[[quoteright:350:http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/future_housewife.gif]]
[[caption-width-right:350:"Because everything in her home is waterproof, the housewife of 2000 can do her daily cleaning with a hose."]]
->''"Zeerust: the particular kind of datedness which afflicts things that were originally designed to look futuristic."''
-->-- ''The Meaning of Liff''

->''"The future ain't what it used to be."''
-->-- '''Yogi Berra'''

Something -- a character design, a building, whatever -- used to be someone's idea of futuristic. Nowadays, though, it ironically has a strange sort of datedness to it. Also sometimes called "Retro-Futuristic".

Gets its name and definition from ''The Meaning of Liff'' by DouglasAdams and John Lloyd (not a typo, but a book of neologisms concocted by Adams and Lloyd), which in turn got the name from a town in South Africa.

Tropes commonly associated with Zeerust:
* FoodPills
* FlyingCar
* JetPack
* NoNewFashionsInTheFuture
* RaygunGothic
* RobotBuddy
* StarshipLuxurious
* TechnologyMarchesOn
* WeWillNotHavePocketsInTheFuture

Compare TheAestheticsOfTechnology, CrystalSpiresAndTogas, IWantMyJetPack, HollywoodHistory, ScienceMarchesOn, TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture, RetroUniverse, WeWillUseMicrosInTheFuture.

----
!!Examples:

[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder:General]]
* A glaring example in material written before the 2000s is the lack of networked computers, email, and ubiquitous cell phones. Many authors/screenwriters bet on communications remaining difficult, expensive, and largely tied to fixed terminals. Some projects got this right better than others.
** A Logic Named Joe is one of the most notable aversions. It was written in 1946, yet it features portable devices and an Internet-like network along with themes of freedom of information. ''At that time there were 6 working computers in the world.''
** ''The Machine Stops'' was written in ''1909'', and has what is basically the internet, though with fixed terminals. Anyone can talk to anyone else on the planet through a screen. And given the state of human society in that story, the lack of portable devices is completely justified.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Anime & Manga]]
* Practically every iteration of ''MobileSuitGundam'' bears some vestiges of the era in which it was made, despite the fact that most series occur some time around the 24th Century. Noteworthy examples include the bellbottom-esque uniform pants on the 1979 original series, the 80s-style clothing in ''Gundam ZZ'' (made in 1986), or the prominence of boxy desktop computers in ''Gundam Wing'' (made in 1995).
** The majority of UC Gundam series have the ubiquitous appearance of floppy disks, even ones made during the age of Compact Discs and Laserdisc, like ''Gundam 0083'' and ''The 08th MS Team''.
** The theatrical recap trilogy of ''Zeta Gundam'' which extensively uses footage from the 1985 TV series adds laptops and more futuristic computer displays, in an attempt to renew the futurism.
** GGundam has a scene where [[OldMaster Master]] [[BadassNormal Asia]] holds up a floppy, claiming it contains vast amounts of information.
** GundamWing has a scene in which Heero Yuy gripes that the regime has been redacting online accounts of his namesake's life.
** IIRC, cell phones were not common in Gundam Wing, in spite of the fact that they were already starting to become popular in 1995 and their ubiquity was only a few years away.
** Ten years from now we'll be saying similar things about Gundam00.
*** Like, ten years from now and we will have things from holographic screens and cell regeneration to impractical orbital elevators and ''Humongous Mecha''? Sounds improbable, but still...
* The original ''BubblegumCrisis'', released in 1987 and set in 2032, is similar: clothes and hairstyles are ''very'' 1980s; car-mounted telephones exist, but not hand-held ones, meaning characters make calls from phone boxes with video screens, and [[TheGreatPoliticsMessUp the Soviet Union and East Germany still exist.]]
* Yoshiyuki Tomino's ''SpaceRunawayIdeon'', famously known for its ending, faces the issue of its protagonist having perhaps the largest afro in anime. There is also the silliness of the alien race, the Buff Clan, wearing futuristic versions of Elvis Presley's wardrobe.
