Futures of the Past

In the fall of 2011 we started showing some classic science fiction films and TV series and their different visions of the future in the evl Cyber-Commons - partly to discuss how views of the future, including modern ones, are influenced by current social and technological trends, but also as a way to get a more common set of experiences. In the first three terms we focused on technology-rich futures, looking at user interfaces, usability, enabling technologies, and broader impacts. Then we skipped a term since we were focusing on getting cave-2 fully functional.

Now we are back for a fourth term and are focusing on showing some of the best or most influential science fiction films that we have not shown so far with a secondary focus on the portrayal of science and scientists.

Many of these films have also recently been remastered for high-definition so they look as good, or in some cases better, than they looked when originally projected or broadcast, and sound as good or better, so even if you have seen them in the past you may not have seen them like this.

Schedule

Notes

More to Explore

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Up next

Spring 2013 Series

5/17/13	1970s  Solaris
5/10/17	1960s - Ray Harryhausen Tribute Jason and the Argonauts
4/26/13	1960s The Outer Limits "Demon with a Glass Hand" & The Twilight Zone "The Invaders"
4/19/13	1970s  Soylent Green
4/12/13	1980s  The Last Starfighter
4/5/13	1980s  Tron
3/29/13	1970s  UFO - Target Earth
3/22/13	1980s  Akira
3/15/13	1980s  The Terminator
3/8/13	1970s  Alien
3/1/13	1970s  Close Encounters of the Third Kind
2/22/13	1950s Gojira (Godzilla)
2/15/13	1980s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
2/8/13	1930s Bride of Frankenstein
2/1/13	1950s Them!
1/25/13	1970s Star Wars
1/18/13	1970s The Andromeda Strain
1/11/13	1950s Plan 9 from Outer Space

Summer 2012 Series (films from the 2000s and Viewer's Choice)

Tom and James were the winners of the summer sci-fi bingo competition.

8/10/12	evl goes to Chicago Comic-Con
8/3/12	1990s Galaxy Quest
7/27/12	1960s The Year of the Sex Olympics
7/20/12	1990s The Fifth Element
7/13/12	1980s Flash Gordon
7/6/12	1980s and 2000s Max Headroom 'Blipverts' Pair of Microsoft Office Labs videos - here and here
6/29/12	1950s The Day the Earth Stood Still
6/22/12	1970s Future Shock & Dark Star

6/15/12	2000s Summer Wars
6/8/12	2000s Global Frequency & Denno Coil
6/1/12	2000s I, Robot
5/25/12	2000s Minority Report
5/18/12	2000s Avalon

Spring 2012 Series (films from the 1960s - 1990s)

Victor and James were the winners of the spring sci-fi bingo competition.

4/25/12	finishing up this series with a quick overview of the last century (and some things we missed along the way) 1902 Voyage dans la lune 1936 final Flash Gordon serial - 'Rocketing to Earth' 1953 and 1958 Warner Brothers Marvin the Martian in  Duck Dodgers and the 241/2th Century and Hare-Way to the Stars 1992 Red Dwarf  'Back to Reality' 1999 Futurama 'Space Pilot 3000'
4/18/12	1990s Ghost in the Shell
4/11/12	1990s Demolition Man
4/4/12	1990s Total Recall
3/28/12	1980s and 1990s short - 1983 - AT&T 'Viewtron' short - 1988 - apple 'knowledge navigator' short - 1993 - AT&T 'You Will' Commercials Star Trek: the Next Generation "Identity Crisis"
3/14/12	1980s Back to the Future II
2/29/12	1980s Mobile Suit Gundam - Char's Counterattack
2/22/12	1980s Blade Runner
2/15/12	1980s Looker
2/8/12	1970s The Six Million Dollar Man "Day of the Robot" Space 1999  "Breakaway"
2/1/12	1960s and 1970s short - Philco-Ford "Year 1999 A.D." feature - Westworld
1/25/12	1970s Silent Running
1/18/12	1960s 2001: a space odyssey
1/11/12	1960s and 1970s Ultraman "Shoot the Invader" Giant Robot "Dracolon - The Great Sea Monster" Science Ninja Team Gatchaman "Gatchaman VS Turtle King"

Fall 2011 Series (films from the 1920s - 1960s)

Solaris (1972)

Jason and the Argonauts (1963) - Ray Harryhausen Tribute

We are going to push Solaris back a week and do a special sci-fi Friday tribute to Ray Harryhausen.

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The Twilight Zone

While 'Star Wars' is the golden child and gets talked about all the time when visitors come by evl, there is another, one that is only spoken of in whispers, and that is 'UFO: Target Earth' from 1974 - evl's first collaboration with the movie business.

A few weeks ago we watched 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', which is one of the best UFO movies, but there were many more UFO movies made in the 1970s, and 'UFO Target Earth' is typical of many of them. With a 2.1 rating on IMDB even Mystery Science Theater 3000 didn't touch this one, but it did get an article in American Cinematographer in July 1974.

To get into the spirit of the thing, here is a screen grab from the film showing the special effects credits - given your experience and available computer technology, can you enhance this frame to see what Tom and Dan were credited with?

Ridley Scott's 1979 film 'Alien' updated Mario Bava's mid 1960s 'Planet of the Vampires' where space travelers investigate a crashed space ship on an alien planet, and the 1950's 'It! the Terror from Beyond Space' where a space crew has to fight off an alien on their ship, from low budget 'B' movies to a big budget film where H.R. Giger's memorable alien designs along with Moebius's space suits and Ron Cobb's ship designs gave the film a unique look

Perhaps still feeling the sting of not having their Star Wars figures out in time for Christmas, Kenner produced one of the greatest toys of the 1970s - an 18" tall 'action figure' of the alien with movable arms, legs, and inner jaw that totally dominated any other toys in the same room. The fact that the film was rated R didn't seem to bother Kenner, but it sure bothered a whole lot of parents, and the toy was quickly removed from shelves. There was also an alien model kit, board game, trading cards, puzzle, and bloody comic adaption from Heavy Metal - all this in the days before films were released onto home video, so the only way for kids to see the film was to have their parents take them, or to sneak in. Fortunately my parents took me to see the film in theaters when I was 14 AND bought me the giant action figure for Christmas. The figure still stands watch over my other toys at home. Check out the commercial on youtube - www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKSv85mJEmY

'Alien' would help spawn over a decade of lower budget 'Alien'-ispired films which only began to ebb when lower budget 'Aliens'-inspired films began to predominate.

