This thread was inspired by me watching Wall Street recently. In one scene, billionaire Gordon Gekko is walking along the beach, talking to Bud Fox on his <gasp!> cellular phone. Trouble is it looks like he’s holding an iron next to his head.
There was another one in From Russia With Love at the beginning when Bond is next to a river having a romantic interlude, when suddenly he <gasp!> gets a PAGE!! On his BEEPER!!!
And of course, the entire movie Wargames is now a hoot.
Any others you can think of? Post 'em here. I know I’m forgetting some good ones from old Sci Fi movies set in the future.
It’s just funny how the computers on Regula 1 have all the blinking lights and mechanical switches, even though it’s supposed to be set in the 2200s. Actually, this applies to all the star trek movies, the origional series itself, and even to Next Generation to some extent.
The Omega Man: Filmed in 1971, and taking place in the “near future” (say, the end of the 1970s - but after a sudden disaster has wiped out most of humanity.) At one point, while lounging around in his ultra-modern (for 1971) pad, Charlton Heston plugs in an eight-track tape.
**A.I. **: Not dated 'cuz of the technology, but in the sequence depicting the ruins of “New York”, the WTC is clearly visible.
Watching Mission Impossible I chuckled as Tom Cruise logged onto the net using a version of Netscape that was already well outdated when the movie was released.
**Semi-Tough ** beats them all with the BEAT guy talking on a briefcase phone. Oooh, so cool.
Star Trek:TOS also had a things about carriable storage media. Remember all those cartridges McCoy would shuffle whenever he needed to access someones medical records. “Stick cartridge into slot “A,” please.”
So, is it movies that use “ultra-modern” technology only to have it outstripped by the real world in a couple of years? (The Wall Street mega-phone).
Or is it movies that guess at future technology and totally blow it? (Star Trek).
One thing that amazes me is that almost everyone completely missed the evolution of flat-screen technology. Cathode-ray tubes? Yeah, those will be what we’ll be putting on starships two hundred years from now!
My favorite being Mike Hammer’s enormous reel-to-reel telephone answering machine – which seems to take up most of a wall – in Robert Aldrich’s great 1955 film noir, Kiss Me Deadly.
I’m fond of zeppelins and bathyspheres, too. Funky obsolete technology roolz.
Actually, Star Trek TOS pegged a lot of things pretty accurately… and influenced tech design to the point where reality mimicked art.
But I hit reply to talk about my favorite “backwards” example, from The X-Files, where, in one flashback scene set in the mid-eighties (his first encounter with the Lone Gunmen), rookie Special Agent Fox Muldur is seen talking on one of those big clunky cellphones that are almost as big as a WWII field radio.
This reminds me of the unintentionally funny scene in *The Exorcist * where the mother is talking to the doctor in his office. As he’s discussing Regan’s diagnosis (he suggests she try Ritalin; I’m sure a lot of parents of ADHD kids empathized with her), he’s smoking. His office fills with smoke as he gestures and waves the cigarette around. The mother never seems to notice it.
Somehow, cigarettes in older movies aren’t as jarring: they’re just part of the idiom of Noir. But in a more recent movie, they look out of place: the office in All the President’s Men, where everyone’s desk is in the same big hangarlike room. Some of the people are smoking; they have ashtrays on their desks. So everyone, like it or not, has to spend 8 hours a day in a smokefilled room. Eesh.
Another “James Bod” moment of (wow!) technology that got old fast was in Live and Let Die, where Bond uses his digital watch with its red LED numbers – the kind where you have to push a button to light p the dial, because otherwise the LEDs eat up too much battery power. In just a couple of years, all the digital watches had LCD echnology, and were so cheap anyone could own one.
Yeah, me too. Giant room-size computers with hundreds of lackeys threading tape into the spools!
And to the people mentioning how Star Trek got a lot of things right - yes, I know. I used it as an example because it was mentioned already in the thread.
Ahem…but in that same movie (ST II:Wrath of Khan), check out Kirk’s computer in his San Fran apartment. It reminds me of a TRS-80, but I’m sure it’s something similar. The ULTIMATE machine for the swinging starship captain of today!!
Speaking of room-size computers, if I remember correctly the computer complex in Westworld consists mainly of huge tape drives and monitors with green spinning triangles and helixes on a black background. This is supposedly the technology which makes possible an entire resort full of completely lifelike robots.
Oooooh, this reminded me of the countdown timer that Kurt Russell wore in Escape From New York. Worn on the wrist, but still about three inches wide with the LEDs that only lit up when you pressed the button.
Scrolling through the entire thread, that film was all I could think of. It has a ‘mobile phone’ moment to equal the others mentioned - a good 18 inches long, with a 2 foot aerial. And Air Force One was AFAIK a 727. And the announcement of the discovery of nuclear fusion was to be made from a recording on a single cassette tape. It just goes on and on.
Though it came out in 1996, the only cell phones the couple had were installed in their cars. So naturally, they didn’t have any way to call the police when the toughs who were terrorizing then cut the phone lines to the house!
In no less a movie than 2001: A Space Oddysey, the digital displays used the glowing filament technology that was completely obsolete about 3-4 years after the movie came out.
I noticed that in Midnight Run. The airline hostess asks Marvin if he’s like “smoking or non-smoking” for his flight, and as he’s smoking at the ticket counter, he says “Take a wild guess.”
Also one of my favorite SNL skits, shot in black and white and starring Phil Hartman as the Doctor:
“You’d better have a cigarette for this - it’s not looking good…I’m afraid your husband suffers from…‘Lung Fever.’”
I used it as an example because it was mentioned already in the thread.