Twenty Minutes Into the Future: Difference between revisions

Both ''[[Max Headroom]]'', and the film ''[[Brazil (film)|Brazil]]'', [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshade]] the [[Zeerust]] problem by setting themselves explicitly "20 Minutes into the Future" and "Somewhere in the Twentieth Century," respectively (rather than identifying specific dates) and by [[Schizo-Tech|mixing up production designs and costumes that would have been considered "futuristic"]] [[Anachronism Stew|in the '80s with random elements from previous decades]].

 

 

A good way to gauge whether or not a show takes place Twenty Minutes Into The Future: would much of the world's population at the time of filming still be alive by then?

== Advertising ==

* A new Volkswagen commercial has someone debating about buying a car, only to have his future self (wearing nifty [[We Will Not Have Pockets in the Future|"futuristic clothes"]]) from "13 days in the future" pop into the showroom and tell him to buy the car.

* The now famous "1984" ad from Apple to promote their new Macintosh during the [[Super Bowl]] of, you guessed it, 1984. The ad depicts what would happen to the world had the Macintosh not be made in time and then IBM being displayed as a Big Brother expy on a giant television screen.

 

* The very first scene of the film version of ''[[A Scanner Darkly]]'' states that the story takes place "seven years from now," which turns out to look kind of like the '70s (when the book was written), the early '90s (when the story was ''set),'' and the early 21st century when it was made ... [[Anachronism Stew|all scrambled together]].

* ''[[Strange Days]]'' was released in the mid-1990s, but takes place in a [[Crapsack World]] version of 1999 in which recorded memories transfered through VR headsets have become the new drug of choice. A radio caller sums up how the world has taken a turn for the worse in the scant few years between the film's release and its current setting. Aside from the aforementioned technology, a few other technology and fashion pointers and the fact that it clearly takes Los Angeles immediately post-Rodney King and turns it [[Up to Eleven]]), it's not ''incredibly'' anachronistic viewing when looking back.

** ''Terminator: [[The Sarah Connor Chronicles]]'' ([[Recycled: the Series|The Series]]), pulls a double-whammy: it [[Retcon|RetCons]] that the events of ''T2'' happened in 1997, when John was 13, implicitly moving the original projected holocaust, and then asserts that the various changes to the timeline have relocated the pending holocaust into 2011. The characters themselves, time-hopped from 1999 to fall 2007, are themselves experiencing some Twenty Minutes Into The Future.

* ''[[Time Cop]]'', the 1994 movie starring Jean Claude Van Damme, takes place in several time periods, including 2004, when the typical family car resembles a tank and can drive itself.

** And flashlights are duct taped onto assault rifles...

* In the 1960 film version of ''[[The Time Machine]]'' by H.G. Wells, the time-traveling hero sets off to the future from the start of the 20th century, stopping off at the time of both World Wars. Then he stops again in the year 1966, when ''[[A Nuclear Error|World War III]]'' is starting. When he eventually gets to the far future, he finds, via an ancient computer archive, that the world of the Eloi and Morlocks emerged in the aftermath of "a great war between the East and West."

* The first of the ''[[X-Men (film)|X-Men]]'' movies is set in "the near future", with its two sequels following after that. Its prequel, ''Wolverine'', is set about 20 years earlier (since Scott Summers is a teenager), setting it sometime between [[The Sixties]] and [[The Eighties]]. The climactic scene, set at {{spoiler|Three Mile Island}}, would seem to imply it's set in 1979, if {{spoiler|Deadpool slicing one of the cooling towers to pieces with his eye-beams}} is assumed to be analogous to the real-world event that occurred in that year.

** The World Trade Centre is still standing in the first film, which seems to make the 'future' early 2001.

* ''[[G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra]]'' is set roughly ten years in the future, and while styles in clothing and automobiles seem more or less unchanged from the present, exotic (but semi-plausible) technologies like powered armour, energy weapons, active camouflage and metal-eating nanites are out in full force. Since the film is believed to be in a [[Shared Universe]] with the [[Transformers Film Series]], one can assume that this futuristic technology was reverse engineered from Cybertronian technology. The fact that G.I. Joe is in the "near future" could be taken to mean that the Autobot-Decepticon conflict is already over, or at least no longer set on Earth.

** It could also be taken to mean that the Autobots have either taken it upon themselves or at least helped to repair the damage done to the pyramids in Giza by Devastator ''Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'', during the ten years between both movies, as "Revenge of the Fallen" is set in 2009.

* Implicit in the 2010 ''[[The A-Team (film)|The a Team]]'', where the "crime they didn't commit" takes place during the supposed final US withdrawal from Iraq and the UCAVs that attack the team's plane are namechecked as [[wikipedia:MQ-9 Reaper|Reapers]], which don't as of [[Real Life]] mid-2010 have support for air-to-air missiles or cannon yet.

* In ''[[Inception]]'', the only futuristic technology seems to be the technology to enter another person's dreamscape, but that is only used by a small number of people.

