Futuristic Sci-Fi movie stereotypes!

[Wonko The Sane]

You know what I mean! There you are enjoying something of the sci-fi vein, and the same things pop up all the time!

1. Lots of silver clothing.
2. No crime, or lots of crime with psychotic crazed police (and they are always corrupt)
3. Hi Opal!
4. Nobody has a southern accent.
5. Everyone has good teeth and is attractive (or is a hideous mutant in a post-apocalypse world).
6. No need for money seems somewhat common.
7. Nobody ever uses the transporters for pranks, pizza delivery, or making the hostess's undergarments simultaneously jump 2 feet to the left.

Anyone else have any? I suspect some could be fun!

[Swampwolf]

Originally posted by Wonko The Sane
You know what I mean! There you are enjoying something of the sci-fi vein, and the same things pop up all the time!

1. Lots of silver clothing.
2. No crime, or lots of crime with psychotic crazed police (and they are always corrupt)
3. Hi Opal!
4. Nobody has a southern accent.
5. Everyone has good teeth and is attractive (or is a hideous mutant in a post-apocalypse world).
6. No need for money seems somewhat common.
7. Nobody ever uses the transporters for pranks, pizza delivery, or making the hostess's undergarments simultaneously jump 2 feet to the left.

Anyone else have any? I suspect some could be fun!

I think that points 4 & 5 are somehow related...

[Wonko The Sane]

Blessedwolf- But the mutants don't have a southern accent either!

What does your sig mean? The only word I can make out is cthulu!

[CalMeacham]

Capes. Especially in sf of the 30s to the 50s, capes and leotards were future-garb.

Nobody seems to think of practical or money-grunning uses for their marvelous devices, even though that's what they end up being used for. Heck, I'd use Replicators to make more replicators, then crank out high-demand items. Use Transporters to sell real estate in previously unsaleable regions. Stuff like that.

[Swampwolf]

[hijack]

Originally posted by Wonko The Sane
What does your sig mean? The only word I can make out is cthulu!

(paraphrase, 'cause I don't have the book in front of me) "In his house in R'lyeh, Cthulu waits dreaming." From The Call of Cthulu

[/byejack]

Also in most SF movies, money is called "credits" and has little or no physical state, it only exists as computer records.

[gobear]

...and computers are semi-sentient AIs that can keep track of every citizen's daily routine and store Ghod knows how many terabytes of information, yet you tell it there is no Sanctuary, and it promptly explodes in a shower of sparks and you have to leave the domed city. Stupid Windows 2000!

[Balance]

Originally posted by CalMeacham
Use Transporters to sell real estate in previously unsaleable regions.

You don't see it in movies or TV, but try Niven's Jumpshift stories. In at least one of the stories, the inaccessability of the place except by jump booth was critical to the plot. They also use the devices for desalinization (the idea was suggested by a drunk secretary at an office party) and as a revolutionary tool for roving new reporters (which generated a whole new social crisis--flash crowd riots). Burglary was also common until people figured out that they shouldn't but the booths inside their houses.

The utter lack of imagination in transporter use in Star Trek always bugged me. Why waste all those red-shirted guys? You know they're going to die down there. Just use the transporter to make copies of them planetside, and let the copies get killed. That way you don't have to keep recruiting new personnel. If you don't want to be so pessimistic, at least keep copies of them "on file" in case they die. Then being part of a landing party is like a game of Diablo II--if you die, you reappear on the ship minus a little experience.

[Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor]

You have ray guns, killer robots, mind control devices & space battleships, but the Hero always beats the Villian in the last scene by winning a sword fight. :wally

[Athena]

Amazingly enough, the popular hairstyles of the future always match closely to the popular hairstyles at the time the movie was made. There's some sort of strange synchronicity there...

[Jet Jaguar]

There are always alien species equivalent to the "Vulcans" (the intellectual aliens), and "Klingons" (violent warrior aliens).

[BlackKnight]

Originally posted by blessedwolf
(paraphrase, 'cause I don't have the book in front of me) "In his house in R'lyeh, Cthulu waits dreaming." From The Call of Cthulu

Well, I _do_ happen to have the book right in front of me!

