60s Space Age Retro Futurism: The Future That Never Was
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Yep, in the 1960’s we thought the future was going to be so bright we’d have to wear shades. It’s become so dark we need a flashlight.
Perhaps the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
Can't find the future with two hands searching behind.
You should consider writing; this is good.
Well, at least there’s one built into your pocket computer.
Guy just wrote a book on the socio-psychological fall of our civilization in two sentences. Yeah he should.
"if the timeline hadn't been ruined by idiotic politicians" - best quote right here
DON'T let them get their hands on *ANYTHING* that they shouldn't have their slimy, grubby, mucus - ridden paws on, even if you have to AMPUTATE !
Unfortunately, our survival instincts had yet to catch up as evidenced by many an investor in many a corporate boardroom promising many a kickback towards highly opportunistic politicians.
This. This right here is why. It’s pretty simple really.
Guess who chose these politicians lol
@@user-yt7dq2kl2t guess who controlled the media to put those politicians in the people's mind
I do not have to imagine being born that long ago and experiencing all those feels. I was born that long ago, I did experience those emotions and I WANT THE FUTURE I WAS PROMISED, NOT THIS #@&%**$ WE HAVE NOW.
Don't know where you are from, but growing up in the 1960s in the UK, there was a TV program called 'Tomorrow's World' and it showed us all how we would be using flying cars (with jetpacks for the poorer folk), and energy would be too cheap to bother with metering it.
The main presenter in the early days was an Ex-Spitfire pilot called Raymond Baxter. He seemed to be a very decent chap - but he LIED TO US!!!
@@ZachariahJ And in the 80s, because we paid for it, cable TV wouldn't have any commercials.
Me too.
Me too!
Me too. I'm SO dissapionted by the "now", by the "modern". It was supposed to be an age of reason, science, space travel... Instead we live in age of absurd, stupidity and nonsense!!! Totalitarian rainbow idiocracy!! 😢😭😡
What I really loved about 50's 60's futurism was the look, design, and architecture. Atomic Age design became, and sill is my favorite look.
I love retrofuturism. It was the promise of things not squandered.
It was more like an empty promise with no bearing in reality.
But hey, it's easier to be fooled than to be convinced you were fooled and all...
Have you seen the TH-cam short trailers, created in 50's-60's style, AI generated,
Retro Panavision versions of modern movies and TV ?
They are next level!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@@Rhythm911They are part of the problem
2:12 I like how, with all they’re over optimism, they still couldn’t imagine a flat screen tv larger than a microwave.
Certain technologies are just difficult to imagine until they're invented. The first LCD screens didn't come into existence until the mid-late 90s. A CRT screen with a display size similar to a large modern flat screen TV would take up half of the room it was in.
Or in colour!
I bet we've got a few very elderly folks walking around extremely disappointed that everything kind of just stayed like it always was except that they upgraded the cars.
I'd say the cars are far worse... unless you like driving a computer...
Most people, even today, don't know the difference between Technology and Design.
In a 1968 episode of Mission: Impossible, Jim Phelps and team trick a bank robber into thinking it's the year 1980. The episode features a gigantic flatscreen TV very similar to those of today.
They also parked a couple of futuristic-looking dummy cars in the parking lot below, just in case the criminal decided to peek out the window (which he did).
I seen to remember something similar in 1973 when they tried to convince him it was 1937.
(Edit - It was 'Encore'. They tried to convince Kirk (then called Kroll) that he hadn't yet committed a mob hit. That must've been on Sigma Iotia III)
The Twilight Zone episode about the futuristic pig faced people also featured ceiling mounted large screen TVs.
@@MrBROTHERFELDER That's right. Good catch!
The future ain't what it used to be - Yogi Berra (smarter than the average baseball player)
The hatred for each other destroys our future.
The fall of Soviet Union is the end of space race. US gov saw no point in spending money at NASA anymore. Instead they sent money to warmonger corporates to control the world from within. Space technology became stopped for decades. Until SpaceX.
Greed has ruined the whole world. The constant lure of money has driven the going world to complete destruction.
It took 12 years to get to the moon but over 50 and still not back :o wow
To be honest, the race to the Moon probably killed the chance at a sustainable long-term space program like it should've been.
That and societal reforms taking away the budget.
