I’ve been watching a lot of older TV lately, and I’ve always watched a lot of older movies. I recently started wondering about the way that old TV shows like The Avengers and The Prisoner have a lot of technical aspects that appear incredibly dated - just little things like gun effects (an anemic, firecracker pop and a little trail of white smoke with no recoil), sets and backgrounds, down to editing things like crude cuts and splices and botched dialogue overdubs.
I imagine that this stuff looked as “state of the art” and “current” to its original audience as something like “Lost” or “House, M.D.” does to me - because it was as much of an improvement over the even cruder black-and-white stuff that came before it as “Lost” is over it.
What aspects of our current TV shows and movies will appear “so nineties” or “so 00’s” in thirty years?
I think that current CG will be the thing that dates us the most - even the CG of many late-nineties movies looks and feels almost as amateurish and crude as stop-motion animation from the sixties.
I think it’s not going to be so much the CG itself, but the overuse of it in some movies. Terminator II, for instance, was basically a two-hour-long tech demo, and really, what purpose was served by the “freeze and rotate in midair” effect in The Matrix? Both were special effects for the sake of special effects, not because they furthered the story. Eventually, I think that audiences will get used to the fact that moviemakers can now show anything they can imagine, and won’t need to be constantly reminded of that fact.
I agree that future use of computer graphics will be much more in the lines of Forrest Gump than The Matrix. CGI was used to wipe out Gary Sinese’s legs, and it didn’t seem like a special effect, just a guy that used to have legs in the first part of the movie and now didn’t have any in the second part.
On the other hand, “POP” and a little smoke are really more accurate representations of gunfire than the gigantic recoil and flame and people knocked across the room of today’s movies. Guns make a really loud noise, but it isn’t a particularly interesting noise, just really loud, so loud that you couldn’t duplicate it realistically without risking damage to the audience’s ears.
So certain conventions of today’s movies that aren’t realistic but are just done as movie shorthand will look really dumb. Like computers that “beep” at every keystroke, heck, basically everything with computers will look dumb. Add to that the “shakycam” convention where the camera POV shakes around randomly to simulate a handheld video camera. That’s going to look really weird to future audiences who will grow up on computer-stabilized video cameras.
Clothes and hairstyles always seem to age quite badly. I haven’t a clue where they’ll go from here though, but modern styles are bound to look frumpy in a few decades.
I think that as the library of available television series and movies on DVDs grows, and the distribution systems get ever more sophisticated, what will really seem dated in the future is bad writing.
Nowadays it’s much easier to find and enjoy older, yet high quality work, and eventually we will reach a point where you could conveniently watch outstandingly good television every waking moment- and you still would not be able to watch every seminal series or movie.
In that kind of environment, new, badly written TV, just will not survive. There’s been constant improvement in writing since the advent of TV, but now that we can more easily look back on what was truly good, the new stuff has a higher mark to pass. I think kid’s shows have already been dramatically affected by this- the very substance of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim is the idiocy of old children’s programming, and modern shows have much higher production values and wider appeal.
The same is true with automobiles. Also, social attitudes and habits can date movies and TV shows (e.g., cigarette smoking and consumption of alcohol).
Smoking is a good example. It’s already shocking to watch a sitcom from the 50s or 60s with Mom & Dad smoking away in front of the kids. Very soon audience will react to scenes of smoking the same way we react to spitoons in westerns. Hopefully alot of our silly ways of avoiding nudity (largely confine to American film) will look really outdated. Stuff like those magic L-sheets, gigantic towels that never fall off, etc.
My guess would be the overwhelming preponderence of caucasians, even in roles that are supposed to be depicting asian/indian/arabic characters. Or science fiction shows supposedly depicting a pan-Earth setting where we just somehow mainly see caucasians.