** In the case of the Buff Clan's wardrobe, it appears to be intentionally done as a semi-tribute to the over-the-top outfits worn by every evil overlord in the 1960s sci-fi B-movies
** ElvisPresley's outfits InRealLife tended to border on SpaceClothes anyway.
* Most of the scif-fi works of OsamuTezuka. The original ''{{Astroboy}}'', being created in the early 1950s, has a lot of this, but not as much as you'd think. Tezuka wanted his readers to be able to relate to the characters and setting, so he usually only added things like robots and spaceships when they were important to the story. Ultimately, though, this results in what looks like SchizoTech, with ludicrously Zeerusty spacecrafts and intelligent robots that run on vacuum tubes existing in what otherwise appears to be mid-20th century Japan, even though the series is supposed to take place in the early 21st. There's an amusing bit of LampshadeHanging of this in the introduction to one of the paperback collections, where a character [[IWantMyJetPack complains]] to Tezuka, saying that since it's the future, he should be wearing SpaceClothes instead of a threadbare old suit and living in a high tech space colony instead of a crummy one-bedroom apartment.
** Oddly enough, the subsequent remakes managed to be even more Zeerusty than the original. The 1980s version tried to depict a more futuristic world where technology was more integrated into modern life, with the result being that the technology's greater presence makes the show's datedness even more obvious and jarring to modern viewers. Even though they got the part about more people using computers right, the computers look totally anachronistic; the futuristic architecture and flying cars they use are often hideously impractical; and all the robots that don't look identical to humans look like a cross between old Kenner toys and outdated computer parts. The latest anime from the early '00s is more self aware about this and deliberately goes with an over-the-top retro-futuristic style similar to that used in the earlier Tezuka-inspired film ''Metropolis''. In most ways this is an improvement, but sadly, it sacrifices most of the down to Earth charm that arguably helped make the original such a huge hit.
*** ''Pluto'', an UltimateUniverse [[TheRemake remake]] of Astroboy by Naoki Urasawa, stakes out a comfortable middle ground here. Most of the robots look like bigger & better versions of ASIMO, modern conveniences that are just now starting to catch on like debit cards & flash-drives are ubiquitous, {{Holographic Terminal}}s are fairly common and most of the automobiles look like larger versions of modern Smart Cars. On the other hand Urasawa has restored some of the more domestic 20th-century touches that gave the original its charm. Ordinary things like houses, cafes and flowershops look pretty much like they always have. He also manages to throw in a few bits of retro-futurism that are even sillier than the original, such as high-tech-looking skyscrapers so huge that they can fit ''entire gated communities onto their roofs''. Only time will tell how Zeerusty this version will eventually become.
* Abundant in ''MazingerZ,'' evident in many of the vehicles and {{SuperRobot}}s in the series.
* There are other examples in UchuuSenkanYamato, but the craziest is Desler's use of a gold-colored mid-20th century earth telephone to argue with Starsha.
**Not to mention, the entire crew is wearing [[http://www.desslok.com/PIC/casty.gif bellbottoms!]]
***That's more of a deliberate visual pun, because they's [[RecycledInSpace Sailors... In Space!]]
**Gamilon General Lysis composes his report on his first encounter with the Argo/Yamato on an alien ''typewriter.''
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Comic Books]]
* The Scott [=McCloud=] comic ''{{Zot}}!'' features the world of the present day, and the AlternateUniverse wherein every cool thing thought of in the early 20th century came true.
* DC's 1980s ''StarTrek'' comics managed a level of datedness filmed Star Trek never did. One issue showed the Starfleet Records Division, with filing cards. The show was fairly consistent in showing us that we would finally have the paperless office by the 23rd century.
** The Dell comics were just as dated, technology extrapolated from TheSixties even though the comics were published well into TheSeventies.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Commercials]]
* Have you ever used a phone booth with a video screen rather than just a cell phone? [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8 You Will]].
** Many of the technologies featured in the ads did in fact come to pass, including turn-by-turn GPS, touchscreen tablets, wireless internet, and video-on-demand services -- mostly in forms remarkably similar to the commercials' versions.
* Telmex heralded in 2008 its brand-new video phone service by airing a "Homage to the Video Calls", which was basically a montage of every single "TV phone" featured in a sci-fi movie. Except [[{{Fanservice}} that one]] from ''DemolitionMan''.

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Film]]
* Intentionally invoked in the happy futuristic scenes in ''MeetTheRobinsons'', as opposed to the hat-dominated {{Dystopia}}.
** The Neo-fifties look of ''Robinsons'' is heavily influenced by Walt Disney's own personal Zeerust from ''50 years ago''.
* ''StarWars'' features elements of this, but strangely, it's mostly used in the newer pequel trilogy than the original trilogy from the seventies/eighties. For example, Dax's diner looks like it's from the fifties. Then there's also the holograms, which have very poor reception and come only in black and white.
* The movie trailer of ''AstroBoy'' looks a lot like setting of ''MeetTheRobinsons''.