I recently watched probably 7 or 8 ‚first time watching 2001‘ videos. What strikes most was what the younger generations did not notice in that movie from 1968. in one scene aboard the discovery one, Bowman and Poole watch a transmission on something that can only be described as an today iPad Pro. Only one, not that young, watcher noticed this at all. For everyone else it was too normal and obvious to watch a transmission on a thin portable flatscreen. They could not identify it as futuristic, as it is common today
Most people also seem not to notice in 2001 a space odyssey that the move being shown on the space plain (shuttle) while the guy is sleeping is 16/9 wide-screen and not 4/3 TV ratio of the 1960's
To the ignorant, sparkling junk and lies will suffice
Nothing changes quicker than the future
i recognize your voice you used to have a TH-cam channel call to the future it was epic one of my favorite channels on TH-cam
And to think, we haven't been beyond earths orbit since the end of the Apollo programme in 1972.
I've been a fan of Syd Mead for a long time. His work while visionary when it was first produced has stood well against the test of time. If any of you have a chance see if you can find any of Meads' books. Sentinel, Sentinel II, Sentury, Sentury II, Oblagon and The Movie Art of Syd Mead. The US Steel posters are also worth looking out for. eBay is your friend for most of these. Thanks for doing these videos.
I used to frequent a disco whose dance floor was inside a geodesic dome. It was pretty cool. The triangles were outlined in flashing neon lights. All the domed structures in this video reminded me of that…they did feel futuristic.
Yep I was born in 43 so the future looked so bright
This is exactly how I expected the future to be as a child
The PC, the Internet, the smartphone, and the smart home have all directly affected our lives in ways that no space flights to Mars could have done. Yet few science-fiction stories in the 1960s predicted any of that. (There was a very short scene in the movie "2001" where they showed a "Newspad", a portable flat TV device showing a BBC-TV program, which was similar to what today's smartphones can do.)
Truer words have never been spoken.
The Jetsons essentially had the smart home. Some form of VR was the setting for Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" written in the 60s. Dick Tracy cartoons had a smart _wristwatch_ in the 40s or something.
No doubt we don't have the future we wanted, but a lot of what we have was loosely predicted. Especially AI.
@@VaraLaFey Robots go back even further in time. The term "robot" was first introduced in a live-theatre play, "R.U.R.," in 1920 - although what the author described was more like what we would call "androids" than mechanical robots.
@@stevenlitvintchouk3131 Could be. I know they've been in sci-fi for a long time, and iirc it's an old Romanian(?) word meaning worker.
@@stevenlitvintchouk3131 And the idea of robots goes even further back than that if you consider 19th century automatons as precursors limited by tech of the time.
13:12 I totally agree. We live in the future God damnit it's about time cars start reflecting that. Many newer cars are starting to get closer to the look I think we deserve.
The house shown after the illustration of the woman doing "aerobics" is Falling Water, by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935. It was built in PA near Pittsburgh.
Thank you, I was just racking my brain trying to remember his name 🙂
Hi, yes it was amazing growing up in the 50s/60s. And oh yes I wanted all the futuristic wonders I saw or read about. Hell , I still want them today!
The problem with glass is it takes a long of work to keep it clean and usable. It also breaks easily. It's just better to build somewhere beautiful and just use the front door to enjoy nature
Personally I find man made wonders done with intention to be beautiful while finding in general a lack of beauty in nature due to it simply being made up of natural processes, without chosen creative intention, not to mention allergies, pesky bugs, and depending on area, the fact that nature “wants” to kill humans and only human ingenuity stops that.
Build a voyeuristic society around glass.
All of the futuristic Charles Schridde house illustrations you’re showing were created for a Motorola consumer print ad campaign featuring 1961-63 Motorola tvs and stereos in a futuristic setting. They’re the actual current 1961-63 tvs and stereo models, that’s why they’re small in the futuristic houses-not because futurist envisioned small tvs in the future.
Love this stuff and the presentation!
YAY! the future sounds like Sebastian again... SUBSCRIBED!
Large Domes were built, several of them. The first in 1965, the Houston Astrodome. It proved glass was not the way to go as it had a clear glass roof in the beginning and caused many problems.
