I just watched What’s Up, Doc, a 1972 movie that is mostly set in a hotel.
Doors have actual keys, not magnetic cards. Not just that, but you were expected to leave your key with the front desk when you left the hotel and pick it up when you returned. The keys were left in cubbyholes behind the desk, so that anybody could walk up and see whether the key was there or not.
Somebody picked up a house phone to call and order a fake room service order. Today, the computer automatically tells the operator what room is calling and the operator normally addresses you by name.
Everybody carries luggage, but none of them have tags or any identifiers, even though they’ve all come off airplanes.
Yeah, there are definitely a couple of episodes where this is the case, but one that stands out is the movie theater episode, where they’re all standing waiting for Jerry to show up. I can’t remember exactly what happened, but for some reason Jerry couldn’t make it, and the rest of the crew ended up getting separated in the chaos. These days something like that would have easily been resolved with one call.
Stilted and unnatural acting and dialogue, both in movies, and TV. Since around the '70’s or '80’s there has been a trend toward ever less scripted more casual laissez faire acting style and ennui in Movies and TV. People seemed to lessen their formality, stiffness, and interview style and break casual with acting. Kind of the precursor and realized today in its apex as the modern “reality style” of TV. You can always tell the movies and tv that are pre-reality tv.
This was a huge gripe when I was working. The NYS Department of Corrections just refuses to adopt cell phones. It’s ridiculous.
What happened was back in the nineties, when cell phones were just becoming popular and were still very expensive (costing at least $200 apiece) the department decided to get into cell phones. The idea was that some people were so vital they needed to be on call around the clock. But because the phones were so expensive, there were only a limited amount of them. So people had to justify being issued a cell phone - it was a sign you were important. And not getting a cell phone was a sign you weren’t considered important.
Now go forward ten years and cell phones had become so cheap, they were literally being given away for free. But unfortunately the mentality was set - cell phones were scarce and only important people could have one. So the department wouldn’t go out and get the phones we could have actually used.
For example, we’re transporting a busload of prisoners three hundred miles across the state - hey, maybe it would be a good idea to have a cell phone in the bus so we can call the people on the bus and they can call us. But no, we weren’t supposed to issue cell phones to transportation. People weren’t even allowed to bring their own personal phones.
I always figured that was before privacy was a big deal. This way if someone stopped in or called for you, the desk staff could tell them if you were in or out. If you were out, they could take a message and give it to you when you returned.
I still do that semi-regularly, though it’s almost always at smaller airports, including boarding a 777 via outdoor stairway last year (on the big island of Hawaii; I don’t think that the Kona airport has any jetbridges at all).
Wow, just when cell phones got cheap enough that most anyone could afford them, but before everyone had them, we started keeping a spare one at work. This way if we had to send someone out on the road and they didn’t have their own (or they forget it at home), they could just grab the spare. Especially nice during our busy season when we have a few temp workers running around delivering things in residential neighborhoods. It’s a lot easier if they have a cell phone and they can call the person or call me for directions rather then coming back and telling us they couldn’t find the house. We just got rid of “Cell X” about a year ago. Between everyone having their own and GPS’s it really wasn’t necessary anymore.
Honestly, I have voicemail on my cell phone and on my work line, but Bell charges something like $6 a month to have voicemail on my home line, and I get maybe 1 message a month that isn’t a telemarketer. I could buy a lot of answering machines with the $6 x $12 x 10 years that I haven’t been paying for call answer. I also don’t have call waiting or call display – I don’t like phones, I don’t get a lot of phone calls I care about, and I don’t see a compelling reason to pay more money in order to allow people to reach me on the phone when I’d rather they emailed.
Any number of multiple heist movies are almost immediately outdated with advances in safecracking/alarm/computer tech within 5-10 years of inception. Many seem ridiculously outdated.
I guess as a classification, obsolete security tech, dates movies.
You can date movies with hotel settings by their keys- physical key or magnetic swipe cards. Similarly, you can date any alarm system readout by the advances in LED/LCD and computing (chip) power.
Most computer equipment stands out by the TV screen size/shape, presence of floppies and other peripherals. Even mainframes can be dated, although it’s a little harder to pin down the exact year.
There’s one of those in Star Trek IV (1986) - he’s on a bus that Kirk and Spock are riding (this is the movie where they go back in time), and Spock neck-pinches him for refusing to turn off his aforementioned obligatory '80s ghetto blaster
