Stanley Kubrick was right about the future in so many ways and that includes what he created but ultimately chose to exclude from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This “miniature” briefcase computer was designed and built for the 1968 movie (filmed between 1965 and 1967) but wasn’t prominently featured. And a good job to – its superbly dated in a way that other 2001 designs aren’t. I can easily see this featuring in The Andromeda Strain, Phase IV or any of those 1970s hard SF films that took great pains to avoid the march of miniaturisation by showing computer technology of the future as it was back then – banks of giant free-standing IBM behemoths with whirring tapes reels and chunky keyboards. Which, of course, are wonderful to behold, as I realised once again while watching the excellent Captain America: The Winter Soldier with its World War 2 supervillain Arnim Zola still “alive” in the 21st Century through the magic of 1970s solid-state technology. And that means great big banks of these…
This is of course a scene from Gerry Anderson’s seminal treatise on unwieldy but aesthetically pleasing supertechology UFO – a show so steeped in cool retro computer banks Anderson had the idea of starting a leasing company to rent out the expensive contents of SHADO HQ and its attendant Moonbase to other productions in need of similar futuristic adornmants. So it was that this:
…turned up a few years later in Doctor Who as this:
…and – famously – in this:
Indeed, the preeminence of UFO’s consoles and flashing lights within the fibre of TV and films through the 1970s and into the 1980s (they were in loads more Doctor Who plus Timeslip, Blakes 7, some Bond films, The Muppet Show, The Goodies and oodles more) may have had the inadvertent effect of holding back the fictitious on-screen march of technological progress, rendering Kubrick’s sleek Hal 9000 interfaces that much more startling in comparison. But think on this: maybe it was all a devilish plot by Gerry Anderson and his good lady wife to deliberately retard everyone’s vision of the future so that they could catch us all napping with this…
Perhaps in the vain hope that people wouldn’t click that it was entirely and gratuitously ripped off from this…
Which is why, as his internal memos later revealed, Stanley Kubrick gave serious consideration to suing Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. But if you’re trying to predict the look of the future, as Kubrick very much did with 2001, you can’t really complain if people think you’re right and use the same aesthetic feel in their own show. Helped greatly by having an SFX designer borrowing liberally from his own contribution to your film. I suppose that’s all fair enough, that’s all all in the game.
Apart from this…
…which is just ridiculous.
No, while I think Kubrick’s issue was certainly compounded by all the visual similarities and glacial styling, the real crux of the issue was that episode 1 of Space: 1999 was a thinly-veiled re-telling of 2001’s Heywood Floyd sequence. Okay, call it a homage.
And on that note…
The Man in the Elegant Room 