* ''SkyCaptainAndTheWorldOfTomorrow'' (2004) is chock-a-block full of Zeerust -- not surprising, given that that was the point of the whole exercise. There is a 1930's submersible with a radio-imager that can send pictures back to the AirborneAircraftCarrier, giant bipedal robots wreck New York, and the hero's plane can go ''underwater''. The entire movie is pretty much [[RuleOfCool Rule of Cool]]. The film appears to be set in 1939 (''TheWizardOfOz'' is still in theaters).
* Notably, RobertZemeckis and Bob Gale wanted to avoid dealing with the future in ''BackToTheFuture'' for this very reason, as they couldn't know what the future would really be like. However, when the ending of the first film left them with no choice, they made 2015 basically a cleaner and more colorful version of 1985 with a generous dose of AppliedPhlebotinum (computerized waiters, flying cars, and weather control) thrown in. It ''was'' [[RuleOfFunny meant to be humorous]], though.
** ''{{Back to the Future}} Part II'' was one of a few early-90s movies and TV series that had incredibly ubiquitous fax machines in the near future. The alleyway recycling center with huge cubes of shrinkwrapped laserdiscs awaiting processing was utterly hilarious.
* The ''IRobot'' movie was nearly ''devoid'' of Zeerust: the Chicago from 2035 looks pretty much like the Chicago from 2007, the John Hancock Center and the Sears Tower are still there, and some of the characters live in plain-looking row houses. The differences: the L-train is replaced with a sleek, shiny monorail, there's a huge underground highway, Spooner drives an actual Audi prototype, and it seems like fossil fuels are not used anymore when Susan starts screaming while riding in Spooner's motorbike:
-->'''Susan:''' Please tell me this doesn't run on gasoline! Gas explodes, you know?
** [[ProductPlacement Yet Spoon wears shoes that are over 31 years old]].
*** He appears to have ordered those shoes specially, he's not happy when they get ruined.
***The shoes in question first went into production in 1917 and have remained in production virtually unchanged until 2009. That means they have been around for 92 years. Its not unbelievable that they will continue to be made in 2035. The cheesy "look at my special order vintage shoes" line was completely unneeded. Especially considering that all the other items of clothing in 2035 looked much the same as what we have now.
* ''DemolitionMan'', which was an example of late 20th century Zeerust despite being a retelling of ''BraveNewWorld,'' which was 1930s Zeerust. A confusing web of datedness in different forms, which probably inspired the look of the above example and its early-21st-century zeerust.
* There's also HAL (''[=~2001: A Space Odyssey~=]''), a computer that can have a philosophical conversation and follow voice commands, but can't print plain text onto loose leaf paper.
**''2001'' is ''full'' of this -- there's the video phone booth, complete with Bell System logo and the Pan Am space flight -- and, in a meta-example, the producers had to pay those companies to [[ProductPlacement use their trademarks]]!
** The novel has typewriters '''and''' office computers being used, along with "[[ValuesDissonance girl assistants]]".
*** The whole ''Odyssey'' series is rife with that, though, while at other times being almost prescient. In fact, Arthur C. Clarke's sequels are said by WordOfGod to be, not direct sequels, but "[[AlternateContinuity variations on a theme]]" to RetCon out outdated predictions. In one scene, series protagonist Heywood Floyd is trying to remember the source of a line of poetry in either 2010 or 2061. Clarke says Floyd could have his computer search the whole of English literature in about 10 minutes, but Floyd stubbornly insists on trying to remember it himself. It's not quite 2010 yet, you could find a line of famous poetry in a few ''tenths of a second'' thanks to the magic of Google.
* A curious example appears in ''StrangeDays'', which, being set only a few years into the future of when it was released (released in 1995, set in 1999), obviously hadn't dated ''that'' badly by the time the millennium came around; except the mind-recording technology that formed the centerpiece of the movie's plot hadn't shown up yet (and still hasn't), and the main character's voice-transcribing answer machine wasn't exactly the way that particular technology field went, either. Neither was Los Angeles ''quite'' the decaying urban nightmare just seconds away from exploding into all-out civil warfare that the movie depicted. And some of the featured fashions and styles were quite interesting when compared to their real-life counterparts, as well.
* An even more glaring example is material written where the whole globe has broadband-speed wireless intranet access to every single piece of information ever. And this "future" is written for the year 200X or whatever. There's places in the US where wired broadband isn't available, and the overall performance of true wireless broadband internet access is more than laughable.
