Results: Past Imaginings of the Future

The 1927 science fiction movie, Metropolis, presents a future wherein monorail trains take passengers to splendorous skyscrapers. Humanity may not be fully to that point technologically, but the film's struggle between the working class and technocratic ruling class of city planners probably has contemporary lessons for viewers on both the political left and right. Even if you've not seen Metropolis, do you believe the above description of its plot may make it (secularly) prophetic of current political divisions?

"The Chase," Giorgio Moroder's instrumental theme for the 1978 drug-smuggling & prison drama movie Midnight Express, is said to be the first hit single (though much shorter than the version included here) on U.S. charts to be entirely computer-programmed. Moroder seems to have been pretty prescient when it comes to post-disco dance club music, if not pop music overall. Do you enjoy synthesized music that requires no human involvement after whatever homo sapiens responsible for it have set it to play?

One might not initially think a Christian new wave band would explore the idea of zeerust, or antiquated ideas of the future, a term coined by science fiction author Douglas Adams. But Daniel Amos did just that in "It's the Eighties, So Where's Our Rocket Packs?" from the group's 1984 album, Vox Humana (itself the third part of their four-album odyssey, The Alarma! Chronicles). Which of the things described in the song's lyrics have you experienced or would like to?

I've no idea whether the show playing on any cable stations or streaming services as of this writing, but the first encounter with zeerust children of my generation may have been The Jetsons. A friend of mine has hypothesized that he Jetsons was animation producers/directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera's upper middle class futuristic complement to their depiction of lower middle-class prehistoric people in The Flintstones. That seems reasonable to me, but do you think Hanna and Barbera had class in mind in their distinctions between the The Flinstones and Jetsons?