Pop culture within science fiction; the good and the bad

Cafe Society
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Science fiction movies and shows try to build a world, and it’s not just science and technology. There are moments when characters are relaxing, listening to music or watching sports. I give the creators credit for trying to flesh things out. When it works, it’s lots of fun; when it doesn’t it’s painful.

What are some examples, good or bad?

The original Star Trek built a world. The walls were made of plywood, and none of the buttons on the bridge were labeled, but somehow it all worked. And then there’s “The Way to Eden”, the episode with the space hippies. It’s so painfully obvious that we’re watching the 1960s, not the 23rd century.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century had the episode “Space Rockers”, where an evil impresario is embeddind subliminal signals in a band’s broadcasts to manipulate the audience. The music is terrible, but Jerry Orbach is in the episode, and he’s always awesome.

The cantina band in Star Wars were great, I liked the music, and it didn’t immediately remind me of when the movie was made. The band did seem very tight and well-rehearsed for a little dive bar in Mos Eisley, though.

The games in the original Rollerball looked like they could be a real sport. I never did figure out all the rules.

Slang language, and insults, can be the same; sometimes they sound natural, other times very contrived. “Smeghead” works, “laser brain” doesn’t.

Anybody have any others that either really worked, or really didn’t? There must be hundreds

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In the original Battlestar Galactica, they measured time in “centons” and “microns”, and profanity consisted of the verb “frack” and the noun “felgercarb”. As a kid, I loved it. If I watched it today, I’m not sure if I would enjoy it, or cringe.

For his Martian novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs created a chess-like game called jetan. I have heard that die-hard fans have played it.

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I was going to mention Red Dwarf too. Lister is a fan of ‘zero g football’. I’ve absolutely no idea what that is and I doubt the writers do either but it sounds like a fun sport.

Then there are things in Star Trek like the popular drink items such as (the illegal) Romulan Ale or the Klingon Raktajino coffee. Not sure drinks count as pop culture though? Or how about Dabo, the gambling game at Quark’s on DS9?

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In Brave New World, the characters enjoy playing “obstacle golf.” Imagine: a society so depraved in its hedonism that the golf courses have obstacles on them!

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How about Jet Screamer from The Jetsons?

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Didn’t Lister also listen to “rastabilly skank” music? Don’t know if that’s a genre or a song.

That, along with the drinks and such, are fine. They’re MacGuffins, of a sort. We don’t know what raktajino tastes like, or how to play dabo; just that they’re things within that universe that people like. If they ever tried to explain dabo (they didn’t, did they?) it would probably wind up sounding like fizzbin.

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Well, part of that is because, in-movie, they kept changing the rules to make it harder for Jonathon to keep winning.

But the fundamental structure of the game can be figured out by watching the movie, and you can even see that different teams have different strategies. Rollerball is one of the few made-up sports where that’s true. It was so real, the stuntmen used to play it for fun in their off-hours while making the movie.

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One of the Seattle TV stations did a show once that was set in the future. Archaelogists were unearthing the city after it had been buried in volcanic ash, and trying to explain what they found. They decided that golf was a game of existential dread emulating man’s futile struggle to overcome nature.

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I’m not a Star Trek completist but it seems to me that the holodeck tech would be the nexus of that universe’s pop culture, the same way TV has been ours for the last 75 years. Yet (as far as I know) we only see the users fulfilling retro fantasies like visiting the past or works of 19th-20th Century fiction.

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They change the rules about penalties and substitutions, but the basic structure of the game stays the same, in a way. It still doesn’t get totally fleshed out. There’s a ball that you’re trying to put in a goal. At one point Jonathan says “next time around we defend.” Why; do they have to carry the ball some number of laps before they try to put it in the goal? Is there only one goal, or two like in hockey?

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Interesting thought. Would people use the holodeck to put themselves front-row-center at a stadium Taylor Swift concert, or stretched out in a comfy chair getting a private performance? Would there be non-interactive holodeck fiction, with people moving through the holo-world but only observing?

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Yes, at one point I think the announcers say that once they field the ball, it has to be carried around the track one full loop, and must be carried aloft where the other team has a shot at grabbing it. And there’s only one goal. Attacking vs defending depends on who has the ball. We see several times the defense team setting up to guard the goal, and it’s clear they’re doing it on the fly, as the other team is trying to get in position to score.

I’ve watched this film a lot :smiley:

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I don’t know if this is the good or the bad, but there is a scene in Dark Star of the crew rocking out to “Wipe Out”. I’m a huge fan of Surf guitar instrumentals, a genre that makes most people grind their teeth and would all but be forgotten if not for St. Quinten. It makes me giddy to think that Surf Music might actually be appreciated light years away in the far flung future.

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The very “holo” in holodeck was from when holography was the futurist thing around.

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I think they said that the ball has to be carried in plain sight, rather than concealing who has it.

I’ve seen this movie quite a few times, too. For the last game, the rules change to no penalties and no time limit, right? What things can lead to penalties, and how are they enforced? I think we see Moonpie get taken out of a game by a referee at some point, but it’s not clear exactly what he did. The game is so brutal already that it’s hard to imagine what would draw the ire of the officials.

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Black Mirror builds entire storylines around this sort of thing. (A recent example: “Hotel Reverie,” where the showrunners created a surprisingly convincing Brief Encounter-meets-Casablanca pastiche for the film-within-the-episode.)

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Paging @Qadgop_the_Mercotan

It’s a game that’s only playable by Martians. It’s trivially easy to force a draw (or rather, if you’re willing to draw but your opponent isn’t, it’s trivially easy to win), but that doesn’t matter for Martians, because they’d never do something as unmanly as deliberately offer a draw.

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The TV show the Expanse did an excellent job with that, creating an entire creole spoken in the show by the Belters, the inhabitants of colonies in the Asteroid Belt. Sasa ke, Beltalowda?

The Expanse also had the popular sport of “transplanatary racing”, where pilots braved brutal acceleration to slingshot their very fast ships around various planetary bodies.

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The Drake Maijstral series by Walter Jon Williams touches on their very weird popular culture fairly often. Drake himself is a pop culture figure; he’s an “Allowed Burglar”, someone who is allowed to engage in theft as long as he does it with enough style and on camera.

Also, humanity in the setting was conquered by aliens, before successfully rebelling centuries later. However during their period of control the aliens reshaped human culture into their own interpretation of what human culture should be like. So the dominant religion is the Church of Elvis, presided over by Elvis clones, there are “Westerns” that are an anachronistic pastiche (such as having Nikola Tesla as a gunfighter), and the institution of the Allowed Burglar itself.

I also recall Ronnie Romper, an animated doll that’s a children’s entertainment character who presides over the Magic Kingdom. One character is somewhat traumatized in a “oh no my childhood memories” sort of way when he gets beaten up by a berserker in a holographic Ronnie Romper costume.

“And he knew he would never enter the Magic Kingdom again.”

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In Star Trek Parrisses squares is often mentioned but never shown or explained.