This week we look at that other famous giant monster from 1954 -  Gojira

While 'Gojira' was inspired by and follows a similar plot as 'the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms", 'Gojira' had a particular resonance in Japan. The opening of the film where the crew of a fishing boat suffers radiation poisoning came less than a year after sailors from a real Japanese fishing boat were exposed to fallout from the US atomic testing on Bikini. Gojira's attack on Tokyo comes less than a decade after Tokyo, Kobe, and other Japanese cities were firebombed, and atomic weapons were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was also only 30 years since the Great Kanto Earthquake, typhoon, and ensuing fire destroyed a large part of Tokyo.

The US version of 'Gojira' had the Japanese dialogue dubbed into English and also featured new scenes shot with Raymond Burr as a reporter in Japan at the time who would be present at the various important events in the film through the use of body doubles and creative editing. 'Godzilla King of the Monsters' would be a major release in the US in 1956. It was a success in US theaters and would go on to be regularly shown on TV, opening the door for many Japanese science fiction films in the US. We will watch the original Japanese version, but the US version is pretty good to.

During the 1970s it was rather common for late afternoon TV in the US to show soap operas or old movies every day, and regularly twice a year one entire week of the afternoon movie would be taken over by 'monster week' showing the Godzilla films or the Gamera films or other similar fare, so the audience for these films was constantly expanding. Several of the Godzilla films were dubbed and received a theatrical release in the US - I remember seeing two or three in the theatre in the 1970s, as well as Godzilla's return to theatres in the mid 80s after a decade absence. In the 1990s the original versions of the films were finally released onto video in the US. For the last several years one of the main Godzilla conventions has been held near Chicago each summer, and they regularly take over the Pickwick theatre in Park Ridge to show the original films during the convention.

The Godzilla film series is one of the longest running film series, currently at 27 films (28 if you count the US film from 1998) with another US film to come next year. There have been three sets of Godzilla films - 15 films from 1954-1975 when declining box office caused the series to stop, 7 films from 1984-1995 when the series stopped to allow the US film to proceed, and then 5 films from 1999-2004 when declining box office again stopped the series.

Other good Godzilla films include:
King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), Destroy All Monsters (1968), Return of Godzilla (1985), Godzilla, Mothra & King Ghidrah - Giant Monster All out Attack (2001), and for its sheer exuberance the final film, Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), is worth checking out. Unfortunately the Godzilla film that I was in does not make the top list.

While earlier giant monsters like King Kong and the Rhedosuarus from 'the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms' were created through stop motion animation, Godzilla would begin the 'man in suit' style of creating giant monsters. The scale of that suit and the model cities it tramples on have changed over the years. Godzilla was 50m tall (roughly the height of SEO on campus) in the 50s through the 1970s. When Godzilla returned in the 1980s he was 80m tall since buildings had grown much taller. In the 1990s he briefly became 100m tall (the height of University Hall on campus)  before returning to 80m tall in the 2000s. For comparison a Tyrannosaurus Rex is only 6m tall.

The success of 'Star Wars' caused Paramount to rethink their in-production Star Trek Phase II TV series and turn it into 'Star Trek The Motion Picture.' That picture went over budget, becoming the most expensive film made at that time, but it did not do as well as expected critically or commercially. It did well enough to warrant a sequel, but that sequel would be made on a much smaller budget reusing sets, models, props, and footage from the first film to dramatically reduce costs, and it would be the last 'Star Trek' film made unless it did very well. It did very very well, was a critical and commercial success, and is still generally considered to be the best of the 'Star Trek' films.

The first Frankenstein film was Thomas Edison's short 1910 film. The most famous and influential set of films began with 1931's Frankenstein and its first (and slightly better) sequel from 1935: 'Bride of Frankenstein'. Since that time there have been roughly 50 films made, and lots of other variations on the theme, but many of the most iconic moments come from this film.
 
Other good Frankenstein films include the original 1931 'Frankenstein', Mel Brooks' 1974 parody 'Young Frankenstein', 1948's 'Bud Abbot and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein', and 1957's 'The Curse of Frankenstein' where Peter Cushing took over the role of the Baron.  Mel Brooks' 'Young Frankenstein' would re-use many of the same props to create Frankenstein's laboratory in their film..

One sci-fi sub-genre that we have not looked into yet is the 'Giant Monster' genre.

The 'Giant Monster' film genre had its origins in 'the Lost World' of 1925 and 'King Kong' of 1933. The genre really took off in 1953 with 'The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms', where a radioactive dinosaur awoken by atomic testing causes chaos in Manhattan. That film was based on a story by Ray Bradbury and featured special effects by Ray Harryhausen. The following year saw the release of two of the best giant monster films: 'Them!' in the US and 'Godzilla' in Japan.

'Them!' would become the highest grossing film for Warner Bros. studio that year. The following six years saw various studios around the world producing films with giant sea creatures (It Came from Beneath the Sea, Giant Behemoth), arachnids (Tarantula, Earth vs the Spider, Black Scorpion), crustaceans (Attack of the Crab Monsters), reptiles (Giant Gila Monster), worms (Attack of the Giant Leeches), birds (The Giant Claw), insects (The Beginning of the End, Deadly Mantis, Monster from Green Hell), people (The Amazing Colossal Man, Attack of the 50 ft Woman), rocks (The Monolith Monsters), machines (Kronos), elements (The Magnetic Monster), and aliens (The Blob, The Crawling Eye, Caltiki the Undying Monster). Beginning in the 1960s, aside from the continuing Godzilla and Gamera series in Japan, very few giant monster films were released until computer graphics in the late 90s made them practical again.

