Thanks For The Memories
One of the delights of watching old movies and TV is to experience different mindsets. It's always a useful reminder that what seems normal now wasn't always considered such.
When it comes to jokes, sometimes it dates them. Occasionally it makes them seem prescient.
Beverly Hills is so ritzy it's the only city that has parking meters that take credit cards.
Fascinating. Back then the idea of using a credit card for a parking meter seemed absurd, but now it's commonplace.
My only question: is this progress?
posted by LAGuy @ 12:03 AM
3 Comments:
I love stories like this. We never really appreciate what our underlying assumptions are until they change. In the 60s, I think they envisioned helicopter cars, ray guns and jet packs but not easy to use credit for all transactions and the demise of physical pieces of money and smart phones (OK Star Trek did anticipate some of that but smart phones do way more than the communicators although communicators could lock in your location much more exactly).
One of my favorite visions of the future came in The Planet of the Apes TV show where the astronaut and General Urko get trapped in and "Old time"/futuristic San Francisco subway station. Everything futuristic the astronaut mentioned just seemed so wrong. Everything from clothes you just washed down the sink after you finished wearing them, to use of mood pills (as a good thing) for everyone- but of course that future had no animal rights appreciation in it and the man-ape rapprochement breaks and the gorilla general finds a circus poster joyously showing an ape held in slave-imagery chains while humans gawk in amusement
Blah Blah Blah- sorry- I enjoy these morning digressions
I agree that you'll look at futuristic astronaut stuff, like flights to Mars, except only white men are allowed on missions. (Though nowadays, despite what they're saying about the Oscars, if you see any groups anywhere in a movie--a hospital, a precinct, a Mars mission--you can be sure the group will be a rainbow coalition.)
Remember the film "Logan's Run?" I think they predicted Tinder.
However, I'm always surprised that in that future, they had perfected teleportation, but then only used it for hookups. Indeed, the whole population lived in a small city-sized bubble - did they really need teleportation?
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