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

[Cheese Head]

For me, most of the 'sameness' in sci-fi revolves around the military aspect.

-the future is violent, because it usually involves the military in battles with aliens.
-wear the same clothing every day.
-prefer logic and science to emotions, music and art.
-not good family values. Very few scenes with spouses or kids.
-the birth rate is very low. Very few pregnancies.
-not many old people in the future either. People are mostly young or middle aged adults.
-everybody speaks English or can be easily be translated to English, even aliens.
-not much eating, going to the bathroom, cloths washing, food shopping.
-not much recreation (sports games, concerts, radio listening, card playing, etc.).
-people usually look athletic, in good shape, but rarely are seen exercising.
-nobody is famous except for military heros and political leaders. ie, no famous entertainers, pop culture icons.
-people don't have jobs like accountants, journalists, school teachers or lawyers. Instead, everybody is a soldier, engineer, programmer, doctor or nurse.
-there is almost no media (tv, newspaper, magazines).
-nobody wears glasses.
-It must be hard maintaining a sleep/wake cycle on board those space ships for years. Lack of day light must lead to fatigue after a month or so.
-everybody has laser guns.
-nobody goes to church.
-politics is not discussed. Do they have elections in the future?
-there don't appear to be any businesses, stores, shopping malls, insurance companies, corporations, factories. No capitalism. Everyhing is controlled by the
govt/military. Nobody worries about the stock market or their investments.

Howard Stern joke: Why aren't there Puerto Ricans on Star Terk? They aren't doing any work in the future, either!

[screech-owl]

Architecture is extreme:

Cities are silver/dull gray, tall and slender spire and towers everywhere, and most of the buildings look architecturally unstable (kind of like the landscapes from a Roadrunner cartoon). Ever notice it rains a lot in furturistic cities, too?

Or

Buildings are dirt and adobe communes, especially in the 'post-nuclear or back to the basics' settings. Doesn't rain much here, usually a drought and the crops will die, leaving everyone to starve.

[xizor]

Every planet has a single planet-wide government. And no matter where the visitors land on that planet, that is the central location of running things on that planet.

And anyone who is a passenger on a spacecraft knows all the technical details of that craft so they can make repairs and modifications to shields, weapons and warp drives as needed.

[TPWombat]

There never seem to be any toilets.

[Purd Werfect]

From the sci-fi I've seen, it seems that women's breasts will be larger and less beset by gravity in the future, and the clothing will be quite form-fitting so as to show them off.

So which of these cliches listed in this thread will most likely become true? I think that electronic money is most likely, though I doubt that it will be called credits. More likely it will be called whatever it was called when it was still a physical object, e.g.: dollars, pounds, guilders, and so on. Unless that old one world government comes about.

[red_dragon60]

Originally posted by screech-owl
A Ever notice it rains a lot in furturistic cities, too?

Well, if it is a metacorp environment destroying little hamlet, yes. It is entirely possible. They did a study recently that showed the corrolation between rain and pollution on the weekends. Pollution from cars builds up and gives water something to cling to. More builds up, until at the end of the week, it pours. Again, entirely possible in a polluting kind of world.

[slortar]

For some reason sound propagates through vacuum in the future.

Also light travels slower in the future, so that beams of light can be dodged.

Of course, there's also the Imperial Stormtrooper school of Marksmanship. You don't see much of that in the present.

The Bulletproof Nudity Law is also in effect in the future it seems (ie the less clothes you wear the less you're likely to get hurt).

[divemaster]

People seem content to have given up all-you-can-eat buffets, big ole' honking boxes of fried chicken, pizza; heck, even a plate full of turkey and dressing. Instead, they take a "food pill" or slurp down some sort of vitamin-filled goo.

[egkelly]

Interesting thread. I too am a lover of 1950’s SF. The really weird thing is how prescient some of this stuff was-they did anticipate computer communication (AKA the Internet). However, in terms of clothing styles, we are stuck around 1900! I miss the capes and leotards-although most people don’t look good in spandex!