'Them!' starts out as a police procedural with the suspense building until the reveal of the giant monsters 30 minutes into film, though the surprise of what 'them' are was somewhat reduced by prominently featuring giant ants on the various movie posters.

its 1977 and 20th Century Fox is preparing to release their big budget sci-fi film of the year, the post apocalyptic action adventure 'Damnation Alley.' It did not meet expectations. Fortunately for 20th Century Fox that year they also released a smaller film. Get out your 'Darth Vader Lives' T-shirts, we are going to watch 'Star Wars'.

'Star Wars' was released slowly across the US in '77, starting in less than 40 theaters since it was not expected to do well in a jaded and cynical post-Vietnam post-Watergate US. Within three months it had expanded to 1000 theaters across the US. The hype built person to person and spread organically since the studio didn't know what they had, so people across the country 'discovered' 'Star Wars' in the way you discover a smaller independent film because you heard about it from a friend and not from an advertising campaign. I was 10 when I saw 'Star Wars' in St Louis when my family visited my brother there, and then we came back to Detroit and there was no evidence of its existence. Star Wars was only playing in one theatre on the other side of town. It was an odd experience having seen something special and then having to wait for the wave of its existence to make it to my neighborhood.

People also started seeing the film multiple times in the theatre on the first run. This was before home video so the only way to see a film again was to go to a smaller revival theatre for a second run, and people did that for older films. Here people were going back again and again to a first run film. I saw 'star wars' at least four times that summer as more and more people I knew 'discovered' the film and wanted to go see it.

Since the film was not expected to do well there was no Star Wars merchandise available aside from the novelization and the very quick production of T-shirts and buttons. Six months later at Christmas you could buy a base for the unreleased action figures along with a card saying you will get your figures in a few months.

'Star Wars' was the second time that evl (then the circle graphics habitat) worked on a film. The first was 1974's 'UFO: Target Earth', which would be in the IMDB bottom 100 if more people had actually seen it. There were no hints that 'Star Wars' would be any different.

What we are going to watch is, more or less, the way 'Star Wars' was seen in theaters in 1977, not 'Star Wars Episode IV' from 1981, or 'Greedo shoots first Star Wars' from 1997, or 'Greedo and Han shoot at the same time Star Wars' from 2007. Depending on where and when you saw 'Star Wars' in '77 there were two slightly different prints, two print sizes - 35 mm and 70 mm, and three different audio mixes (mono, stereo, 6 channel) with different content, so like 'the Hobbit' you had a different experience depending on the theatre you saw it in. Theatres were also a whole lot bigger then, before the dark times, before the multiplexes, with a single auditorium seating 500 to 1000 people with really really big screens, so its almost impossible today to recreate the huge impact of seeing and hearing and feeling the opening shot of 'Star Wars'.

This week - The original 1971 version of The Andromeda Strain. Our third Michael Crichton film was based on the 1969 novel of the same name and features one of the most realistic depictions of scientists in a dramatic film, also some pretty cool set design, a nice electronic music score, and a good example of late 60's early 70s split screen work.

An alien life form hitches a ride back to earth on a satellite, but unlike many sci-fi films it does not rapidly grow into a man in a suit terrorizing small town villagers, or grow into a very large man in a suit trampling model cities. It confines its terrorizing to the microscopic level.

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To celebrate evl's new popcorn machine and large amount of organic popcorn from Alan and I, sci-fi Fridays will start up again this Friday at 12:30 in the cyber-commons with Ed Wood's 1956 film: 'Plan 9 from Outer Space'

While not the worst movie ever made, it is certainly a very badly made movie, but also a very very enjoyable one. Wondrously inept in almost every conceivable way, Ed Wood's anti-war alien invasion film would eventually inspire Tim Burton's 1994 Film 'Ed Wood' which covers many of the 'high points' of the production of this film.

Other entertaining bad movies in the same genre and time period include:

• Bride of the Monster (1955)
• Beast of Yucca Flats (1961)
• Monster a Go-Go (1965)
• The Creeping Terror (1964)
• Robot Monster (1953)
  

We have taken a look at adaptions of stories by several major science fiction writers, but one we have not encountered so far is Nigel Kneale. He is most famously known as the creator of the Quatermass series on TV and in the movies. In 1954 he adapted 1984 for television and in 1968 created his own dystopian future where an overpopulated planet is divided into the few 'high drives' who run the government and the media, and the many passive 'low drives' who are encouraged to watch but not do. Taking this to the extreme is the The Live Life Show where the television audience can watch a small group of people 24 hours a day on an island - yes, its the birth of reality television as part of a dystopic parable.

The original broadcast was in color, and apparently in a lot of color, but no color videotape survives, only a black and white version, which was only found in the 1980s after the program was presumed lost.

Luc Besson's 1997 film is one of those movies that a director 'has always wanted to make since his/her childhood.' These kinds of vanity projects tend to go to extremes and this film embraces that. With Moebius (Jean Giraud) on the production design team the film has a very different style from the typical Hollywood future.

An early cyberpunk TV series, Max Headroom started as a made for TV movie created by Channel 4 in the UK in 1985. Two years later it was remade, almost shot for shot, with the same lead actors as the first episode of the ABC Max Headroom TV series, which lasted 14 episodes. We are going to watch the US version; the original UK version is not commercially available but can be found in the dark corners of the internets.

Notes on Microsoft Office Labs Videos

These videos were made in 2008 and 2011 by Microsoft Office Labs  to show how people might interact with computers / displays / each other in 2019.

Future Shock was a book written but Alvin Toffler in 1970 with the core idea that society and technology were changing too fast for people to be able to adapt, causing a high degree of stress. He popularized the term 'information overload.' This film version was made in 1972.


Dark Star was John Carpenter's first feature in 1974, starting out as a student film and going through several iterations of added, removed, and edited footage; we are going to see the shorter Director's Cut. The film was budgeted at $60,000 (or about $250,000 today) so it will be one of the least expensive views of the future we have seen so far. Appearing after Silent Running but before Star Wars it would be the first film to show space travel as just a job, and not very glamorous  - a theme that would be revisited by screenplay writer Dan O'Bannon in Alien.