** Well, we're getting there. Though by the time we do they'll probably have much better wireless internet. Hopefully.
* ''Silent Running'' features robots that can understand human speech, yet take their programming from cards that have to be welded together.
** Couldn't that be a security feature?
* ''The Island'' is mostly devoid of zeerust. It takes place in 2019 (released in 2005), where Detroit looks pretty much the same, though the vehicles are pretty much all modern cars (no junkers). MSN runs a free database that allows you to look up anyone you need at booths, and the phones and computers are pretty much the same, albeit with more voice recognition software. However, for everything that is perfectly in place, something is off. The police have flying jet bikes with machine guns, tiny spiderbots can enter someone's body through their tear ducts to act as a tracking device (that [[NightmareFuel leave through urination, despite being a bit.....uncomfortable]]), and, of course, [[spoiler:''giant underground colonies where sentient clones are raised for the wealthy as organ banks.'']] All this is supposed to come about in ten years?!
** Or maybe all this was intentional as part of an AlternateHistory.
* ''{{Film/Soylent Green}}''. Nice arcade machine you got there, Shirl!
* In {{Godzilla}}, ''Destroy All Monsters'', the year's 1999. Rocket men, aliens that [[HumanAliens look like people]], mind control signals, knockout gas, a nation devoted to containing monsters; must've been what Y2K was distracting us from.
* ''BladeRunner'', which was made in 1982, thinks that in the year 2019 we'll have flying cars, skies so choked with pollution you never see the sun, artificial humans with implanted memories, and off-world colonies. In the year 2009, most of this still feels like a far-off possibility (except for ''maybe'' the pollution issue).
** The novel it was based on had at least the artificial humans and the colonies in the year 1992.
** The novel also explained these Zeerust phenomena as being the after effects of a nuclear war (World War Terminus), which had necessitated genetic engineering experiments, and eventually fabrication, to allow certain species of animals to be "saved". This didn't come over very well in the film.
**It's also worth noting that the film's approach to the portrayal of urban architecture represents a significant aversion of the usually zeerust-prone approach found in older sci-fi, and was one of the earliest mainstream works to do so. While much older sci-fi assumes that the cities of the future would, at some point, be levelled and replaced with a sort of Corbusian wet-dream, Blade Runner depicted a convincly jumbled combination of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century architecture, which still looks quite reasonable today.
* The film adaptation of ''Fahrenheit 451'', directed by Francois Truffaut in 1966, features zeerust aplenty, notably a propeller-powered monorail commuter train (which was an actual French prototype at the time, but was never developed), and public pay phones with a weird design.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Literature]]
* Joe Haldeman's book ''Worlds'' falls badly into this. Set in roughly 2085, it smacks of the 80's throughout. Some examples: There are no personal computers; though libraries keep most documents electronically archived, you have to ''pay'' for the copyright in order to print out individual articles. If you can't afford copyright, you simply hand-write notes. Typewriters are also still apparently in widespread use. There are "robot cars" but no more advanced robots or AI, and genetic experimentation can't do anything more impressive than create mutants like two-headed goats. Oh, and of course the USSR is still around and even expanded, with most of Asia being part of the "Supreme Socialist Union."
** Still possible for that last one to happen in 75 years... though they'll likely speak Mandarin instead of Russian.
* In print, RobertAHeinlein's early novels for younger readers all have an anachronistic "future 1950s" feel to the society, despite the presence of interplanetary travel, Mars colonies, nonhuman sentients, and a host of other technologies, concepts and discoveries one might think would change American society. In ''Have Space Suit -- Will Travel'', there are colonies on the Moon and the hero wins a used space suit in a contest... but the contest is held by the sole sponsor of a (typical) live TV program (a soap company), and the chronically unemployed town ne'er-do-well, "Ace" Quiggle, hangs out at the drugstore soda fountain. Drinking ''[[MaltShop chocolate malts]]''.
**Pretty much the best example is the fact that all his stories written before about 1970 feature things like flying cars, yet slide rules are in use. Heff is not the only author, however, to fail to predict the pocket calculator.
**In ''Rocketship Galileo'', the titular spacecraft has an autopilot that is a ''shaped cam'' connected to the controls. Which are, in turn, connected to the damping rods in the nuclear reactor that makes up the ship's drive using ''mechanical linkages''. There's also transAtlantic passenger and freight rockets instead of jets. And the existence of the U.N. police has abolished war. Heinlein had [[StupidJetpackHitler Nazis on the Moon]] too, but given that the book was written in 1947, that probably seemed like the least fantastic element.