People in the past either imagined an outlandish utopia or a complete dystopia. Reality: a soft dystopia. Not as bad as thought but definitely not as good as it could’ve been.
We imagine solarpunk.
This fever reached its pitch at a conference at NASA headquarters in 1969, with appearances by visionaries like Arthur C Clarke and Wernher von Braun. What caused it to come crashing down was the sea change that took place in American culture around 1972-1973. Richard Nixon terminated the Apollo program after 1972 and took a meataxe to NASA Marshall to get rid of the former Nazis who were employed there. Nixon and much or America worked to a different narrative that won out.
The assault on science and technology that came then was from both ends of the political spectrum. On the right, the Evangelicals were threatened by science. On the left, the academics saw issues with technology with the more extreme elements craving a return to nature. This meant the end of government-led technological ambitions, with continued growth to come from the private sector and with different technologies.
Kudos to Maiorianus for putting together this video. He's a romantic at heart.
În 1990 I was 7 years old and my grandparents had already told me all the stories with moon landings and all..and they still were like "wait until you see the 2000s" ...in 1990!!! Poor people. They died in 1997 and 2009..no flying cars, no mars colonies..no moon base....and no internet!!! To me, someone should've come out on TV and say: hey dumb-asses, WE CAN'T GO OUT THERE ANYMORE CAUSE WE HAVE TO GIVE YOU TIKTOK FIRST!!!!
...and now I am almost 42 and I only hope for 2 things:
1. To get to see a man on the moon again and - at curent speed NASA is advancing towards this it seems more important to them what race or gender it is rather than WHEN it is - probably he/she will be Chinese in the end but it's perfectly ok
2. To get to see that highway over the Mountains my gouverment promissed me in 1990..
...but I still think I ask too much
In a lot of ways, the architectural visions of the future were not as much predictive but more causal. We wanted the future to look like that and so we made it look like that. With TVs as with rockets, in some areas, we overestimated the potential advancements in one area and underestimate the potential advancements in others. In other words, their vision envisioned grand cities on the moon and mars with computers stuck in the 1980s. Instead, we get our first moon launch in 50 years with computers quickly catching up to our capabilities in a wide variety of areas.
The thing is, we have advanced in spectacular ways that would blow peoples minds, even of the one with bold predictions. But in totally different areas than expected. Always hard to predict the future, especially if you have to extrapolate the technology and trajectory you know.
Regarding Space: I think the show “For all mankind” does an awesome job in depicting the alternative timeline if the space race never stopped.
Interesting you pointed out when glass domes were the craze but these also get very hot in the summer. Regarding why space stations didn't become what was envisioned back then, there was a website called Rocketpunk (maybe it's still there) where it presents retro-future like Steampunk. It mentioned that NASA was able to replace lots of humans with just a few kilograms of electronics in spacecraft so a communications platform in space that was predicted in 1950s of having a 100 men to operate, is now unmanned like all communications, reconnaissance, and weather satellites.
I'm old enough to remember watching 2001 when first released and it all made sense. By the time I'm an old guy, I can buy a ticket on the Pan Am Orion to go to space. But none of that happened because purpose of Apollo program was to beat the Soviets to the moon. After that there is no compelling reason to expand human presences beside keeping a human spaceflight program to demonstrate technical prowess. They learned with the USAF MOL and NASA Skylab the three most important space applications (comms, recon, weather) are best done with no people on board.
Fallingwater, the house you used as an example of futuristic designs coming true, is from 1935.
Fallingwater was always on the verge of sliding into the valley because of using substandard materials, so I have heard.
@@DanielAppleton-lr9eq It's reported to have developed numerous cracks in many of its heavy reinforced concrete structural members letting rain enter and corrode the steel reinforcement bars inside. it looks like Mr. Wright used concrete beams that were too big for the spans.
@@pbxn-3rdx-85percent I had read that a contractor did work on the cheap AND used substandard materials. Guess it was a series of misprints.
Glad I didn't have to point that out😂
Yes. I bothered me that the narrator implied that Fallingwater was built after the 60s.
What an incredible video! What should have been our birthright we now dream of seeing before we die. It is both a sad epitaph, and a beacon of Hope.
2020: I'm sorry 1940s, we have failed you
Hey, guy in 2020,,,,,,,it’s going to get a lot worse.