A small crew is on a long term mission to destroy unstable planets to make way for human colonization. Unfortunately the ship and the crew members are starting to break down.

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Notes on Summer Wars

in the 1950s and early 60s two great Japanese directors, Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, made very different 'Japanese' films, Kurosawa more action/adventure, Ozu more personal. Almost all Japanese futuristic films have followed the Kurosawa model; Summer Wars (2009) by Mamoru Hosoda, is more of an Ozu film, dealing with family issues and personal relationships at the same time as the world's massive online world OZ is coming under attack.

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Global Frequency started as a 12 issue comic series in 2002 (now available on comixology) and then became a TV pilot in 2005 but it didn't go on to become a TV series.

Global frequency was a cross between the X-files and the 1960's Mission Impossible TV series. In the 1960s Jim Phelps would be given his mission and then choose the most appropriate agents from a binder of photographs at the beginning of each episode (though his team pretty much always included exactly the same people). Now with cellphones and immediate access to information about almost anyone on the planet a much more dynamic solution to problems becomes available.


Denno Coil was a 26 episode TV series in 2007. The series is  set in a future city where augmented reality eyeglasses are commonplace allowing an almost complete merging of real and virtual worlds.

'Avalon' was Mamoru Oshii's first film after 'Ghost in the Shell', teaming up with the same writer and composer, but filmed in Poland with an entirely Polish cast and help from the Polish military. If you recall our discussion about the computer graphics going from green to amber in 'Ghost in Shell' between its original release and re-release, here is where Oshii first went amber. I think 'Avalon' was the first, and perhaps only film to get the concept role playing games right.

While the 2000s weren't that long ago and people may actually remember these things, I figure I would complete my set of notes on the new tech of the various decades, so here we go:

in the 2000s

GPS goes mainstream with small receivers for cars and hikers

wireless networking goes mainstream in the early part of the decade and cellular by the end of the decade

video conferencing becomes more common in the early part of the decade as webcams or built-in cameras become more common

In the second half of the decade social media would take off in dramatic fashion with Facebook, twitter, etc.

text messaging surges in popularity as smart phones are used less and less as actual phones

in the second half of the decade flat panel displays quickly replace tube-based displays

RFID tags gain popularity for tracking merchandise, people. etc.

minimally invasive surgery becomes much more common

digital high definition (and widescreen) television replaces analog NTSC TV in the US


and in particular years:

2000 PlayStation 2 released with a DVD drive, 300 MHz processor, and 36 MB of RAM, eventually selling over 150 million consoles with over 1.5 billion games sold.

2000 first Prius hybrid car released

2001 iPod (max 10 gig of music) became as ubiquitous as the Sony Walkman of the 1980s or the transistor radio of the 1950s. The music industry is slow to react.

2001 windows xp released with minimum system requirements of (300 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM, 800x600 monitor, 1.5 GB free hard drive space)

2002 cell phones with cameras begin appearing

2002 Roomba is introduced. Eventually 6 million of them will be robotically cleaning floors in homes (and biding their time)

2003 DVRs appear, allowing you to record TV digitally onto a hard drive

2004 Spirit and Opportunity Rovers land on mars and drive around for many years

2005 YouTube begins operation

2005/6 Xbox 360 and PS3 released. PS3 incorporated a Blu-ray drive, 3.2 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB hard drive, Wi-Fi.

2006 Nintendo wii appears and introduces gestural interaction to the masses

2006 Pluto demoted to dwarf planet (as measurement tools have increased in accuracy, Pluto's estimated size and mass has continued to shrink since its discovery from roughly the size of the Earth to 1/500th that of the Earth)

2007 smart phones, including the iPhone, change everything again. Touch screens dramatically gain in popularity.

2008 Amazon Kindle appears. The publishing industry is slow to react.

2009 avatar brings 3D movies back (again) after the short 3D booms in the 1950s and the 1980s - the basic passive stereo projection technology however remains largely unchanged over those 60 years.

Ghost in the Shell was directed by Mamoru Oshii (who directed lots of great animated and live action TV shows and films like Urusei Yatsura, Angel's Egg, Patlabor, Avalon) and based on on comics by Masamune Shirow (who's stories revolve around the integration of humans and technology in the near future) with music by Kanji Kawai and a screenplay by Kazunori Ito (both of which also do lot of great films and TV series)

The year is 2029. Cyborgs are common and people have varying levels of prosthetic implants allowing limb or organ replacement, and the transfer of human consciousness into a fully mechanical body. Implants give the benefit of constant connectivity to the net without external interfaces, but also allow hacking into someone's body. A recurring theme is whether machines in this inter-connected world can develop a soul or 'ghost' in this environment.

We are going to look at the original version of the film from 1995. There is also version 2.0 (not to be confused with Ghost in the Shell 2, the sequel, or Ghost in the Shell - Standalone Complex, the TV series that followed). Ghost in the Shell 2.0 was released in 2008 and added more computer graphics, changed the film's color pallet, and featured a new impressive sound mix. All of the various incarnations of Ghost in the Shell are worth reading / watching.

We are up to 1990s and a few years away from the internet changing everything.


tech in the 80s:

atm machines become commonplace - no more talking to a human at a bank when you need to get cash

1990 hubble space telescope launched to take pictures from above the atmosphere, and we see a lot more colour in the sky than ever before
   
1990 human genome project begins and is completed 13 years later

1993 - multi-platform mosaic web browser is released replacing gopher, ftp, and beginning the move from a small text based internet community to a page layout graphical one for the world. Within a couple years Netscape and Internet Explorer would appear based on ideas and/or code from mosaic. By the end of the 90s isolated online communities like America On-Line (AOL) and Compuserve are left behind

similarly email becomes widespread two decades after the first email was sent with services like Hotmail providing email access through the web. By the end of the 1990s there were over 550 million email addresses worldwide (330 million in the US) and in the US 2/3rds of workplaces and 1/4 of homes had email

1993 doom released and the pattern of the first person shooter are set down.

