Was watching WarGames the other night and smiled at David going down to the library to find out info on Dr. Falken by reading microfilmed newspaper articles.
Let’s not even talk about acoustic modems.
As long as we’re on that: any time a brig on Trek or whatever uses a forcefield as one of its walls. In this era, we of course use prison-bar technology so stuff won’t flicker away during a power outage; but that’s maybe a lost art by then.
The movie Duel probably wouldn’t work today for many of the same reasons as Vacation:
[ul]
[li]He could just call the police on his cell phone and report the trucker (Unless, I suppose, they establish that he can’t get a signal way out there in the desert).[/li][li]The phone booth scene would probably feel a little contrived, because phone booths don’t exist anymore.[/li][li]They’d have to find some other way to establish that Mann’s car has a failing radiator hose, since gas station attendants don’t exist anymore (except for the states where you can’t pump your own gas, but they don’t check under the hood, do they?)[/li][/ul]
I’ve recently been rewatching Buffy for the (mumble) time and it especially struck me how much less of an impact the situation in the episode Hush (everyone the town becomes mute overnight) would have had in a modern setting. With texting and social media (and text to speech where useful) moderns would be barely inconvenienced at all (and some of us might even notice.)
Going by the examples in the OP , there’s only one that seems like it could have been realistic in 1982 but not now - the lack of an ATM. If I remember correctly, the issue with the credit card was that one was reported stolen and I think even now that would result in closing the account so that the other card also couldn’t be used.
I still end up in places where my cell phone has no service and the GPS (and satellite radio ) can’t get a signal , and as far as “wouldn’t the website have said the park was closed” , maybe- if you go to the Disney World website the only information about the current closure is when a chat box pops up asking if you have questions about the closure. But the idea that an amusement park would have a planned closure for two weeks during its season is just as inconceivable now as it would have been in 1982 - even today , I wouldn’t be checking the Disney World website a couple of weeks before traveling there to see if it was going to be closed. They really only close for extreme weather and now this pandemic, neither of which could ever be on their website a couple of weeks in advance.
I’ve got a clip I use in class a lot from Star Trek (TOS). Kirk is in sickbay, and Nurse Chapel asks Dr. McCoy what might be wrong with him. McCoy says, “I don’t know. But I intend to find out. I’ll be in the Medical Records Library.” And he leaves. There’s a computer terminal literally RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM on his desk in sick bay. But he still has to go somewhere (downstairs?) to the Medical Records Library which has to be a physical space with file drawers or something.
Where, for the GPS part? Caves? Deep canyons?
The small suitcase containing Ellen’s cards fell of the car and was lost. They called in the lost cards making Clark’s cards invalid (as well as ATM cards presumably). All they had were checks.
A running gag in Play It Again Sam was Tony Roberts’ character always calling on the nearest pay phone to let his office know where he was and how to reach him on said phone. Without that his character basically has no funny bits in the movie.
The movie Sorry, Wrong Number is based on someone hearing a conversation with crossed lines. I guess that happened back then.
The same places I can’t get a Sirius radio signal - which might be due to weather or something more than location. But lots of people don’t have a separate GPS ( I no longer do - I should have worded that in the past ternse) - and if you can’t get a cell phone signal, you also won’t be able to use Waze on that cell phone.
So use Sygic.
I just saw an old Columbo episode - Columbo had questioned a witness shortly after the murder, and the next day Columbo is talking to the witness about having gone to the library and looked him up in the card catalog, and having been impressed by his books.
Columbo is an interesting case, of course, because so many of the crimes have to do with what was then “bleeding-edge” technology, like VCRs, closed circuit TV, and (later) cell phones.
Hell, most Buffy plots are ruined by cell phones. Instead of racing to save someone, today they would just text “It’s a trap!” and show’s over.
Yeah, Gandalf wouldn’t have had to go all the way to Minas Tirith for his research. He could have looked it up online.
Off the main road in an area away from major cities – e.g. trying to find a B&B a few miles off Hwy 101 on the Southern Oregon coast, I got lost because the GPS didn’t cover the area and I didn’t have a map, and there were a lot of little country roads leading to other private properties. It can still happen. My sister doesn’t have cell access at all where she lives – 15 minutes outside of the nearest town.
If you need a dastardly human agency to get that effect for a plot, perhaps they will have cell phone blocking that can cover the critical several square miles.
Back to the OP, compare CSI today with Murder She Wrote, where most of the plots would evaporate in short order with modern technology. In fact, CSI is a good example of how crime-solving plots can develop with all the modern technology available.
Wait Until Dark. Totally doesn’t exist without old-fashioned phones that are hard-wired into the home. Not to mention, that if a person carried a cell phone with a flashlight function…
And, not technology, just a change in the law, but a lot of the humor, as well as the ending, to The Awful Truth couldn’t happen now. A lot of it is predicated on an old law that you could invalidate a pending divorce by “re-consummating,” so to speak, the marriage. It took 60 or 90 days of “cooling off,” before a divorce could become final, and during that time, it was very easy to change your mind.
This is why Cary Grant and Irene Dunne go to such lengths not to be caught alone together, lest someone suggest they had reconciled, and it’s why Irene Dunne comments that things will be so much easier in a few weeks.
It’s also why the focus on the clock at the end.
I’ve noted before that the Guide from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is–other than having galactic coverage–very primitive compared to modern smartphones and tablets. It was text-based, had a five inch screen, and was covered in buttons. Nobody today would be impressed by it.
Yeah, the core crime at the heart of Catch Me If You Can isn’t about the protagonist impersonating an airline pilot to score free flights, but being an extremely clever and talented “paper hanger”.
Little of what Frank Abagnale, Jr. does in 1963 would have worked even in 2003, and even less so now.
And it had to store text in very limited, on-board memory. Which is why Ford’s extract on Earth was originally severely edited down to as few words as possible to convey the most useful information to the typical Hitchhiker: “Harmless.”
Fortunately, with much complaining, Ford was able to get them to expand on that entry, hey?
GPS works everywhere on the surface of the planet, be it big cities, small towns, or uninhabited atoll islands in the middle of the Pacific.
Programs that give directions to places might be out of date in some places, and will certainly have a hard time finding a road route to someplace that’s not on any roads. But the GPS will still work.
Haha, yes, when I first moved from a Blackberry to an iPhone in 2007, having a “flashlight” app was an unexpected advantage over the previous device. The first time I thought about using it in a dark room, nerd that I am, I couldn’t help but exclaim: “What have I got in my pocket? … Why, it’s a light when all other lights go out!”