Future Past Imperfect

One of the annoying things when I watch Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville is all the 20th Century references.  Like the Kermit the Frog on his desk.  Or in one episode when he and a girlfriend watch The King and I (the Yul Brynar version) and later listened to Billy Joel.  In one episode he tells the first officer’s boyfriend that her favorite band is Journey.  In another episode they watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and in another Singing in the Rain.  The first officer designed a whole simulation on the holodeck to look like 1940s America.

Before you pile on, it’s not just The Orville.  The Star Trek shows have done that plenty.  In the original series they went to a Nazi planet, a gangster planet, a Roman planet, and back in time to the “present” of the 1960s.  And of course the famous “City on the Edge of Forever” where they went back to the 1930s.  In Next Generation Picard had his noir detective character Dixon Hill.  Data played Sherlock Holmes.  The crew played poker against Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, etc.  In DS9 Sisko had a baseball on his desk.  In Voyager they went back to the “present” of the 1990s at one point.  And of course there was Star Trek IV, a whole movie set around going back in time to 1980s San Francisco.

It happens in books too.  There was one book I really hated and part of it was it’s the 25th Century and on this planet a gateway to Hell was opened and all these evil people were coming out to possess people.  Among them were Nazis.  I have no love for Nazis, but that would be like 500 years in the past; maybe the author could have focused on more current villains?

In a Tweet MacFarlane defended the Billy Joel in the show by saying that most attempts to make “future” music suck.  Which is probably true.  And if you think about it even music like the cantina band in Star Wars (yes I know it’s a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but shut up) was based on Earth music.  The music in Jabba’s Palace in Return of the Jedi even more so.

There is of course a practical element to this.  To invent new instruments and such would be time-consuming and costly.  Licensing some Billy Joel or showtunes is a lot more cost-effective.  Making video clips of “future” movies or TV shows would likewise be costly and time-consuming.  It’s much cheaper to just license an old movie.  It’s the same reason that in most movies and TV shows if they’re watching TV it’s some really ancient cartoon no self-respecting kid would be watching in real life because that shit is pretty much public domain so you can pick up a DVD at a dollar store and plug in a clip.

On shows like Star Trek it is much more cost-effective to shoot on a backlot made up like the 20s or 30s or 40s than to create a whole new futuristic city.  Chances are that already existed so all you had to do was rent the space for a few days.  It saves a lot of money.

Also another part of it is that most people know what Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or The King and I or Singing in the Rain or Billy Joel are.  If you created some new show or movie or music, the audience wouldn’t know what it was.  There would be no emotional connection to it.

And yet I can’t help thinking a big part of it is also a lack of imagination.  It’s hard enough to imagine one future society without trying to imagine all the incremental changes to get to that point.  If I were to imagine life in 2100 I’d probably be spectacularly wrong, as wrong as someone in 1900 trying to imagine 2019.  (Where are our jetpacks and moon colonies?!)  It’d be much harder to imagine 2030, 2040, 2050, 2060, 2070, 2080, and 2090 to feed into that.  Plenty of awful movies and TV shows got the future wrong (you should see 1980-ish’s The Apple’s depiction of “1994” and be very glad it never happened) but even good shows like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone often got it wrong.  I think by now we’re pretty much living in the same time as The Jetsons but no flying cars or cities in the sky.  I suppose some people can have robots to clean and stuff.

This is why prequels like the Star Wars ones or Star Trek Enterprise/Discovery have problems with how everything looks better than it does in the original.  It’s almost impossible from the 21st Century to design a “past” that would dovetail smoothly with sets from the 60s and 70s.  In the case of Star Trek, sets and costumes that were made on the cheap back in 1966.  (Especially the Klingons.)  It would look utterly ridiculous to have that same 1960s look in 2019.  It’s not just the technology but the costumes, hairstyles, and so on.  It’s really hard to be living in 2019 and try to work backwards from what someone did in 1966 or 1977.  It’s far easier to design it around what you have available in the present.

Writers have it a little easier in that we don’t have to actually create sets, costumes, etc.  We can just make shit up.  Yet it’s still hard for sci-fi writers to not work in references to the 20th Century or earlier because as I said earlier it’s something the audience will know and be able to connect with.  Despite that it’s ludicrous and more than a little arrogant to think people will give a shit about 20th Century American culture in the 23rd or 24th Century.  I mean how much do you care about the 17th or 18th Century culture?  Sure there are things that survive like Shakespeare, Mozart, and Beethoven but unless you’re going to a costume party you’re not going to wear one of those big puffy Elizabethan collars or powdered wigs or shit like that.  You probably aren’t going to listen to harpsichord music or the drinking songs of the time.  Most of that shit gets forgotten except by a few historians or anthropologists.  Just like most of our culture will probably be forgotten in time.

That includes all of my books, I’m sure.  So there’s no need for me to write for the 23rd Century when I barely have a 21st Century audience.