Computers with big displays of pointlessly flashing lights. The last one was probably WOPR and people commented even then how silly it looked.
Rockets that looked like missiles.
Interestingly, many of those computers from movies and TV were the very same AN/FSQ7 SAGE computer repurposed:
http://ripsaw.cac.psu.edu/~mloewen/Q7/
What killed the cigar-shaped rockets were the advent of our own space age, coupled with Star Trek* and 2001.
*which itself got input from the saucer C57-D from Forbidden Planet. Because of the re-use of props and footage from FP by The Twilight Zone, we had Earth people flying around in non-cigar-shaped ships on TV even before Star Trek.
That doesn’t make them not sci-fi tropes. It just makes them unimaginative sci-fi tropes.
But in Mass Effect, the aliens weren’t *native *to our solar system, which is the discredited trope in question.
And then there’s Planet X, the planet in Earth’s orbit but on the opposite side of the Sun from us at all times. I don’t think you hear about that one anymore either.
If you see the same gender roles in westerns, police procedurals and sitcoms from that era then I can’t really think of it as a science fiction trope.
“Hidden Race”/“Lost Civilization” stories.
Bug-eyed monsters. Especially ones who kidnap Earth women.
“Nobody steals our chicks … and lives!” – Duke Nukem
1992 wasn’t the end of the Terminator franchise
[spoiler]
T3 had a T-850 struggling against being taken over by the more advanced TX model to keep JC alive
The Sarah Connor Chronicles had a T-1000 raising a human child, Cameron (unknown model) who despite being a Terminator was clearly in love with JC, and John Henry who was a T-888 hooked up to a supercomputer trying to figure out the whole humanity thing
Terminator Salvation had a Terminator/clone hybrid literally rip his heart out for the sake of JC.[/spoiler]
not sure if the spoiler tags are really needed, most people who care about the franchise have already seen it all, but just in case.
Adam and Eve endings. “Looks like we’re the only survivors. What’s your name, by the way?”
Atomic radiation can do absolutely anything from turn you into a blob of snot to make you a god, although, yeah, there’s still Fallout and Spiderman, et al.
Computers that talk like vibrators in a tin can. CAP! TAIN! KIRK! WAR! NING!
Computers the size of a battleship.
Computers the size of a battleship that are really just some guy, Wizard of Oz style. OK, this one’s a little specific.
During the cold war, the fictional future was going to be shitty because of war. Now the fictional future will be shitty because of pollution and a population too lazy to recycle. In the future, the fictional future will be shitty because there’s too many fat people, at least according to Hollywood. I say this as an obese person myself.
Used in a scifi film released in the last 5 years, well ok there were 1,000 human survivors give or take…hey wait a minute…was it Earth all along:eek:
I’ll not put the title here as its a big spoiler.
Last year’s Another Earth is pretty much this.
That’s because this one was so overused (probably by the second time it appeared) that it had people groaning with annoyance. People were making fun of this a long time ago, with endings like “My name’s Adam. What’s yours?” “Louise”. Alfred Bester lampshaded the whole concept at the outset when he did his twist on it by titling his story “Adam but No Eve”. The problem, as usual, was that TV and movies were over a cdecade behind the literature, and kept this chestnut going long after it shoulda died. Heck, even Twilight Zone did a variation on this one.
All that high-voltage stuff that insane scientists used to revive corpses…like the original Dr. Frankenstein.
I always liked those tesla coils, VanDeGraaf generators, and jacobs ladder sprk gaps.
Heck, you need lots of electricity to shock those corpses back to life.
Note the heavy duty leather straps on the operating tables-can’t trust those zombies.
Every time I see one of those in a film I want this to happen.
TZ was what I was thinking of. I saw the promo Serling did for “Probe 7, Over and Out” and he was (totally seriously) talking about how the twist ending was going to blow everybody’s tiny minds. It combines Earth All Along and the Adam and Eve ending. Other than that, I only have only vague recollects of running into the Adam and Eve twist elsewhere, probably comic books.
Evidently he did a good job with it – it’s the only science fiction story that noted SF hater John Updike wrote of approvingly (in his book Of the Farm), though Updike never indicated the story was real, nor did he mention Bester. Updike scholars are probably crediting the concept to him.
As for lost tropes, there are the individual asteroid prospectors who crash their way through the asteroid belt.
Waterlogged and swampy Venus.
The immaculately clean cities of the future.
The military leadership coucil, consisting of many command officers wearing full dress uniforms complete with a chest full of medals, all arguing, all making dire predictions…
…and all smoking cigarettes like mad.
Oh, and for the super-advanced-mega-computers covered in flashing lights and containing big reels of tape, they also have walls full of meaningless gauges and consoles jammed with toggle switches.
~VOW