1999 AD

Some works actually improve because they've aged badly—badly in the sense that they feel dated or that they now work in a very different way than the creators intended.

Though I'll probably get some pushback on this one, I'd argue this is behind much of the appeal of the films of Georges Méliès. Beyond the admittedly still impressive effects work, the charm comes largely from the antiquated costumes and art design, things that probably looked fairly standard at the time. For modern viewers, the combination of fantastic imagery, clever camera tricks, and a tawdry late-19th-century theatrical aesthetic creates something unique.

*1999* is a bit like that. Though no masterpiece, it's a great deal of fun for retrofuture buffs, and it tells us something interesting about the way people viewed technology and progress almost 60 years ago.

If you've ever taken a deep dive into the techno-optimism of the postwar era (very different from that of today), pretty much every detail will resonate. The botanical experiments reflect the excitement over the Green Revolution. The mention of the Mars colony reminds us that 1967 was the height of the Space Race. Talk of casually flying to the East Coast or Mexico City for a round of golf is hardly surprising at a time when the Concorde had just entered its prototype phase. From the school lessons to the automated kitchen to the disposable clothes and dinnerware are topics you will run across when reading the futurists of the 1960s.

For me, the most striking thing is how, once you get past the size of the computers and the crudeness of the displays, the world that people in 1967 expected to see 30 years in the future still seems ambitious in 2026.

We've discussed before how the late 19th and very early 20th centuries (particularly 1875 to 1910) and, to a lesser extent, the postwar era represented huge and unprecedented periods of ubiquitous, explosive technological change, especially in the United States and countries such as Britain, France, and Germany.

Whether you're talking about serious scholars or popular culture, speculation about the future in the decades after these huge spikes consistently tended to overestimate the coming rate of progress. There were exceptions, but where predictions were inaccurate, they were far more likely to be overambitious than conservative.

This bias is all the more noticeable given that one of the axiomatic beliefs of people like Arthur C. Clarke was that the near future would almost certainly exceed our expectations in practically every way.

    Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation because the prophet invariably falls between two stools. If his predictions sound at all reasonable, you can be quite sure that within 20 or, at most, 50 years, the progress of science and technology has made him seem ridiculously conservative. On the other hand, if by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so far-fetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn. This has proved to be true in the past, and it will inevitably be true, even more so, of the century to come.

    The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic.

    So, if what I say to you now seems to be very reasonable, then I'll have failed completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable, have we any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen. 

Speaking of camera tricks, take a good look at the car around the four minute mark.