I liked when the Woody character fantasizes about the Roberts character flying to the Arctic forever, because Woody is in love with Diane Keaton, Tony Robert’s wife: “If you need to reach me, I’ll be at Frozen Tundra 5-6954”
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Of course that’s just a weird movie anyway, but it just screams mid-1980s. Some examples:
*The Mr. T cereal
*Those biker kids. “Radical!”
*Dotty’s clothes.
*Pee-Wee’s original belief that the Soviet’s were involved with his stolen bike.
There’s a Humphrey Bogart movie called Dark Passage that I rented on a whim a while ago. At one point, an antagonistic character argues with Bogey about something - I forget what, it’s been so long - but one of his major points in the argument is “You’ve seen my car - you know it couldn’t go over 25!”
I had a car that wouldn’t go over 55 without a fight. I can’t imagine a car that wouldn’t go over 25. I can’t imagine this not sounding preposterous. But it must not’ve sounded so bizarre in 1947…?
I can forgive that. However, 2010 is a lot worse with the stupid cold war subplot. At least 2001 made no mention of the soviet union.
Actually, it could just be a shitty car.
I mentioned this one before.
In the Lensman series of sci-fi novels (by E.E.Smith), there is a planet in the future Galactic Empire that is just a library filled with data on everything. Part of this data is a list of all the top scientists in the Empire, and they need to find all the best ones for a super-scientific conference. So they go thru the whole database to find the names.
They do it with a card reader.
Regards,
Shodan
Hi, Qadcop
Not knowing much about the technology* involved…
That big clunky radio-phone that Danny Glover hauls around in the first Lethal Weapon is pretty dated looking.
[sub]*If it was just an early portable phone, fine. If it’s actually some piece of police equipment I’m unaware of, maybe this one doesn’t work so well.[/sub]
I don’t think this is an example of an outdated movie moment. Those who are actually required to have a cell phone for work may very well consider it a millstone. I know “I had to turn the phone off” wouldn’t fly very often where my wife works.
Marc
Shodan, that’s beautiful.
The first line of the cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, to describe a cloudy, rainy day uses the wonderful, but now outdated line “The sky was the color of a television set, tuned to a dead channel.”
Within two years of the book, just about every TV had something built in that made TV screens go a pretty shade of blue, rather than showing snow/static.
Every now and then on rec.arts.sf.written, we get some punk ( 
) kid who says “Wait…how’d the weather change so fast? First it’s beautiful, then it’s miserable. What’s up with that?”
Fenris
Point taken. But cell phones, as in cell, not portable, were fairly new in 1992. I don’t remember kids at the mall having them, or guys in the produce section calling home to say, “Honey, was that white or yellow onions you wanted?” If you did carry one, it was almost certainly for work. Jarmusch probably got the idea from observing some kind of under-assistant-West Coast-promo-person who was similarly tethered to their cell phone.
Has anybody ever read the book THE FIFTY MINUTE HOUR? It was written in the 1950s and is the professional autobiography of a psychoanalyst who discusses his most interesting patients (names changed, of course).
The most famous segment is “The Jet Propelled Couch”. The patient was a leading physicist for the Department of Defense and very instrumental in the Manhattan Project, but he was also convinced that he was living a double life and that even as he was on the couch he was also a space adventurer in another galaxy. In this other galaxy/dimension he controlled whole worlds, had enormous spacecraft, wrote treatises on faster than light speed, fought space pirates, etc., and kept all of his information in a secret room in one of his space palaces where he stored all of his… file cabinets.
They could propel through space faster than light, but unfortunately the data disk never found its way into the galaxy.
Actually Pan Am still exists, it’s just morphed into a small regional carrier in the North-East. It’s conceivable that they could once again grow to national prominence. Especially if the big ones keep going down. Still have the same logo too. I did an economic report on Pan Am several years ago.