[MEBuckner]

All spacecraft--including starships which are supposedly capable of traveling many times faster than light--are maneuvered by having some guy haul on a joystick while he peers out the window (or occasionally at a "viewscreen", which shows exactly what he'd see if he looked out a window). Weapons are targeted and fired pretty much the same way, with someone manually lining them up on the target and then pushing a big red button. These weapons have a range such that in order to engage in combat, spaceships have to get close enough to each other that the crews could just as well throw rocks.

[Finagle]

No great literature or cinema is ever produced after the late 20th Century. Ten thousand years from now, people are still watching Humphrey Bogart movies and quoting Shakespeare.

[Cheese Head]

Animals are rare in the future. Not many pets, dogs, cats, fish, zoos, anything. Not many household plants either.

Nobody dresses real casual--blue jeans, tennis shoes, etc. Not much formal dress either (suits and ties, or women's dresses), except for formal military uniforms.

Humor and laughter are rare in the future. Maybe because almost every day is a work day. Not many weekends or holidays.

I think Futurama may be the best sci-fi show that doesn't fall into these stereotypes. People live on Earth, have regular jobs and lives, are not constantly fighting aliens. So far, that show is perhaps the most reasonable prediction of what the future will be like.

[Podkayne]

There is no idiom in alien languages, forcing aliens to resort to English whenever they wish to make a point, even when they're talking amongst themselves. "We have already discussed this. What is it the Earthers say? Don't beat a dead horse!"

[CalMeacham]

Aliens are always incredible imitative of human culture (this started LONG before the Star Trek episode "A Piec of the Action") but humans are NEVER imitative of alien culture. We don't convert to alien religions, either (I'm talking about bad movie, TV, and comic SF, so don't give me any lip about "Stranger in a Strange and").

[Sengkelat]

Off-line data storage is on crystals/chips/whatever that are often inconveniently small and have no provisions whatsoever for external labeling.

I'm not really bothered by the lack of toilets in the future, since non-SF tends to have a lack of toilets as well. Let's face it, movies about people sitting on the potty just aren't that dramatic.

Also, all computer systems in the future will be compatible, no matter how disparate their origins.

And all spacefaring races will agree on a universal "up" and "down" and align their ships accordingly.

[Lumpy]

No one ever destroys an enemy starship simply by exploding a big nuke near it (exception: Babylon 5)

Parasites that evolved in a totally alien ecosystem find humans just right for their needs.

A damaged spacecraft will always "crash land" on a planet that just happens to be nearby.

99% of all evil aliens can disguise themselves as humans.

The artificial gravity never fails. (exception: Star Trek VI)

A spaceship can be reduced to a battered hulk filled with wreckage, yet still retain pressurized compartments.

In a brightly lit room, you can see stars out the window. (try this at home one night).

The human race never gets it's butt kicked by superior aliens (exceptions: Babylon 5, Futurama)

[Tengu]

Originally posted by CalMeacham
We don't convert to alien religions

Well, Ben Sisko not only converted to, he became the Messiah of and later a god in the Bajoran religion...

(The 2 sides of the Bajoran religion - Worship of the Prophets and of Pagh Wraiths seem fairly compelling...the latter managed to get Gul Dukat to convert as a very devout - actually, zealous - member - in fact, he became the Anti-Christ to Sisko's Christ. Not to mention Rom's apparently converting for Lyta's benifit. Of course Dukat and Rom are aliens, not humans so they don't really count...)

[Albert Rose]

There aren't any billboards or bumper stickers.

People don't call each other "snookums."

Most of the smart, developed alien races are bipeds.

Nobody wears t-shirts that say "Kiss me, I'm Romulan."

Nobody has real metal keys -- only keycards.

[OrcaChow]

Originally posted by TPWombat
There never seem to be any toilets.

"2001: A Space Odyssey" did a humorous turn on this. Not only did the Earth-orbit-to-Luna shuttle have a toilet, the toilet came with a wall-sized panel of instructions--in small print. By the time one gets through the instructions, one no longer needs the toilet.

[OrcaChow]

Gotta love the Fifties...