** In ''Cocktail Time'' (if I'm remembering the correct title), a gentleman disgruntled by an encounter with Drones writes a novel also called ''Cocktail Time'', exposing the depravity of today's youth. The cover of this 'inner' novel is described as featuring a young man in spats dancing the rock-and-roll.

* Shepherd Mead's ''The Big Ball Of Wax'' (published in 1954) predicted that in 1999, [[Video Phone]]s would be common (though he failed to predict personal computers or the Internet, the things which made this very nearly right), TV sets would be wall-size and stereoscopic (we're still waiting...), videotapes would be widespread (he got that right too, though he thought they would be open-reel and didn't foresee DVDs), power transmission would be a reality and cars would thus be electric, contraceptive pills would be easily available (yes) and nearly all diseases eradicated (sadly, no), the Soviet Union would have fallen and Leningrad reverted to its old name of St. Petersburg (both yes)... and that XP would take over (he got that [http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-xp/ right -- sort of, anyway], though ''his'' XP was E'''XP'''eriential Broadcasting, a way of recording and transmitting full-sensory material). Let's hope that the last one never comes true, or at least not the way Mead depicted it...

* John Birmingham's ''Axis of Time'' trilogy is an interesting case as it's very difficult to tell if it is meant seriously or is a very deadpan parody of [[techno Thriller|techno thrillers]]. The first volume was published in 2004 and it's (initially) set in a 2021 where everything that can go wrong with the "war on terror" has gone wrong, turning it into a full scale war of the west against Islam, and the allies act with as much brutality as the enemy (a sanctioned form of field punishment for the US forces is to put a Muslim enemy into a pig carcass and bury him or her alive). Probably the most ridiculous element is the predictions about technology, which include fusion reactors, artificial intelligence, military medical implants (which, amongst other things, reduce the soldiers' sex drive and dispense pain killers) and the routine use of vat grown replacement organs. This is all at least 20 years early.

* Niven & Barnes wrote ''Dream Park'' in 1981, set it in 2051, and doomed it to datedness by making reference to an earthquake that'd leveled Los Angeles in 1985. In the first sequel, they [[retcon]]ned the quake to 19''9''5, and in the second to 2005. They also retconned the first two novels' use of holographic displays to incorporate virtual reality elements in book three; ironically, this makes the tech in ''The California Voodoo Game'' seem '''less''' advanced than what's in ''Dream Park'' or (especially) ''The Barsoom Project'', as mechanisms which were kept discretely off-stage in the earlier books are much more intrusive in the last.

* ''Taken'' by Edward Bloor takes place sometime in the 2050s. The date is never specified, but it is hinted at by characters mentioning the recent 100 year anniversary of ''[[I Love Lucy]]''. The major differences are that indentured servitude is legal, the ultrarich live in extremely gated communities, and it is common for the children of the ultra rich to be kidnapped for ransoms.

* It's implied that ''[[Ender's Game]]'' and the ''[[Ender's Shadow]]'' series take place in Earth's near future; Earth itself is almost unchanged, but military technology is much more advanced (though it also appears to take place in an alternate world where the Warsaw Pact remained a powerful threat). [[Fridge Brilliance|It could be that in a world where aliens have attacked and killed a sizable amount of people, all funding when straight to the military and space travel, causing other technology on Earth to stagnate.]] The books following ''[[Ender's Game]]'' explicitly take place 3000 years after the first one, so it's averted there.

* ''[[WWW Trilogy]]''

* John Stith's ''[[Manhattan Transfer]]'' is far enough into the future from the publication date of 1993 that they have tiny memory disks and something mentioned in passing called a "VirtReal Simulation", but the [[Harsher in Hindsight|World Trade Center is still standing]] and there's no mention of [[The Internet]].

** Then there's the 2007 episode "Utopia" which takes place in the year 100 Trillion but depicts humans as using almost exclusively 21st century technology.

* The setting of ''[[Sealab 2021]]''. The show it parodies, ''[[Sealab 2020]]'', arguably suffered worse from the trope because it took itself seriously.

** Quite niftily, one episode of TOS that came out in 1967 ("Tomorrow Is Yesterday") had the crew going back in time to the late sixties—where they pick up a radio broadcast talking about a manned moon launch coming up on Wednesday. Guess what happened on a Wednesday in 1969 in real life.

* Inverted in ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' in the episode "2010", where contact with an advanced civilization willing to share technology makes 2010 a much different world than it was at the time of filming. A very visible bit of [[Zeerust]] is the fashions of this 2010: taking a cue from ''[[Wild Palms]]'', President Kinsey wears an outfit that would look more at home in ''1910''.

** In addition to similarities in clothing, the series features other modern-day elements, such as British rifles and American HMMW-Vs.

* ''[[Head of the Class]]'', where Howard Hessman's character comments at a reunion that his teacher's salary has finally reached six figures, and that even though teachers are now paid what they deserve, he's too old to enjoy it.

