In Escape from New York, the WTC in NY acts as a landing pad for Snake’s glider. But then again, the movie is set in 1997(just a 1997 where New York is a Giant Prison).
And you have to ask, do you really want to give Spielberg an excuse to go back and digiatally “edit” his old movies?
The early 70s were the heyday of 8-tracks. By the time I was in third grade (1978), they were already considered a joke. Since the epic disaster that destroys most of humanity takes place at about that time, it still looks a bit anachronistic. (Early in the movie, there is a shot of an OLD calendar dated 1978, accompanied by “shockIng moment” theme music, to date thee film.)
Anyway, the mention of airplanes in a few other posts made me think about “the Parrallax View,” an early 1970s thriller steeped in Watergate-esque paranoia. In one sequence, Warren Beatty is pursuing shadowy, no-good corporate types and tails them to an airport. Seeing the bad guys board a plane, Beatty follows them onto the plane (without having to pass through any type of security check whatsoever), and actually seats himself and purchases his ticket from a stewardess AFTER the plane has taken off! Ironically, Beatty’s character is trying to prevent a bomb from going off, and thereby saves the plane, something he’d never be able to do nowadays. I don’t imagine that, if a remake is ever made of the movie, that scene will be included.
Didn’t he mention somewhere in the story that it used tubes because they were immune to EMP and they could just dissapate the heat into space? Or did I justifying it after the fact somewhere along the line?
Another one from hackers where their drooling over AJ’s laptop, paraphrasing
“Pentium 500mhz processor, RISC archetecture(blah, i can’t spell)…”
DocCathode, I can accept the explanation of lost technology. But really…filing cabinets?
At least they had it dial up a mainframe to do the heavy number crunching. 
My SO has a thermal paper fax and a thermal paper photocopier. Thermal paper hasn’t completely gone the way of the Betamax.
I’m betting the technology in *Minority Report * will seem pretty laughable in short order.
That was approximately .00124 seconds after the film was released.
Dooku, note: “smartass” is not necessarily an insult, and I didn’t mean it as such. You, on the other hand, are being needlessly snide, and I’ll thank you to mend your tone.
(Regarding The Omega Man
The movie was made in 1971. The calendar says March 1975, which is supposed to be when biological warfare wiped out most of mankind. The action takes place a couple of years after that, but of course technology has stood still in the meantime. So 8-tracks are entirely reasonable.
Outstanding choice. I remember how proud of the system he was in that movie, too.
I never saw Hackers, but I was heavily into the primitive online scene that existed at the time (actually, that’s probably WHY I didn’t see Hackers!), and IIRC a 28.8 wouldn’t have attracted a crowd even in 1995! I knew people who had them, and while I thought that was cool for them it didn’t make me drool or anything. My gear was far from cutting-edge then, but even I had a 14.4…although it wasn’t reliable unless you set it down to 9600. But most local BBSes had few/no lines that could handle anything faster than 2800 anyway.
Actually, IIRC, that part was even funnier because the laptop was an Apple Powerbook.
Yeah, when Apple finally caves and goes Intel, them Pentiums will be going at about 4 GHz…
There’s a scene in Forbidden Planet where they unload stuff from the spaceship. Out comes a perfectly reasonable ray gun, some other duly futuristic-looking stuff … and a radio that it takes two guys to carry.
They had the imagination to make a futuristic ray gun but not to throw away their pre-conceptions of what they knew a radio looked like.
Goldeneye.
I’m willing to bet that a lot of the computer concepts they showed in the movie are laughably obsolete- I don’t know enough about “spiking”, or whatever that Russian computer nerd was doing, to know.
But I did laugh when Natalya asked for a computer with a 200 Meg hard drive and 16 MB of RAM.
In the middle of the battle planning to defeat the Borg in “Best of Both Worlds Part 2,” the crew of the Enterprise-D throw out all kinds of wacky ideas like heavy graviton beams. Then Data turns to his 24th century colleagues and suggests “nanites,” and the response is “what are those?”
For some reason I think it’s very amusing that a concept that exists today hasn’t generated enough interest or newsworthy breakthroughs for the crew to even realize that they might actually be possible and, well, what they are. It’s not really an anachronism, but it makes me smile when I see it.
Oh, I love doing this stuff!!
The 'Net with Sandra Bullock… the whole movie is filled with this stuff!
I remember in Twins there was a phone in a rich man’s car, and Danny Devito seemed surprised when he broke into a car, and it had one of those new-fangled alarms!
Another one from Die Hard 2, where Bruce Willis gets a page from his wife, so he calls her back. “Where are you, you landed?” “Honey, this is the 90s…we have air phones now…”
You want to see a movie that got it right? Check out Back to the Future 2. The scene in the antiques shop is great! Lots of little items that make you smile, including a nice little early Apple computer with the screen that was shaped like legal paper. The 80’s Cafe had lots of great little things in it too.
What bugs me is technology that never existed in the first place. Current movies do this all the time. How annoying would it be if each and every keystroke resulted in a beep from the computer?? I like the computer set up in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it looked very real with hundreds of cables and big clunky SCSI ports all daisy-chained together. Looks like the area under my desk!
Errr… I’m not sure. I mean, they have a computer system that btracks every call made in the US from one location, matter where it gets connecvted from and to, can reproduce a man’s face precisely based on space-based telescopes, and track down shotgun mikes within minutes.
And determine who’s talking on the phone by his voice, out of several million calls.
That’s way better than anything we’ve got now.
Sure you weren’t watching it on a black and white TV I’ve seen 2001 fifty times at least, and I don’t remember black and white displays - unless you are talking about the moon landing shots. I do remember the nixie tubes.
HAL has umpteen displays to control. Now, they do show stuff that is pointless, but they are in color. The hardcopy Bowman and Poole get looks pretty modern also.
The thing that gets me is that having your logo in2001 was the kiss of death. Pan Am, the Bell System, Howard Johnsons as a place that would ever be in orbit. Only IBM seemed to have survived product placement.