** In ''Misfit'', Andrew Jackson "Pinky" Libby, a lightning calculator as well as a math genius (the two often don't go together IRL), saves the day when the space-ship's sole calculator is on the fritz, gaining him the new nickname "Slipstick" for his supposed mental resemblance to a slide-rule.
** And Heinlein's supercomputer in ''The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress'' is intelligent (and sapient) enough to plan a full lunar revolution... but gives all of its calculations on long rolls of printed paper. Ironically, the book did accurately predict CGI acting.
** Barry Malzberg was quoted as saying something to the effect that the richness and datedness in Heinlein's stories comes from R.A.H.'s '...understanding ''perfectly'' how the world worked in 1945.'
**In ''Starman Jones'', {{FTLTravel}} is accomplished with the help of books containing table after table of pre-computed values---seemingly no electronic storage or look-up at all.
* Parodied in the KimNewman short story "Tomorrow Town", which is set in the 1970s and focuses on a murder committed in an experimental community of futurists deliberately constructed as a 1970s version of what the year 2000 would look like -- and the savvy detectives are quick to realize that it's completely unworkable, with a futuristic monorail system and bubble cars that can be outrun by someone on a bike, [[RobotBuddy robots]] that are bugger-all use whatsoever, a [[InstantAIJustAddWater "super computer"]] that's really good at adding things up but not much else, an "evolved" linguistics system which exists largely because its creator has trouble spelling, and a dysfunctional and somewhat sexist social system that, not un-coincidentally, places the (murdered) leader of the community in both a position of unquestioned power and gives him the opportunity to legally steal other people's girlfriends/wives if he fancies them, whether they (or their partners) want to or not. Oh, and the very fact that a murder's been committed by people who claim to have [[EvolutionaryLevels evolved "beyond"]] the petty motives for murder is a pretty big strike on the card as well.
* The ''{{Dune}}'' books [[JustifiedTrope justified]] a non-computerized future by outright stating that any kind of computers were destroyed due to a past [[RobotWar religious crusade against artificial intelligence]], which still has sway over the galaxy. Thus "Mentats", or humans who train their minds to act as computers, are standard personnel for all major powers.
** Even so, Mentat Piter De Vries, who works for the villainous House Harkonnen, points out to the "floating fat man", Baron Harkonnen, "Even you, my dear Baron, could outperform those... machines." The writing clearly indicates that the use of machines to do any sort of extensive calculations or data-mining is considered shameful. The notion that the upper classes of the ''Dune'' universe are educated to allow them such mental abilities while still classifying them below those of full-fledged Mentats remains somewhat mind-boggling.
*** This is less mind-boggling when you take into account that the humans of the ''Dune'' universe, especially the noble classes, were the beneficiaries of many millenia of Bene Gesserit selective breeding, as well as the life-extending and cognition-enhancing effects of the [[SuperSerum geriatric/nootropic drug]] Melange (aka [[SpiceOfLife Spice]]). There are also hints of similar manipulation by the Bene Tleilax, who were portrayed as supreme [[GeneticEngineeringIsTheNewNuke genetic engineers]]; and who were noted from the start as being at least partly responsible for the creation of the Mentats and their abilities.
**** And even less so when you consider that while de Vries isn't a complete toady and Harkonnen does for the most part tend to be fairly realistic about his own strengths and shortcomings, a little mild exaggeration to flatter your boss (especially if said boss ''literally'' holds the power of life and death over you) is seldom a truly terrible idea.
* IsaacAsimov's ''{{Foundation}}'' series [[strike:suffers badly from this]] deliberately uses this as part of its central theme of history repeating itself and knowledge being lost. Hyperdrive and planet-wide cities at least 12,000 years into the future, and yet society is, universally, much the same as America in the 1940s. Particularly fails in the computers department: there is no digital technology at all, and despite the fact that nuclear reactors the size of a walnut are common technology, a pocket calculator draws gasps of amazement. Books have been replaced by audiocassettes instead of our current PDF files, images are stored on microfilm, television is apparently unknown, and interplanetary missives are sent by ''telegram'' and distributed via pneumatic tubes. There's a "transcriber" machine which recognizes spoken words and prints them on paper ''immediately'', providing no way to correct errors. And, of course, ''everyone'' smokes.
** The later ''{{Foundation}}'' novels sought to rectify some of these seeming errors, but instead ended up introducing a whole new crop of 1980s Zeerust.