* The 1992 series ''[[Wild Palms]]'' was set fifteen years in the future, with technology and fashion that look nothing like that of the real 2007, assuming a revival of Edwardian-inspired fashion.

** And a lounge-style revival of popular sixties tunes.

* Several episodes of the original ''[[Twilight Zone]]'' were set in a future that has come and gone.

** Some episodes refer to the setting as "the day after tomorrow".

* ''[[The Tribe]]'' was a post-apocalyptic series set in a Type 2 [[Teenage Wasteland]] after a [[Depopulation Bomb|mysterious virus]] killed off all the adults. Based on the technology commonly used and traded by the various Tribes (CD players, egg-shaped original iMacs, no iPods), the Virus struck somewhere around 1998.

 

* ''[[Chrono Trigger]]''. Though it obviously takes place on a non-Earth world, its dinosaurs did die on 65,000,000 B.C., making it clear that it was somewhat Earth-like. In its version of 1999, mankind lives in domes with air fortresses and sentient robots. This one is obviously on purpose, considering that A.D. 1000 corresponds roughly to modern times, and A.D. 600 to medieval times.

* Nearly every [[Tom Clancy]] game; see his [[Literature]] entry.

* ''[[The Sims]]'' is never said to take place at any specific time in the Simverse, although The Sims 2 is set around 25 years after the original while The Sims 3 is set 25 years before. The neighborhoods in [[The Sims]] are very similar (well, with the limitations of the game) to our current society and levels of technology (with some differences between each game) - except for the robots (both [[A Is]] that begin functioning as [[Robot Maid|household servants]] but can be freed and helpful household robots), aliens, werewolves, ninja teleportation, resurrection, the Grim Reaper, zombies, plantsims (Sims that function like plants, needing oxygen and water to survive), and more.

* ''Crystalis:'' October 1, 1997. The END DAY.

*** The timeline shown in [[All There in the Manual|the tie in Sarif Industries website]] shows that this is a minor example of an [[Alternate Universe]]; the titular prosthetics company was founded in 2007, amongst other examples.

* ''[[Grand Theft Auto II]]'' took place 'in the near future'. 3 hints to it's time where give, yet each contradict each other. The manual states "3 weeks into the future" while entries on the official website are dated 2013. As if that wasn't enough to throw you off, a DJ on the radio states "The millennium's a' commin'!". There wasn't much future technology to be seen, although a few examples exist - one of the weapons is an [[Shock and Awe|electric arc gun]] and one of the gangs is hinted to use [[Expendable Clone]]s as mooks.

* The original ''[[Half-Life]]'' took place sometime during the 2000s. The sequel takes place 20 years later.

** Fans have debated the exact date of the Black Mesa Incident quite heavily. According to the [http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline#200- Half-Life wiki], the exact year is most likely 2003 though 2008 is also possible. 1998 was a third option until [[Word of God]] dismissed it as a mistake.

* ''[[Uplink]]'', written in 2001 and focusing on [[Hollywood Hacking]] in Far-Off Year of 2010 AD, has more than a few issues. For the more technically-oriented gamer, this can lead to either [[Narm]] or [[So Bad It's Good|unintentional hilarity]]. A 60 GHz processor is quite slow (a tribute to the megahertz race of the moment), and gateway computers with multiple processors are common, while only specialized systems support daughterboards. BBS software still holds a major part in the world, and [[Inter NIC]] can be used as a proxy and hacked into with a basic dictionary attack.

* ''[[Frontlines: Fuel of War]]'' takes place in the year 2024. The biggest differences are that military robotics are widespread(everything from hand-held flying recon drones to [[Gatling Good|minigun]] and [[Stuff Blowing Up|mortar]] equipped mini-tanks to hand-held miniature attack helicopters to automated sentry guns); the XM8, or at least a heavily modified version of it, is in widespread service; and that oil is about to run out(specifically, [[wikipedia:Peak oil|Peak Oil]] has been reached and passed, and now everyone's scrambling to get something out the door to help people).

* ''[[Killer7]]'', with a good measure of alternate history.

* ''[[Persona 3]]'' takes place in 2009-2010. Guess what...

* ''[[The Batman]]'' episode "Artifacts" is like this, as well as being one big [[Mythology Gag]] dedicated to ''[[The Dark Knight Returns]]''.

* ''[[Captain Scarlet]]'' is set in 2070-something, which might seem a way off, but don't worry. Aside from a floating fortress, some nifty lorry manoeuvring gear, cars that can (sort of) fly and hoverbikes, not much has changed.

* Parodied in ''[[The Ripping Friends]]'', in the two-part episode entitled "A Man From Next Thursday." The Ripping Friends' city, Ripcot, is said to be so advanced that it exists in "next Tuesday." The villain, Thursday Man, comes from the highly futuristic world of "next Thursday."

* Made fun of in ''[[South Park]]'', episode 31 "Prehistoric Ice Man". The episode was about a man who had been frozen 32 months earlier who was thawed and had trouble adjusting to the 'future'.