1993 apple newton released as the first serious PDA. It fails but in 1996 the palm pilot appears and succeeds

1994 and 1995 - visible human datasets released

1994 amazon starts selling books on the web (and eventually a whole lot more) - no more need to talk to a human to buy a book

1995 toy story premiers and theatrical animation is dragged in to the computer graphics age

1997 dvds begin to replace VHS and laserdiscs for home video

1997 sojourner rover starts driving around mars

1997 netflix founded - no more need to talk to a human to rent a video

1998 construction of International Space Station begins

digital still cameras start becoming popular. By the late 1990s these cameras would have 1-megapixel resolution (no more talking to a person to get your pictures developed a few days later)

cell phone (just phones, not smart phones) usage would go from 5 million in 1990 to 100 million by 2000 (and 300 million in 2010)

fueled by the internet boom pc ownership jumps from 55 million PCs in the US in 1990 to 140 million by 1999

In the 1990s we carried around lots of devices, none of which connected to the internet - digital cameras, PDAs for our appointments and quick notes, portable game players. and cell phones to talk to people

in the mid 1990s PCs had:

• single CPU at 50-100mhz
• 8 MB ram
• 512 MB hard drives
• 800 x 600 pixel monitors

and with that context - Total Recall - 1990

Ten years after Blade Runner we get a second big budget film based on a Philip K Dick story. This time Arnold Schwarzenegger stars and Paul Verhoeven directs (right after his success with another Robocop).

Ridley Scott +  Syd Mead + Philip K. Dick + Vangelis = one of the most memorable futures of the past. A commercial failure at the time, its appearance alongside the birth of cyberpunk in written form would have a much stronger influence in later years.

While I would normally prefer to show the version of the film that was shown in theaters in 1982, the 2007 'Final Cut' fixes a few errors in the original and is closer to the original intent for the film without introducing any 'Greedo shoots first' annoyances.

Looker was the first film to use shaded computer graphics for a very short sequence, and also the first film to deal seriously with the concept of computer generated virtual humans, scanning human beings to create those characters, and combining virtual and computer generated elements in real time - things that are common today, though the details are a little different when seen from 1981.

tech in the 80s:

There were several wonderful new things that could be done with your phone in the 1980s that still exist today:
- fax machines
- answering machines

The phone system also enabled bulletin board systems (BBSs), a DIY internet at 300 or 1200 bits per second run from individual PCs scattered around the country/world. They supported text only conversations, and often only one person could log in at a time, but you could set one up in your basement with an extra phone line and a dedicated computer, and they would lead to more general services like compuserve and America online, and eventually to all of the online conversations today.

While phones were still hard-wired you could carry around a small battery powered pager/beeper to get notified that you should find a phone and call someone - kind of like an 1980s version of twitter

Television changed from over the air to cable, taking people from 10 local channels to 100 national channels, 24 hour channels, and the first channels dedicated to particular topics.

The mid 80s would see the first major resurgence of 3D cinema, using the same passive polarization technology of the first 3D boom in the 1950, which is the same passive polarization technology of recent years. Red/Blue glasses were used to try and bring the 3D experience to TV screens but without a big hit like Avatar or computer generated animated films to keep the trend going, the resurgence was very short lived.

In the early 1980s you could carry around the music you wanted to hear on a Sony walkman with cassette tapes.You could also watch music videos all day on MTV as rock stars were suddenly expected to have hit videos as well as hit songs. By the end of the 80s you could carry a GameBoy around with you as the first popular portable video game system.

Personal computers were becoming more common and display resolution was up to 640 x 480. Computers would gain mice and graphical user interfaces. Storage would move from 5&1/4" floppy discs to 3&1/2" discs (looking a lot like what they used in star trek in the 60s) with 800kB of storage per side. Laser printers would replace dot matrix printers allowing people to make professional looking printed documents.

CDs would replace LPs for music distribution and would dominate for a quarter of a century. CDROMs would begin to replace floppy discs for software distribution by the end of the decade and would have more storage than a typical hard disc drive until the mid 1990s.

Laser discs would appear for home video distribution with double the resolution of VHS tapes, and while they never replaced VHS, they would innovate by giving viewers films in their original aspect ratio, audio commentaries, and special features that have become standard on DVDs.

1981 saw the first space shuttle flight. The two Voyagers would continue to give us images of the outer planets throughout the decade - 1979 Jupiter, 1980 Saturn, 1986 Uranus, 1989 Neptune, US and Soviet missions would give us views of Venus, while a European mission would get close to Halley's comet

Steve Austin, the last man to walk on the moon, is seriously injured during a NASA test flight. As the opening credits briefly explain, he is rebuilt as a cyborg, or 'bionic' man, at a cost of six million dollars (25 million in inflation adjusted dollars today). While initially working as a secret agent and traveling around the world, the series producers quickly determined that they needed things that were difficult for Steve to fight, so four episodes into the series we get the first robot adversary, which would lead to several more encounters with robotic impostors, aliens, and Bigfoot, as the science-fiction elements would start to dominate the five years the series was on TV. This particular episode would start an incredible number of slow motion fights on the playground.

We last left Gerry and Silvia Anderson when they were producing Thunderbirds. Three supermarionation TV series, and two live TV action series later brings us to the most expensive TV series made to that time - Space 1999. Set on the moon 25 years in the future, the look of the series was obviously influenced by 2001, though the production designers would create several memorable designs of their own. While the computer interfaces are pretty primitive with lots of buttons and few displays, the characters routinely carry a 1970s vision of a PDA/cellphone.

First up is a view of the year 1999 from 1967 made by Philco-Ford. Philco was known for making radios starting in the 1920s and became one of the major radio manufacturers before moving into TVs and computers. They were acquired by Ford Motor Company in the early 1960s. This short 20 minute documentary describes home life in the far off year of 1999.

Michael Crichton has written various books and scripts about near-future technology, and has visited the theme of an amusement park run amuck as its underlying technology fails a couple times. This was the first. The pace of technological change, glacial by today's standards, was concerning people, and the widespread introduction of computers would really begin to speed up that pace of change. Westworld has the first digitally processed imagery in a motion picture, as we enter the time of computer graphics in film. It would take 5 days of computer time to produce 2 and a half minutes of final footage.

