In The Year 2173
While watching Woody Allen's great 1973 sci-fi comedy Sleeper, I was hit by a few moments that have dated in interesting ways. (Topical humor usually becomes dated quickly, and there's plenty of that in Sleeper, but I'm referring to something else.)
First, there's this gag:
Luna: Everyone is frigid now.
Miles: So all the men are impotent.
Luna: Pretty much, except for those whose ancestors were Italian.
Miles: I knew there was something in that pasta.
This joke must sound odd now when pasta is such an everyday item, but back then, "pasta" sounded exotic. Non-Italians didn't eat "pasta," they ate spaghetti and macaroni.
Second,
a big plot point at the end deals with cloning. It's 2173, and a bunch of doctors taking part in a cloning procedure have the word explained to them. Luna even pronounces it incorrectly.Perfectly understandable--in 1973, even more than pasta, "cloning" was something strange and new. But it plays weird today.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:25 AM
4 Comments:
Following up on this post and yesterday's discussion on monkeys and apes, I recently ran across a vision of the future in re-watching some old "Planet of the Apes" TV series episodes (one of my my son's favorite dvds)
Gorilla General Urko and one of the astronauts get stuck during an earthquake in an old human subway station (albeit from the 21st century of later). The astronaut explains the (paper!) ads on the walls- pharmaceuticals to take before a date to set your mood for the evening. Biodegradable Clothes you just wash off in the shower when you're done with them (must be fun to go people watching on rainy days). Of course the history lesson and effort at simian-human cooperation breakdowns when Urko sees a (somewhat socialist realist style) poster advertising the circus with laughing smiling humans surrounding a caged morose looking gorilla with a big chain collar around his neck (apparently, since we know in this series the apes eventually rose to supplant their human overlords, the PETA point of view must have been completely discarded at some point).
I think there was a traveling exhibit - "Visions of Yesterday's Tomorrows" which I think was at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago back in the mid 80s - I wanted to go but never got around to it-did anybody see it?
NEG
I'd love to see that poster, because everyone knows all circus posters go out of their way to make the animals look enslaved and unhappy.
I used to own a book about how some day we'll go to the moon.
Here's a website that looks at old views of the future. Maybe you should send your info there:
http://www.paleofuture.com/
A lot of good stuff at the paleo website. For instance, exactly a century ago, some predicted we'd be out of food by 1959, and we'd be out of iron and gas well before then.
Thanks for the link LA Guy- Like many of the commenters I am one of those absolutely disappointed in the fact that what has become the future does not include flying cars or at least home helicopters. (Is this like the phone company that sat on cell phone technology for 20 years- traditional car companies seem equally non-innovative)
Post a Comment
<< Home