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Originally Posted by manephelien  Looking back, the thing that jars me most is the 1960s conception of "futuristic" furniture. Looks like leftovers from the early 1970s... |
Thats nothing, the Kaminoans from 'Star Wars: Attack of the Clones' shop at IKEA! Straight out of the catalogue!
The single most hardest thing about SF for film and TV must be designing the sets and props. Anything that looks futuristic very quickly looks dated. Even letter fonts date; in the late sixties everyone thought those OCR fonts such as those you still get on cheques were futuristic.
Music is another bugbear. All of that early seventies futuristic synthesiser music just seems out of place. I've just been re-watching the 'Planet of the Apes' series and those use it way too much. Much better to go retro and have the characters listen to some old fashioned soul, or rock and roll, or classical music.
One of the reasons that 'Star Trek' the original series (of a similar age) has not dated as much as it could have (compare it with the silver suits in 'Lost in Space') is that the costumes and sets were not built on an extrapolation of the current trends, or made particularly futuristic. Theiss, the costumer designer actually designed those short skirts before the mini-skirt was a fashion icon.
The computers don't have reels of magnetic tape going around, but for memory, instead use a small square disc, long before a floppy disc or CD was imagined. Contrast that with later series of 'Star Trek' when in 'Voyager' Captain Janeway in the 24th Century has this huge enormous PC and monitor on her office desk when you can already get laptops the size of a keyboard now.
That period of the late sixties was one of tremendous change and I find it hard to criticise those things. I think the ending sequence of 2001 still holds up today, even against what could be done with modern graphics.