Ships have cooks on their crews, and the cooks speak with Brooklynese accents, wear Gilligan caps and wear white cloth aprons even when they're not working. They're always in search of "hootch... oh, but only for cooking."

Any Spider monkey brought along with the expedition is always is the first to discover that the new planet has a breathable atmosphere.

Talking robots are plentiful but stationary computers are massive. And robots talk but stationary computers can't.

Space expeditions bring .38 longnose revolvers. They sure come in handy when the expedition goes into the cave and gets pounced on by the big-ass spider.

The women on Venus are always desperately in need of men, haven't had any men around since God-knows-how-long, yet there seem to be plenty of Venusian women. They're all Caucasian and show no signs of lesbian tendencies.

[SPOOFE]

Futuristic Sci-Fi movie stereotypes!

-Every future weapon is a laser... bullets no longer exist.

-Deflector shields always form a massive sphere/ellipsoid around the ship it's protecting, making a bigger target and an apparently inefficient system (they're protecting a volume twice as big as the ship!).

-No porn (unfortunately).

-Children are always prodigies. And they often grow at an accelerated rate, too.

-The necessity to aim a hand-held weapon has disappeared, so much so that weaponry no longer has any aiming apparatus (and it's shaped like a TV remote control, too).

-Plastic is stronger than metal. At least when body-armor is concerned.

-The Evil Emperor's personal guards are always armed with spears/axes.

-You can always sneak into someone's secret base through the air ducts.

[Sir Rhosis]

Wondrous tours of alien cities are mentioned in the Captain's log, but never seen. Aliens (on Star Trek, anyway) never have brand names for their food products. I recall an episode in which a little alien boy (I knew he was an alien because he had a piece of latex glued between his eyes, and a small artistic tattoo just below his left ear thus making him totally non-human) was once advised to go buy himself a "confection bar."

1954 DeSotos have bubble domes thus making them the car of the distant (THE YEAR 1988!) future.

Brylcreem has made a comeback.

If the film was made in Europe in 1966, the future is very mod, pop-arty with lots of white walls with random black dots and designs.

3-D Comic Books in the dentist's office.

A tendency to, without much context, mention the ancient days of 19?? (coincidentally, just about the year the movie was released).

World government--The President of Earth ("Madam President").

Until the 80s and 90s, with notable exceptions, there seemed to be very little ethnic diversity in the future. Everybody was as white as Roger Whitaker.

Time-traveling heroes humourously attempt/misunderstand slang.

Speaking of which, slang is taboo in the future, or else it's along the lines of "As they used to say in the 20th century, 'Right on, man.'"

This one annoys me to no extent. Star Trek, again. A hundred years from now, people jam on Steppenwolf, etc. Yeah, I so dig the pop hits of 1878, doncha know.

Sir

[big_yellow_kingswood]

Spaceships are aerodynamically designed, and manouvure through space as though the were banking in an atmosphere.

When travelling out of the solar system in a straight line you will pass by every single planet.

Everyone travelling back from the future is coming from 1999, 2000 or 2001

In the year 2000 we posess interstellar flight, but communication devices identical in size, shape and operation to old style walkie talkies.

Cars can fly.

Heavy makeup on a man is a sure sign that he's an alien.

All planets have a breathable aptmosphere and have recognisable plant life, although it might be painted purple.

Aliens deferentiate towards the obvious intellectual cultural and social superiority of humanity.

Humans can interbreed with creatures who evolved on an entirely different star system and have a completely different style of reproduction, yet experiments conducted by lonely farm boys on local sheep from the same evolutionary cradle have produced nil results.


Hey, this is really fun!

[soulsling]

The women on Venus are always desperately in need of men, haven't had any men around since God-knows-how-long, yet there seem to be plenty of Venusian women. They're all Caucasian and show no signs of lesbian tendencies

This is something we should definitely strive towards ensuring never happens. Let me be the first volunteer to begin colonization on Venus, please!

goboy, I almost fell off my seat laughing.

