About five years ago, when my two oldest kids were young teenagers, I put on a movie I remembered from my own youth at around the same age: National Lampoon’s “Vacation”.
To my great surprise, they found it only mildly amusing. As each of the terrible situations they encounter on the trip occurred, they objected at how contrived or unrealistic it was, only for me to have to explain each time: “That didn’t exist in 1982… Probably not until after 2000.”
“How could they get so lost? Where’s their GPS?”
“Why are they walking in the desert when their car broke down instead of calling a tow truck on their cell phone?”
“Why would they have to wait 10 business days for a check to clear? They can’t pay with a credit card?!”
“OK, if he could only pay in cash, where’s the ATM?”
“WHAT? The place was CLOSED all along? Wouldn’t the website have said so before they left?”
What other movies, or TV shows, were set in a context that would be similarly unrecognizable to someone who’s 25 years or younger?
Note: this should not count “they got the future wrong!” stuff for past movies that were set in today’s timeframe or involved time traveling to now.
“Seinfeld” would have been a lot different if everyone had cell phones. Take a picture of where you parked the car in the parking garage, reserve a table online at the Chinese restaurant, call or text each other when getting together to see a movie and nobody shows up… You get the idea.
Modern DNA testing makes a lot of plots obsolete. It’s very easy to show if someone really is a family’s long lost son, or an imposter. Or any debates about a child’s paternity can be settled quickly. An example is the Disney film Candleshoe, but there must be many others.
Ohhhh yeah, good one. My kids did have the same reaction to a lot of the Seinfeld storylines for this reason, except they were amazed things were “still” like that in the mid to late 1990s because they know that was not long before they were born (where 1982-83 seemed far more distant to them).
The whole “Kramer posing at Moviefone” one, for example. “What the hell is Moviefone?” But I remember when dialing Moviefone with my cell phone on the street to find out what movies were playing and where, without having to go find and buy a newpaper!!!, was truly life changing!
Hmm, not sure what element of Speed would be abrogated by bus passengers having mobile phones… And an updated version of Speed could simply have the mastermind demand everyone on board surrender/chuck their cellphones at the start of the kidnapping, or he’d detonate the bus remotely.
The key point where they switch the video signal he was using to watch the passengers on the bus with a loop of everyone sitting still would not be possible, though, because the video would now be digitally transmitted and encrypted/encoded, they couldn’t just use the same frequency to feed him a different video signal as they cut the original one off.
An old guilty pleasure, “When a Stranger Calls.” Carol Kane is babysitting and gets a call and the creep keeps calling back, getting more and more sinister. It’s an urban legend, right? Where the call turns out to be coming from inside the house and OMG there’s a murderer upstairs!!! Well there’s caller ID and you don’t need a landline anyway and so on. I think it’s accepted as fact that everything from your 1979 Radio Shack flyer is now on your cell phone. Clock radio, check. Calculator, check. Camera, check. And so on. Even things that weren’t on that flyer, like GPS, are on your cell. It’s a huge game changer so for some plots either they left it home, forgot to charge it, don’t have service, dropped and broke it, accepted a call from an unknown person…
Yeah, not only do all the missed connections, “I didn’t know where you were and couldn’t reach you” storylines need adjusting, “unknown caller” ones do too.
Of course the storylines still work as “period settings” for thrillers; my kids just couldn’t identify with a “family vacation road trip” in the context of everything that happened to them (I put the movie on ahead of our own cross-country, NYC to SF two week road trip in 2015).
Buying airplane tickets for someone else, or just handing someone your own ticket to use instead as if it was a bus ticket, is something that used to be a thing but hasn’t been since 2001. This is definitely a casual thing in a number of movies as recently as the late 1990s.
Ha! When I visited London a few years back, I specifically got an airbnb type room in Earl’s Court just to surprise my family with that “TARDIS” right outside the Underground station.
I think this may be why we’re seeing a lot of “retro” productions nowadays. It’s hella difficult to give characters real predicaments anymore. Cellphones solve SO many problems. GPS is a marvel. I can’t imagine just getting into my car and going anywhere without getting lost. I honestly don’t know how I managed before.
You see a lot of scenes in old movies where characters are going to some library or archive to search through old documents to find some information that moves the plot forward. Nowadays most of this searching for information would be done online from their home or workplace.
I watched National Treasure and its sequel recently, and there were a lot of points where it would have been a lot easier on the main character if he’d had a camera. But then I realized-- It didn’t need to be a camera phone, just a camera. And cheap digital cameras existed then, and he really should have anticipated that it would come in handy. Why the heck didn’t he have one?
A whole new genre might be “Death by GPS” (and/or trusting technology too much).
“It’s what I’m beginning to call death by GPS,” said Death Valley wilderness coordinator Charlie Callagan. "People are renting vehicles with GPS and they have no idea how it works and they are willing to trust the GPS to lead them into the middle of nowhere.
Husband died just SIX miles from help after he and wife got lost in wild because of GPS … he died trying to raise alarm but she survived for seven weeks by staying put
In Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel The Mother Hunt Archie Goodwin, keeping a subject under surveillance, has to get to a pay phone to check in with Wolfe. While he does so, the subject slips away, with tragic consequences. That wouldn’t have happened if Archie had a cell phone. There are a lot of times in the Nero Wolfe stories when it would’ve helped a lot if Archie and Wolfe’s other lieutenants* had had portable phones they could use on the spot**, and there’s a lot of description about how they cope with not having them. But this is the place where I think it had the biggest effect.
The Teers, if you’re a long-time fan.
**And they could’ve looked things up on Google on the spot, too. But then they wouldn’t need Lon Cohen.
Man About the House or Three’s Company. Today, the landlord would be sued for discrimination, and all of the male characters would be sued for sexual harrassment.
In the past checking was a very standard method of paying for stuff, but now much less so. For example it used to be common to carry a checkbook with you.
There used to be the phenomena of float: pay for something today with a check and deposit money to cover the check in a few days–this is much riskier now (on the other hand banks now offer overdraft protection…).
In a sort of reversal of the OP, there are a number of times when watching Star Trek TOS or TNG where, for example, someone is on the bridge or in engineering when they shouldn’t be, or is sneaking around not wanting to be seen. And I’ll think, don’t they have badge access for secure areas? Aren’t there security cameras everywhere in the corridors? Which are things that are fairly common today, but seemingly non-existent in the future.
I always kind of wondered that; there are omnipresent cameras in almost every compartment, which even today would probably be able to recognize crew members through AI, facial recognition and being able to correlate with the Starfleet badge communicators everyone wears.
Plus, there is clearly some kind of location system within the ship for the badge communicators, if they can beam people right from wherever they are to elsewhere. So they’re able to know where you are with enough precision to teleport you anywhere on the ship.
There’s no reason anyone should be able to go anywhere they’re not supposed to, or even be unmonitored in public spaces without some pretty serious IT shenanigans going on.