonda in 1968 you will already know the tone: camp titillating high jinks bordering on soft porn. The titular heroine is a sexy young hedonistic astronaut who finds herself tumbling into one compromising situation after another, invariably losing most or all of her clothing in the process. Sexploitation? Perhaps a little, but the lewedness here is too mild to be offensive, certainly by today's standards. Barbarella is an object of desire, yes, but she is also a fully autonomous agent, not a vacant bimbo. What we have here is an embodiment of 1960s sexual liberation ('free love' as a personal and political statement against a conventional Western society that frowned upon any