Guy from 2024
In DC Comics, Metropolis is a city based on retro futurism, which is why it stands out so much. It was a city based on what its engineers believed a city of the future would be like, but that future never came, and Metropolis sticks out like a sore thumb as a result, like a city out of a Flash Gordon movie. Gotham City, by comparison, is very retro gothic-noir.
The TVs were too small, no one ever imagined the they would one day fill up a whole wall!
I swear I have a memory of looking through an old science book as a kid and it showed green humans that had been altered to produce chlorophyll so they could use photosynthesis to have more oxygen on mars. It was speculative, but they we're thinking wayyyyyyyy differently back then
Hyperloop, lol. Yeah, I wouldn't put too much money on that idiotic idea.
I really love this style of drawing from the 60s!
It is symptomatic of architectural drawings from all times. Architects make these drawings that show buildings that look like they are from heaven and then the building is actually built and it looks pretty ordinary. If these things had been built, they would not look so clean and airy.
I found it interesting that despite the very futuristic houses depicted, the artists' imagination stopped short of envisioning anything but small televisions on a cart or a typical home entertainment center (TV, Stereo and Radio) in a piece of wood cabinetry just like people had in the 60s.
They were by the same artist.
Read Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury (1953)... rooms with walls of all video. Some of these images are cool but this guy's sort of of pulling all this out of his you know what😮
This is a very cool topic of course, but it seems this video is all about creating content... I guess like a lot of TH-cam is.
Future projections are based on contemporary observations thus any imagination MUST fall short of what the passage of Time results in.
My home entertainment still has the same format as 30 years ago (TV, Stereo/Radio, DVD Player); I merely added a Tablet and SmartPhone to it.
"Predictions are hard, especially about the future." -- Yogi Berra. Btw, Tesla's 'Cybertruck' is the Lemon of the Century.
Gigantesque TV.... the screen's not larger than 24", but maybe Stereo or quadro.😊
6:16 - artist Robert McCall’s moonbase painting from the movie 2001. I once visited the offices of the National Air & Space Museum and noticed in a back hallway there were several hanging pictures - one of them was this one and I commented it was an excellent copy - our guide answered “no that’s the original painting”.
Falling Water was made decades before those illustrations, showing just how futuristic it was.
6:20
Interestingly enough a prediction that did come true from that concept art from 2001: A Space Odyssey is that a man depicted in the painting appears to be holding what in modern terms would be called a mobile tablet.
Strange as I was there at that time. Now that I am here, we don't have a lot that was imagined.... but in so ways we have much more. On balance I think we have done okay.
Fascinating stuff.
Great research. I wasn't aware of Syd Mead. His visions were astounding and very artful.
3:01 Franc Lloyd wright built that house in 1939 and not in the 70s.
I LOVE SYD MEAD ARTWORKS!! He had a large paperback book of his VISIONARY WORKS! GLORIOUS!! He did a lot of work for US Steel , somehow I got a poster of one similar to the construction truck.
PS! I Just Subscribed!
They also thought that tvs in the future would still be crts and not flat screens
If you make them look too different, then people don't know what they are supposed to be
Wow, I had no idea... I'm especially interested in Retro Future practical/industrial Architecture. This channel 👍🏻x5. Thanks
Die Stimme kenn ich doch!
Thank you years and years ago I used to have a subscription to Omni magazine and this is almost a type of variation with a nostalgic viewpoints other than being in the 80s shattered and closed down back then
Monorails are still cool.
I've taken them in Hamburg (Germany) and Dubai (UAE)
Hey, Sebastian. I remember you from *2 THE FUTURE.* It's nice stumbling upon your new channel.
6:30 oh look a vacuum rated tablet by IBM ;-)
That house over the waterfall is called Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright was built in 1935.
Yeah this irritated me. The video makes it seem like a vision from the sixties that came true later, but it was built decades before these drawings and likely inspired some of them.
Syd Mead passed in 2019, the year 'Blade Runner' takes place. Stanley Kubrick passed in 1999, before the real 2001 arrived.
It's still been over 50 years since we last went to the Moon. In terms of space travel history/progression that's got to be the most disappointing of all.
We stopped going to the Moon because there's nothing worth doing on the Moon. We also stopped planning to send astronauts to Mars after unmanned probes showed us that Mars too is barren and lifeless.