With regards to the space program, after the near cancellation of apollo 16 and 17 and the real cancellations of apollo 18-20, the US stopped going to the moon in 1972, but we did have Skylab in orbit from 1973 until its flaming wreckage crashed into australia in 1979 and the Soviet Union had their series of Salyut Space Stations. Robotic space exploration really began to flourish as the Soviet Venera 9 probe sent back photos from Venus in 1975, the two Viking landers successfully arrived on Mars in 1976, and the two Voyager probes were launched on their grand tour of the gas giants in 1977.

- 1977 first mass produced Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs). Note that at this point Hollywood was against putting movies on tape so you still could only catch old movies on TV (edited and in the wrong aspect ratio) or in 2nd run theaters (with so-so projectors, and breaks in the films), or you had the read the novelization of the movie, or read the comic book version.You could record TV on a VCR but it cost $15 to by a blank tape to record 2 hours.

- 1977 apple ][ and the TRS-80 were introduced as the first successful personal computers. Their programs were initially loaded from cassette tape, or typed in by hand each time you wanted to run them. A year later disk drives with 5&1/4 discs would appear with 120kB storage per side.

Silent Running was released in march 1972. In the four years since 2001 was released we had landed on the moon four times, with two more missions to come in 1972. The shiny 2001 future is starting the turn to a darker vision as people are asking what we are giving up in exchange for that bright technological world. Social and environmental issues that had been simmering for a long time were now more in the public consciousness. New directors were being given a chance to try to appeal to that social consciousness in youth that wanted heroes that would fight, or ignore the system. Silent Running would become 2001's hippie counter-cultural sibling.

Other good dystopian films of the time include: Soylent Green, Rollerball, Logan's Run, THX-1138, Sleeper, Death Race 2000, A Boy and his Dog.

Most robots in science fiction films to this time looked like people, with some exceptions like the very mechanical robots in Gog or the robot from Silent Star. Silent Running would show a different kind of robot - looking mechanical, but with the personality of a humanoid robot.

Hey look! this film has a rating. Its rated G for General Audiences. The Motion Picture Code that ensured all films shown in the US were 'suitable' was gone in late 1968, and in its place was the MPAA rating system. At the time the ratings were G(general), M(mature), R(restricted). The M rating would soon be renamed GP and then renamed again as PG, and those ratings would stand until the Temple of Doom ripped the heart out of the rating system in 1984.

2001 was released in April 1968. At a time when traveling to the moon (we hadn't landed on it yet) was exciting and dangerous, Stanley Kubrick would look 30 years into the future and show space travel as routine, yet still giving us a view of the near future that Walt Disney or Wernher Von Braun would have approved of. 2001 would probably be the high point of the bright beautiful future, aside from one or two orbiting weapons platforms, some mutual US / Soviet distrust, and a couple bugs in the computer programming.

Most computers in movies and TV were good at crunching numbers and giving answers with their inputs moving from cards and dials and buttons to voice. We began seeing more display screens at the end of the 60s, but in the context of the stories they were almost always used to show images from cameras rather than computer generated information. In the late 60s some sci-fi computers moved beyond being a useful tool and started thinking and reasoning and making decisions on their own, and not always in the best interest of the humans around them. Captain Kirk would talk at least three computers to death in Star Trek, but couldn't run his ship without them - a topic Kirk and Spock would regularly revisit.

In real life there was concern about computers replacing people in jobs as computation and automation do what mechanization had done before, and with the increasing 'intelligence' of computers, people were forced to think about what makes us 'human.'

Eiji Tsubaraya had been in charge of the special effects for all the Toho Studios science fiction films including the Godzila series. In 1966 he created a black and white TV series called Ultra Q with a small group investigating strange phenomena. The sequel to that series would be in color and was called 'Ultraman'. 45 years and 18 TV series later the concept is still going strong. This series takes place 25 years in the future in the 1990s. Ultraman is a 40 meter tall alien from 'nebula m78' who accidentally kills Hayata, a member of the Science Special Search Party, who are tasked with investigating strange phenomena like in Ultra Q, except with the advantage of an international organization, a spiffy headquarters, jet aircraft, and energy weapons. Ultraman brings Hayata back to life and gives him the power to call / transform into Ultraman when needed, which is about once per episode. This episode is the second of the series and introduces what will become Ultraman's main recurring enemy - the Baltans.

Giant Robot  - Dracolon - The Great Sea Monster (67)
The first giant robot that started it all was Tetsujin 28 (Gigantor in the US) created by Mitsuteru Yokoyama in comic form in 1956 and then in TV form in 1963. Tokoyama would then create Giant Robo (Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot in the US). His giant robots were controlled by a person on the ground, typically a young boy, and featured pretty outrageous villains and a high amount of violence. This is the first episode of Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot.

Science Ninja Team Gatchaman - Gatchaman VS Turtle King (72)
Gatchaman would be the first team focused sci-fi series in Japan, drawing on the success of the modern ninja team TV series Ninja Butai Gekko and spawning many more multi-coloured animated and live action teams. The bad guys, Galactor, are trying to invade earth using giant mechanical monsters operated by their soldiers. The good guys, the International Science Organization, do not have their own giant robot, or help from friendly giant aliens, so they must typically infiltrate the alien monster or base and destroy the machinery, usually while killing large numbers of the bad guys. This is the first episode of Gatchaman.

The Giant Robot genre would continue to evolve for several more years. In 1972 Go Nagai, creator of Devilman, Cutey Honey, and the list goes on and on, would create his own giant robot - Mazinger Z - which was the first giant robot piloted from the inside by a pilot in the head of the robot, and in 1974 he created Getter Robo - the first giant robot that would be formed from several components in different combinations. The Giant Robot genre would fade by the end of the 1970s when it was replaced by a more realistic depiction of robots and their pilots in Mobile Suit Gundam, which we will get to in a few weeks.