** This is probably a better example of SchizoTech than Zeerust, but early on in the Foundation series we encounter the Barbarian Kingdoms of the Periphery, who have hyperspace-capable starships powered with ''coal.''
*** Notably, the Kingdoms did not build those ships themselves but acquired them from the Empire, and later require Foundation help even to keep them running.
* ''{{End of Eternity}}'' by Isaac Asimov is about a secret organization which regularly changes the whole history of humankind, by combining TimeTravel, ButterflyEffect and magical computers, powerful enough to calculate what the new reality will look like after the change made by a ButterflyOfDoom. They also use... wait for it... punched cards.
** Nothing hinders progress more than unlimited resources. Asimov is very much aware of that, as can be seen from ''Foundation'' novels.
*''Minus Planet'', a story by John D. Clark from 1937, has a huge one. The protagonist observes an anti-matter planet, compares his sightings with those of observatories on Mars and Venus, and works out that it's heading for Earth -- with a slide rule.
* William Gibson's 1985 ''{{Neuromancer}}'', unintentionally prophetic in many ways, features a famous and unfortunate moment early on where Case's "...buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi wasn't taking calls."
** Another "famous and unfortunate moment" is when the titular sentient supercomputer's more extroverted counterpart, Wintermute, disturbs and frightens Case by causing a bank of ''pay phones'' to ring in sequence as he runs past them. This is in addition to the fact that cell phones are ''completely'' non-existent in Gibson's vision of the future.
* Much to RayBradbury's surprise, ''{{Fahrenheit 451}}'', first published in 1953, partially avoided this, portraying an early 21st century society with people listening to music from devices the size of cigarette lighters with plugs that go in their ears, televisions that are as wide and as thick as the walls they're mounted on, and people who are obsessed with their "interactive stories".
** And actual physical books being relevant, despite that. One would think a small memory chip would make hiding literature much simpler, given that you could carry the Library of Congress in your pocket -- if there were any digital technology to speak of.
** There's actually a discussion in the book where it's pointed out that the books themselves aren't what's important, what's important is the independent thinking that they represent. Also, book burning even today still brings back memories of Nazis and Communists and "anti-smut" campaigns which seek to ban or bowdlerize anything "immoral."
* AldousHuxley's ''BraveNewWorld'' posits a {{Dystopia}} where humans with drastically reduced mental capabilities are engineered in a complex of labs... to be elevator operators.
** There's also a moment where they use a card catalogue.
** And they apparently can't make infinite clones of the same person, despite having a rather complicated process to increase the number of identical twins born from each "batch" of people.
** This is somewhat justified by the PowersThatBe actively trying both to create jobs for the Gammas and specifically avoid technology that would lead to society to have less work. This is explained near the end, though.
* ''Islands In The Net'', by Bruce Sterling, has a computer-net dominated future -- of fax machines and BBS (bulletin boards, for those too young to remember. The pre-WWW ancestor of the forum). Still, with just a few changes in wording, it could very easily become a believable TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture, as it does predict many plausible consequences of information technology.
* It's difficult to believe that ''AClockworkOrange'', even in the 1960s in which it was made, is meant to be set in the ''future''.
** [[WordOfGod Burgess himself]] said that book was meant to be set in an alternate 60s. The film, however...
* Alfred Bester's ''TheDemolishedMan'' holds up surprisingly well for a novel written in the '40s, mainly by circumventing or just not directly addressing most potentially Zeerusty subjects. However, there's only one computer in the book: it's the size of a room and prints the results of its calculations on paper tape. Despite this, its legal verdicts are weirdly intuitive.
* Another notable aversion appears in Murray Leinster's short story ''A Logic Named Joe''; published in 1946, the story comes spookily close to accurately depicting home computers and the Internet -- including search engines and filtering software.
* The Metaverse of SnowCrash resembles Second Life more than the internet (which is essentially what it turns out to be). Also, on a more political front, the United States has devolved into a series of franchises that each function as separate countries, and Japan (or "Nippon") is the undisputed leader in technology and business, as apparently the Japanese economic bubble never burst.
** It also features a real-time Google Earth, and a {{wikipedia}} which requires one to pay for its information.
* ''EndersGame'' was/is a well-known [[AvertedTrope aversion]]. Published in the mid 80s, Orson Scott Card managed to predict (if not perfectly) a number of computer technologies, including laptops.
** By the mid 80s, laptops would have been a fairly safe prediction, given the existence of "transportable" computers at that time (yeah, they weighed upwards of 20 pounds and were the size of a suitcase, but you ''could'' carry them around, and except for the screen, today's laptops use mostly the same technology).