9:35 Also hanging monorail in Wuppertal DE.
Fallingwater is a house designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935. The Glass House, or Johnson house, is a historic house museum on Ponus Ridge Road in New Canaan, Connecticut, built in 1948-49.
Come to Wuppertal if you want to see the Monora i mean Future😂
In the '80s, I, as a boy, viewed the space shuttles as a significant advancement in the engineering and science of sending people to space, as astronauts were able to fly back to Earth decently. However, most spaceships today are capsules rather than spaceplanes, and they land on the Earth’s surface with the aid of parachutes.
Great.
Biggest city in Okinawa, Naha, has a nice little monorail.
Just around the city though (unless it has been expanded in the last 10 years - which is very possible). It is quite small, but it's fun to ride!
This was great. I love these types of illustrations....
Maiorianus has a sci-fi channel?! I love your voice! All I can hear is you talking about dastardly Ricimer though lol
That’s what i was thinking too
Funny how they thought houses will be large in scale and modern but TV will remain tiny. Its like they didn't have high hopes of future television.
You know it's funny because I also just watched a great video about France in the 1700s and what they thought the future was going to be and the same thing happens over and over again. We keep predicting the future on what we currently are doing and what we have instead of what might happen and even bigger. All potential futures suffer because we keep forgetting how human beings actually behave act and think.
I have some Syd Mead books showing the 2000's
It was government who brought us the voyages to the moon. Private interests saw no advantage to pursue in commercial development because of staggering overhead costs.
Syd Mead is the GOAT when it comes to imaging American futurism. To think he isn't a household name when we've all seen his art and probably bookmarked it in our head as what we imagine these times to look like. I know I do whenever I don't see one of his gorgeous car designs drive by or architectural creations rise from flat land... Just more strip malls and pickup trucks rolling coal.. Not the future I ever wanted or envisioned for myself I can tell you that much!
Wait are you the same narrator of Maioranus? :D
Am I trippen or ain’t this bro with the Roman history channel
Greetings from Wuppertal, Northrhein Westfalia, Germany. Search for the monorail 😉😁👍
the next fanastic four film is a perfect example how to use this avant garde
Your title is wrong. It must be "The future we decided not to have"
The future that could never happen
The future no one could afford.
A lot of those houses look like the stuff John Neutra was designing and building
8:08 -- "we've got TikTok instead ..." Okay, I'm won over. Subscribed!
12:11 thats just the Citadel from Mass Effect
Cool video!
Only needed a few moments to realise that it is the same voice as from majorianus.
If you have cheap unlimited energy, heating and cooling a large glass dome is trivial. Unfortunately the oil crunch occurred, and energy attitudes have never been the same since.
9:05 kinda reminds me Berlin DB hub
I love this retro future, but it you want to know why monorail, vacuum tube transport, etc., didn't send shouldn't happen, watch some of Adamsomething. He's hilarious and brutally right.
Are you going to do a video on Japanese Futurism? Like the art of Shusei Nagaoka?
Getting house on river ruins it for everyone else.
Begs the question whether our ideas about the future will be considered retro future in the future or whether we are more accurate (probably not)
Please do a video on Syd Mead.
Ngl, one of my most hated sci fi concepts is retro-future space stations that specifically have big yellow fields of crops and giant normal crop harvestor combines going around collecting them all. Its almost as bad as space stations that have highways built in them...where people are shown driving around their cars just like its a normal day on earth. It makes me sick to my stomach almost, just something about that level of mundane thinking about the concept of building a space station is crazy to me. Its the kind of thing only envisioned by a society that is so set on ideas of conformity that even in the far far future of space travel, life will be lived completely "normally" and in an earthlike fashion, no matter if its inefficient or not
Society decided to stop looking at the stars, and instead decided to look into their palms.
Well, there’s always Dubai. I’ll see myself out.😅
To be fair, all those glass building weren't too unrealistic considering the energy growth at that time. Air conditioning would have basically cost nothing today if those trends didn't stop in 1971.
Energy production grew exponentially between 1900 and 1971, then our "leaders" decided that's too much prosperity.
That's also the reason why innovation stopped, it was fueled by energy production growth.
07:08 Looks like they're crank-starting an early automobile.