Notes on The Prisoner and Star Trek

The Prisoner - Patrick McGoohan had a successful three season run in the mid 60s on TV in Britain (Danger Man) and the US (renamed as Secret Agent) as a secret agent that used his brain more than his gun. When the studio asked for a follow on series he pitched a series that asked what would happen to a secret agent if he quit. Instead of a straight action/adventure series he gave them a very personal 17 episode series that dealt with issues of the place of the individual in society.

Star Trek - Its the 22nd or 23rd century (the mythology was still evolving at this point), human beings can move between star systems in days, there are lots of alien races out there (who mostly look like humans), and there is a lot of casual use of advanced technology, especially communications technology, computers, and sensors. 'Obsession' is not one of the best episodes, but it is a pretty representative one, and features a good variety of the technology used in the series. Star Trek lasted 3 seasons (79 episodes) and then went onto a successful run in syndication which spawned a Saturday morning animated series and then production on a second TV series which, thanks to Star Wars, would lead to its rebirth in movie theaters in the late 70s.

Both series would often deal with social issues in a science-fiction setting, where the technology acted a backdrop, allowing the writers to deal with topical issues in a novel setting, while still allowing the characters to have fist-fights.


Other sci-fi TV from the 60s that are worth checking out include anthology series such as 'the Outer Limits' (in particular the episode 'demon with a glass hand') and 'the Twilight Zone', the first season of 'Lost in Space', and pretty much anything Nigel Kneale wrote in the UK.

In the 1960s the number of sci-fi TV shows multiplied dramatically; we will spend a couple weeks looking at a few of them.

This time will be the peak of the positive future, before the social and ecological movements of the late 60s turned people's attentions back to real problems in the present, and started to color much darker views of the future.

There were a handful of producers in the US and Britain that would shape TV science fiction in the US in the 60s and 70s - Irwin Allen, Gerry Anderson, Gene Roddenberry, and Glen Larson. We will start with Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds.

Gerry Anderson would create several sci-fi tv series from the 60s to the 00s - some in live-action and others with marionettes. Thunderbirds is his most famous series, and ran for 32 episodes. The series takes place in the middle of the 21st century and follows the adventures of the Tracy family who form International Rescue and use a variety of futuristic vehicles and technology to accomplish their missions.

Our second feature is the Disneyland episode 'EPCOT' in which Walt Disney gives his final filmed appearance in a pitch to create the city of tomorrow. Walt Disney's vision for EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) was that this community would be a living, evolving, testbed to prototype communities of the future.


A few notes on the 60s in terms of personal technology:

• telephones were cabled to the wall, but now you could push buttons 0-9 to 'dial' the number rather than using a dial to dial each number
  
  
• transistor radios allowed people to listen to radio broadcasts (including music) wherever they wanted (though usually places like the beach or the park.)
  
  
• colour photography was now available to everyone with portable cameras. Once you took a roll of pictures you had to take the film roll to a drugstore or photo shop to get the pictures developed, and they would be ready for you in a few days or a week. These photos were often developed into slides - which were put into slide projector carousels (see the 'Mad Men' episode for more on this) and then shown at home on a projection screen.
  
  
• home (silent) movie cameras now popular. You could carry a camera with you and shoot 3 minutes at a time and then change the cartridge. These cameras needed a lot of light, so they worked well outside. Inside you needed a massive light rig, brighter than anything Lance has used. Again you took the film into a drugstore or a photo shop and saw the results a week later, projected at home from a movie projector onto that same screen you used for  slides.
  
  
• cassette tape players/recorders appeared - You could conveniently record audio through a small hand-held microphone and playback that audio. The tapes could hold 30 to 45 minutes per side. Music was still sold as vinyl records (45s or LPs), but you could hold the mike up to the speaker of your home stereo system to record it if you wanted something portable.

 
and in terms of the space race, it would still be two more years (1968) before anyone orbited the moon, but every month or two astronauts and cosmonauts were sent up to orbit the earth, and unmanned probes had orbited and landed on the moon.

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Notes on Forbidden Planet

This week we are back in 1956. While many 50s science fiction films were low budget 'monster of the loose' fare with various creatures being mutated by atomic radiation, Forbidden Planet (1956) stands among a handful of 50s sci-fi films that succeeded in being something more.

Other very good and highly recommended 50s sci-fi films include:
    Gojira
    It Came from Outer Space
    Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    Them!
    The Day the Earth Stood Still
    The Thing From Another World
    The Incredible Shrinking Man

'Forbidden Planet' was one of the first films that took place completely on and around another planet in another solar system (in this case Altair - 17 light years from Earth). It was one of the first science fiction films filmed in Cinemascope with stereo sound, and had the first all electronic music score. It also introduced Robby the Robot.

The film was a clear and acknowledged influence on Gene Roddenberry's 'Star Trek' a decade later and would supply props to a dozen 'Twilight Zone' episodes.

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Notes on Man and the Moon and The Jetsons

At this point we've progressed from silent films in the 20s to talkies and serials in the 30s to colour films in the early 50s, and now … television!

In 1946 there were only 6000 TVs in the US compared to almost 40 million radios. By 1955 half of US homes had a TV and by 1960 there were 50 million TV sits in the US. Most programming was broadcast by the three national networks: CBS, NBC, ABC (which began as radio networks) on their affiliated local stations. Few programs were broadcast in color until the mid 60s, though several were filmed in color. In 1964 only 3% of TVs were color TVs. Half of US homes would not have a color TV until 1972.


We will start with an episode of 'Disneyland' (later to become The Wonderful World of Disney), a one hour weekly tv anthology series with a mixture of live action, animation, documentaries, and dramas. This episode is 'Man and the Moon' which was aired December 28, 1955 and looks back at the history of mans relationship with the moon and forward to man building a space station and journeying to the moon and mars.

The second is an episode from the 1962 cartoon series 'The Jetsons' which takes place in the year 2062. This episode is 'Jet Screamer'. 'The Flintstones' was a very successful TV series which ran from 1960 to 1966. If a series set in the stone age worked, why not a series set in the future? It was the first program broadcast in color on ABC. Unfortunately the Jetsons only lasted one season but used animation to create a memorable futuristic earth.