* ''DragonridersOfPern'' shows a bit of this: apparently, when we achieve faster-than-light interstellar travel and turing-level artificial intelligence... we will be using [=DOS=] again.
** Arguably, this is one of the reasons why Pern is essentially a Luddite planet in the first place--with AIVAS as the only example of "modern" technology on Pern (albeit 2500 years old), [=McCaffrey=] was able to avoid having a series with a helluva lot more Zeerust.
** Also, one could argue that in ''All the Weyrs of Pern,'' AIVAS has the Pernese program in DOS because it's a "baby step." If you've never seen a computer before in your life, it may be easier to start with a simpler operating system. Since AIVAS appears to have encyclopedic knowledge of everything 20th-century on, it's actually not much of a stretch to say he would know DOS inside-out, even if that knowledge, in his home culture, is ridiculously academic and outdated.
* {{Hyperion}} managed to predict relatively cheap ubiquitous use of the Internet in 1989, just one year after it was made accessible to commercial groups. On the other hand there are also Hard Boiled [=PIs=].
** Even more, it predicted the ''iPhone''. Yep. The Diskey is a small, ubiquitous device looking like a screen the size of a cigarette pack, but much slimmer, that you command by pressing icons that appear on it. It's used as a communication device, has a direct connection with the computer network and is your main way to access any medium. The cycle doesn't tell if you can shake it to skip tunes, or if it systematically falls apart by itself after three years use, though.
*''[[http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPgraf/Media/valentina.htm Valentina: Soul in Sapphire]],'' a story about a sentient computer program published in 1984, is interesting because it rather accurately predicts the Internet, online gaming culture, and the use of emoticons in text messaging.
* {{Larry Niven}}'s {{Ringworld Engineers}} has computers that use magnetic tapes. Built by a race that make floating cities, interstellar rampscoops, longevity drugs, etc.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Live Action TV]]
* Costume designs from ''LostInSpace''.
** ''Everything'' from Lost in Space. My personal favorite is the laundry machine that spits out neatly folded, plastic-wrapped clothes.
* Just about anything from ''StarTrekTheOriginalSeries''. ''StarTrekVoyager'' had some fun with Zeerust, with a crew member who enjoyed acting out the ShowWithinAShow adventures of FlashGordon [[CaptainErsatz -esque]] "Captain Proton."
** The ''StarTrekTheOriginalSeries Remastered'' undertaking does, on occasion, [[http://www.startrek.com/custom/include/feature/bst/tos-enhanced/tos-007a/pop.html fix some of these]]. To the annoyance of purists.
*** Khan's origin story is that he's an Indian warlord/genetically altered superhuman during the Eugenics War in the year 1997.
** The ''StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' episode "Trials and Tribble-ations", in which the crew time-traveled into the setting of the episode "Trouble with Tribbles", mined a lot of amusement out of the style differences of clothing, devices, Klingons.
** ''StarTrekEnterprise'' really made things interesting, considering it is a modern ''Trek'' with [[TheAestheticsOfTechnology modern designs]] yet is supposed to be set ''before'' the Original Series. It was a challenge to make their handheld communicators bigger then modern cell phones yet smaller than the clunky boxes they used. The designers even said that in 40 years, the modern ''Trek'' will look like ZeeRust (really, it won't take that long). Plotwise, things haven't changed much either: one of the stock patterns of threat in ST:TOS is "Step 1: take away the communicators". Similarly, by 2005 or so, the stock pattern in all contemporary media is "Step 1: take away the cell phone". Most writers then and now haven't worked out how to create dire circumstance while having reliable mobile communication available. (This is why BuffyTheVampireSlayer didn't get cellphones until the last season.)
** Trek's computing technology ''excluding AIs'' is absurdly primitive by contemporary standards. TOS has the Federation using hand-sized ''Microtapes'' in 2267 when we have MicroSDHC cards the size of a fingernail today.
** Let's give credit where its due and acknowledge that Trek's [=PADDs=] have a great deal in common with modern [=PDAs=] and [=TabletPCs=] and that communicators are cellphone equivalents. Our cellphones, however, are restricted to sublight communication and ''at most'' single-planet range.
*** Much, much less than that. You can call London from your cellphone in Hawaii because of the vast infrastructure supporting telecommunications in general; your cell phone itself is communicating with a tower at most a few miles away. The really impressive thing about communicators is that they've got the power to talk to a ship in orbit, punching through not only the ionosphere but also potentially through several thousand miles of rock... and this is taken so much for granted that the crew is distressed when the communicators ''don't'' work.
