Although the Barrandov Studios is perhaps most fondly remembered in film scholarship for the high artistic achievements connected with the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s, the studio's first fifteen years must be thought of primarily in terms of popular cinema. Most early English-language scholarly accounts of Czech cinema from the interwar and World War II period frame these films and their makers looking forward to the major developments that came later. The early decades of Czechoslovak cinema are typically treated as merely a preamble foreshadowing the creative boom of the New Wave, as a prehistory that must be briefly established before moving on to the main topic of interest. Given this common frame of reference, many early scholarly assessments invariably highlight and champion those films from the 1930s and early 1940s that were socially or politically engaged and those that were linked with the progressive artistic movements of the period. At the same time, many accounts downplay or outright dismiss the popular films that dominated the industry at the time as purely capitalist endeavors to produce simple entertainment. The latter sentiment is, of course, also echoed in most of the scholarship on the period written in Czechoslovakia during the communist period. The lingering impression of such canonical overviews of the period is that production prior to 1948 was, apart from a few exceptions, overwhelmingly substandard or insignificant and thus hardly worth mentioning. There has yet to be a comprehensive scholarly reassessment of Czech (or Czechoslovak) cinema of the precommunist era.