In the future, It seems there is either still an earth with the same pollution/population problems, even if it's five thousand years from now, and yet, we still get along fine, or earth has been destroyed by some menacing alien force without any warning (or perhaps a small warning left in the filing cabinet of some basement on some distant planet by the vorgons...) and yet Humans still manage to survive...

[Cheese Head]

-Door knobs. They won't exist. All doors slide open and closed from the side.
-People don't seem to bath or shower much in the future, but they look clean and nobody complains about body odor.
-The paperless office arrives in the future. People hardly ever use paper, pen or pencils. Not many printers, copiers, or faxes.
-There aren't really any offices either. Everybody sits in a big open area at their "station".
-Nobody smokes or chews gums.
-Telephones and phone numbers don't exist. Everybody uses walkie/talkie communicators. How are these communicators able to reach whoever you need to at
the time without using a phone number to reach them? You just turn it on, say your names, ie "Kirk to McCoy", and the other person is there. What if there are
several McCoys, or the person you need to reach is named Smith?
-Hull breaches can be fixed. Just seal off the sector and fix them.
-A lot of planets have oxygen and air pressure similar to Earths.

[Podkayne]

Originally posted by Cheese Head
-The paperless office arrives in the future. People hardly ever use paper, pen or pencils. Not many printers, copiers, or faxes.

If hardcopies exist, they are in the form of plastic transparencies. 'Cause those are so easy to read.

[kunilou]

There is always a tribal elder who remembers the last 6,000 years (pardon me, cycles) of history that somehow didn't get recorded, but dies just before he can reveal what the members of the civilization did the last time they were threatened like this.

The civilization's queen is the most beautiful and usually the most intelligent member of the community, but inevitably falls for the earth commander five minutes after they meet.

All physicians have come to accept the healing powers of a good stiff drink.

All planets with breathable atmospheres are either lush jungles or deserts. No other planet seems to have a prairie.

Despite the rigorous screening procedures and training that astronauts undergo, every crew contains either a hothead, a coward or a traitor.

[Sengkelat]

Ship's weapons are never effective, but something quickly jury-rigged will always have devastating destructive power.

Patrolling guards will lose all peripheral vision.

Evil guards' body armor will be entirely useless, especially against small furry Ewoks throwing rocks.

[MEBuckner]

All planets with breathable atmospheres are either lush jungles or deserts. No other planet seems to have a prairie.

I dunno about this one. Quite a lot of your lower-budget planets bear a truly amazing resemblance to random places in Southern California. Of course, it's true that your higher-budget worlds all have ecologically-unlikely single-biome planetary ecologies ("the jungle planet"..."the desert planet"...and also "the swamp planet" and "the ice planet"). It's especially interesting that the "desert planet" and the "ice planet" still have perfectly breathable atmospheres, given their pronounced paucity of oxygen-producing vegetation.

[Avumede]

Originally posted by screech-owl
Architecture is extreme:

Cities are silver/dull gray, tall and slender spire and towers everywhere, and most of the buildings look architecturally unstable (kind of like the landscapes from a Roadrunner cartoon).

I've noticed that. Even recent movies have that - huge towers everywhere, everything is 100% downtown. People teeming in the streets. There are no suburbs. Even though it's quite clear the trend is the exact opposite.

[Palandine]

Originally posted by SPOOFE Bo Diddly
-No porn (unfortunately).

*cough* holodeck *cough*

At least in Trek, it's a poorly kept secret that not only can the holodecks or holosuites be used for porn, but for interactive porn. It's pretty clear in Voyager that Janeway may be hosing an Irish hologram from the Fair Haven holoprogram. I'd attribute this quote if I could remember who said it: "Trek holodecks should probably have a drain at the bottom."

[ianzin]

A notable feature of all sci-fi is that the weirdness and special capabilities of aliens tends to vary in direct proportion to the sophistication of the special effects industry. Go back far enough, and you knew the alien WAS an alien purely because you were told he was. He looked like anyone else. In something like "Space 1999" aliens are very much like people wearing a lot of make-up (so their skin is anything except skin coloured) and some weird clothes. A few years later, and all aliens look very much like ordinary people wearing a great deal of latex prosthetics. A few years after that, aliens can "shapeshift", largely because morphing was the hot new toy in the edit suite.

