For the heck of it, I took a random episode of Space: 1999 and watched it again; I’ve included the link above. That’s what I love about YouTube; it’s such a marvelous way to visit the past’s recollections about the future. All sorts of great offerings are posted there and I’ve spent many an hour lingering over its pages.
As it turns out, the Dorcons are digging around in Maya’s brain. She has what they don’t. Or, rather, she has the last of what those pesky Dorcons need. See? Here we are with the brain again. As I had mentioned in a previous post, those mind matters sure come up often, because people desperately need to control what they can’t have. I’m figuring they couldn’t come up with their own supply of artificial intelligence, provided from their own biological source that they grew in some distant lab, harvesting other’s brains to reconstruct and contort for their own wicked purposes. If a society has to rely on one person to keep them ticking, when that person dies (which was inevitable), what next?
So here I sit, in 2014, looking back at the future in 1999. Odd. I find myself wondering if this is what I have to look forward to? I ask that question every time I check out the future. Not mine, of course, that’s kind of nebulous at the moment (whose isn’t?). There’s just so many options.
Take, for instance, a simple object like computers. I love the computer in Cloud Atlas. How about District 9? Even Iron Man. Notice how fluid and oddly shaped the displays are, how one can pluck from the air directives and commands, or plain information?
I’m kind of a fan of the computer in Max Headroom (the TV show) when floppy disks were those 3.25″ and that was considered the cat’s pajamas. Well, that was kind of a deconstructionist future, so I think it’s kind of valid today as back in the 1980s when it first broadcast. Brilliant show.
If you happen to watch the above episode of Space: 1999, you’ll see a more practical, button-pushing kind of keyboard/monitor setup. Similar TV shows also relied on the same technology, and if you dare to watch early episodes of Star Trek, you’ll see the most crude of crude. Still, those systems got them where they wanted to go, so they couldn’t have been all that bad.
Once in a while, there is some crossover. If one compares the hand mechanics to operate the computer/typing in Michael Palin’s office from the Terry Gilliam masterpiece Brazil to the hand mechanics in the scene in Children of Men where Clive Owen sees his nephew play a computer came as he asks his brother for a favor, they’re pretty similar.
Anyway, it’s fun to see what’s going on out there in the future. Gives us something all to remember.
Moon, Stars and Beyond 