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Notes on Destination Moon

In the previous weeks we have looked at films that took place a hundred years in the future. This week we are going to take a look at a film from 1950 that attempts to portray how man will get to the moon using the prevailing engineering concepts of the time, 7 years before sputnik, 11 years before Gagarin orbited, and 20 years before the moon landing happened.

'Destination Moon' features artwork by Chesley Bonestell who was THE artist illustrating the near future of spaceflight in the 50s. It also features a screenplay co-written by Robert Heinlein. Destination Moon won the academy award for special effects and a Hugo (top yearly science fiction awards) for best dramatic presentation

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Notes on Things to Come

'Things to Come' features a screenplay by H. G. Wells based on his 1933 book 'The Shape of Things to Come' and looks at what will happen in the next 100 years on Earth.

It had a budget of 300,000 pounds (1 million dollars) in 1936 or 17 million pounds (26 million dollars) today

The screenplay by h g wells was based on his book 'the shape of things to come'. Wells wanted his film to be more realistic than metropolis. This is the 92 minute version (10-15 minutes shorter than original version)

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Notes on Flash Gordon

Some information on movie serials:

Each week a theatre would show one chapter - typically ending in a cliffhanger (sometimes literally the hero or heroine hanging off the edge of a cliff) to bring people back next week to see how the cliffhanger was resolved

The serial was shown along with newsreel, cartoon, A movie, and B movie
Serials started in the silent era around 1910, ended by 1950

There were three flash gordon serials. This is the first with 13 episodes. It was the first science fiction serial. It was based on the Sunday flash gordon comic strip by Alex Raymond which ran from 1934 to 1943 and is still being reprinted (I have a full set)



The Hays motion picture code began in 1934 but not fully enforced yet so the first Flash Gordon serial is truer to the comics than the later two.

Adjusting for inflation Flash Gordon would cost about 8 million today for its 13 half hour episodes so its similar to what an original series on the sci-fi channel costs to make. It was the most expensive serial made. Most were westerns, though several featured super heroes (Batman, Captain America, Zorro, Captain Marvel, The Green Hornet) … some things don't change

There is a lot of talk of 'rays' in Flash Gordon, especially by Dr Zarkov - they were the techno-babble buzzword of choice at the time

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Notes on Metropolis

- silent films had a score that was performed live in the theater, commonly by a small symphony in a large theatre or an organist in a smaller theater, which was synchronized to the action on screen - in the case of Metropolis this is the original Gottfried Huppertz score from 1926 performed in 2010 by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra.

- silent films often had tinted scenes e.g. for scenes taking place at night that section of the film would be entirely blue tinted, scenes in a forest would be green, scenes inside would be yellow, scenes with a fire would be red. Fritz Lang did not like tinting and didn't use it.

- Lang also used many fewer textual intertitles than was common at the time

- Metropolis' budget was equivalent to 200 million dollars today.

- at the time Metropolis was made, in 1926, sound films were starting to appear, similar to the current 3D boom in many ways. Don Juan, the year before, had music and sound effects recorded live on set and synced to the movie. The Jazz Singer, which premiered less than a year after Metropolis, was the first feature length film with (a bit of) spoken dialogue recorded along with the film. The Jazz Singer made a lot of money and the days of the silent movie were about to end.

- in the US the Hays Motion Picture Production Code wont be imposed for 8 more years so in 1927 you could pretty much do whatever you wanted on screen

- when I first saw Metropolis in the theater in the late 1970s it was only about 90 minutes long, with the film having been edited rather brutally after its premiere. Bit by bit the other missing 90 minutes of the film have mostly been recovered and re-integrated, though there are still a few scenes (about 8 minutes) missing. The quality of this print varies depending on what source it was taken from.


at the time in the 20s …

• skyscrapers being rapidly built, and growing taller and taller
• current design styles were modern / art deco /  bauhaus
• in the Weimar Republic in Germany a stable situation after years of inflation and reparations from 'the war to end all wars'
• Hollywood pushing US culture (including jazz) abroad
• women had gained the right to vote throughout the US only 7 years earlier

in the US (with a population of 115 million people) technology becoming a commodity …

• radio stations just starting to appear - radios in the home became very popular very quickly
• number of movie theaters rapidly increasing
• cars selling well with 23 million by 1927 and a new focus on creating better roads for them to drive on
• 15 million telephones in homes and businesses
• cities had electricity and indoor plumbing - rural areas did not

popular science fiction authors of the time ...

• Edgar Rice Burroughs
• H. G. Wells
• Jules Verne (from 1870s and 1880s)
• magazines like amazing stories start in 20s
  
  

If you were intrigued by today's feature and like to try some other silent films then I would recommend:

• Robert Wiene - Cabinet of Dr Caligari
• Buster Keaton - The General, Steamboat Bill Jr
• F. W. Murnau - Nosferatu, Sunrise
• Charlie Chaplin - Gold Rush, Modern Times
• Sergei Eisenstein - Battleship Potemkin

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More to Explore

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Here are some alternatives for further exploration. If we have more time, or if we decide to start over and do this again, these would be in the next set ...

• 1950s
• Radar Men from the Moon serial
• Rocky Jones Space Ranger TV series
• It the Terror from Beyond Space
• The Thing from Another World
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers

• 1960s
• Silent Star (East Germany)
• Battle in Outer Space (Japan)
• Planet of Vampires (Italy)
• Alphaville (France)
  
• Lost in Space TV Series
• UFO TV Series (UK)
  
  
• 1970s
• Colossus: the Forbin Project 
• Rollerball
• Logan's Run
• Death Race 2000
  
• Space Battleship Yamato TV Series (Japan)
  
  
• 1980s
• Brazil
• 1984
• Dune
• Buckaroo Banzai
  
• Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back
  
• Robocop
• Aliens
  
• Patlabor (TV series and/or Movies, Japan)
• My Youth in Arcadia (Japan)
  
  
• 1990s
• Strange Days
• Jurassic Park
• Dark City
• The Matrix
• Terminator 2
  
• Babylon 5 TV Series