This gives rise to the fun new game of Special FX archaeology. Given a decent clip from a sci-fi story, and a rough knowledge of the history of the special FX industry, you can nail when the thing was made to within a 2-3 year period. Interestingly, you have to apply a two-tier scale, whereby the "made for TV" scale lags about 18 months behind the "made for movie theatre" scale.

[mbh]

Clothing:[list=1][*]Silver and/or bright primary colors[*]Black leather and studs[*]brown robes and cloaks[*]light, flimsy stuff in pastel colors[/list=1]
Ships:[list=1][*]airplanes on steroids[*]V-2 rockets on steroids[*]flying saucers[/list=1]

Every city is either an art-deco paradise or a run-down slum.

A robot, no matter the function for which it was designed, either wants to be a human, or wants to ravish the hero's girlfriend.

No matter how advanced the civilization, its economy is still based on slave labor, hence the need to enslave humanity.

No matter how advanced the technology, raw materials can only be mined on Earth-like planets.

[SPOOFE]

Ships:

airplanes on steroids
V-2 rockets on steroids
flying saucers

Then how do you explain Star Destroyers?

[mbh]

The Star Destroyer is a Flying Wing aircraft on steroids.

Or, add #4. Simple geometric shapes with a rocket stuck on one end.

[SPOOFE]

The Star Destroyer is a Flying Wing aircraft on steroids.

Oh please. A "Flying Wing" is aerodynamic.

Or, add #4. Simple geometric shapes with a rocket stuck on one end.

Still doesn't work, 'cuz a Star Destroyeer is too complex to be called "simple" (don't believe me? Try drawing one. Those things have angles that would make Da Vinci blow his brains out).

How's this for a category: "Big-ass-fucking ominous chunks of death-delivering metal." :D

(Sorry... I'm a tad religious about Star Destroyers... ::hums the "Imperial march"::).

[Barbarian]

Hey hey! What about absolute boneheads wandering around through space who haven't figured out really good flashlights? (Hey Jim, we've got enough anti-matter to fly 8000 times faster than the speed of light, and we can turn this small moon into slag in about 3 seconds. So why am I holding a candle as we explore the big cave with the alien?)

and then there's the Sluggy Sci-fi Adventure!
http://www.sluggy.com/d/970929.html

[sturmhauke]

The ship's computer always has a female voice unless it's insane/evil (HAL, the Star Trek episode where a computer calculates real casualties for a virtual war).

A horde of carniverous alien creatures can live and breed on an otherwise barren planet (Starship Troopers, Pitch Black, Alien).

Starships can perform equally well in an atmosphere (X-Wings, TIE Fighters, USS Voyager), and even if crashlanding from orbit, can make it to the surface sort of intact (USS Enterprise in "Generations", Nightingale in "Pitch Black").

The enemy aliens have better weapons technology, but humans can always find a weakness (Star Trek).

A lightsaber can beat a squad of Stormtroopers with blaster rifles. But only if you're a Jedi. Then again, Stormtroopers can't aim for shit, except when beating up on innocent Jawas (Star Wars, as if you didn't know).

Humans are the only species that comes in different colors and has more than one culture. (I suppose that's progress; in the past, humans only came in white. *snort*)

Gigantic space-time anomalies can be fixed by mere mortals (Star Trek).

Deities are either con artists or misunderstood beings from another dimension. Or both (Q anyone? - Star Trek).

A whiny farmboy can save the galaxy (Star Wars).

[egkelly]

One of the really amazing things about our current culture is how retro everybody actually is. For example, where I live (NE), everybody wants to live in a house that most closely resembles dwellings built in 1600! Our towns are typically laid out in the style of 200 years ago, and our clothing (with little changes) is identical with that worn 100 years ago. Even out lamps are imitations of oil-burning lamps of 150-200 years ago! I really don’t understand this-we have made huge technological advances, yet we seem to strive too imitate the past , as much as possible!
Maybe this is why we find the future (as projected in SciFi movies) to be so amusing!