** Even more subtle is the ubiquity of touchscreen technology and contextual interfaces used even as early as TNG (1987), which really seems somewhat realistic if you're not into the idea that we'll control everything with brain implants someday. Heck, flip-open cell phones exist because of TOS.
** Motorola had a big hit when they introduced a slim, very pocketable flip cell phone, the "StarTAC"--not a concidence, I'm sure. Unfortunately, even though the Federation had a galactic information network, their communicators and tricorders didn't have data plans unlike today's smartphones.
**The classic Trek films and ''The Next Generation'' TV series are staring to suffer from this as well, in some areas more than others. '80s resort hotel architecture for a starship interior, anyone?
**Thanks to the retro '50s car styling on the new Enterprise and the interior sets seemingly modeled after Apple computer design from three years ago, there's a small portion of the Trek fanbase that considers the JJ Abrams remake movie to be {{Zeerust}} already. And it can only get worse with time.
* ''DoctorWho'' has had some problems with this due to its exceptionally long run. Under various excuses, the new series has "modernized" such Zeerusted elements as the TARDIS interior (which has, on a few rare occasions, had a deliberately {{Steampunk}} look), the Cybermen, the sonic screwdriver, though ''not'' the RobotBuddy K-9, designed in TheSeventies. In "School Reunion", a [[LampshadeHanging lampshade was hung]] on the latter:
-->'''Rose:''' Why does he look so... disco? \\
'''The Doctor:''' Oi! Listen, in the year 5000, this was cutting edge!
* ''[[ThatSeventiesShow That '70s Show]]'' once had Red [[ImagineSpot imagining]] what the future would be like, and it was filled with tongue-in-cheek Zeerust, such as jumpsuits and jet packs.
** "What?! They promised us hovercraft!"
*** The joke was that he imagined all that stuff would be available in the far-off year of ... 1997. The episode first aired in 1999.
**** ''Zot!'' had already topped that joke, with a girl from the Eighties awestruck at the marvels of 1965.
* The TV series of ''BuckRogers'' had everyone in 1970s clothing and hairstyles, listening to 1970s music.
** The clothing styles are not so much "1970s" as "what people in the 1970s thought future clothing might look like." The music is actually explicable, as the movie that launched the TV series featured very different music (best described as a kind of electronic version of a minuet); it was actually a plot point that Buck Rogers ''himself'' was responsible for (re-)introducing Disco to the 25th century.
* Part of ''{{Firefly}}'''s charm is how a lot of the "future tech" weapons [[IKnowThatGun look like old fashioned guns]]. This is exemplified in the episode ''Trash'', where the hightech laser gun shown looks like an oversized ''Star Wars'' blaster. Well, it's a SpaceWestern.
** Though it really doesn't look like original ''Star Wars'' blasters, which were based off of real weapons, primarily World War II era guns.
* ''{{Red Dwarf}}'' had this quite a bit. Examples included the [[NoNewFashionsInTheFuture Cat's "cutting edge", very 90's fashion sense]], and an episode where the crew watched triangular ''video tapes''.
** Amusingly [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] in the 2009 ReunionShow "Back to Earth", in which [[spoiler:Kryten points out that [=DVDs=] became obsolete because everyone kept losing them. Apparently videotapes are "too big to lose."]]
* ''{{UFO}}''. In the episode "Court Martial" a computerized encoding device uses handwritten data entry, but it's actually a security precaution. Handwriting samples of personnel authorised to use the device are stored in its memory, and compared against the message written on the input card.
* ''BabylonFive'' used bulky, awkward, and sharp 'holographic data crystals' for portable data storage. In the real world, [=CompactFlash=] cards came on the market in 1995. B5 was behind the ''real world market,'' let alone the real state of the art.
** As mentioned in ''Trek'' above, the bulkier future storage device may have a massively greater capacity than present day devices.
*** Holographic data storage is still a future technology (with some working prototypes now) - they may become Zeerust in 10+ years time but, for now, aren't. You could be storing Exabytes of information on them, which compact flash cards aren't exactly capable of.
*** Regardless of the storage capacity and efficiency, the ergonomics are still pretty crappy. Disk-shaped media will probably stay around ''exactly'' as long as the pocket will, for obvious reasons.
** Needing to find non-military people in person or by word of mouth is definite Zeerust in a modern world where it's impossible to avoid overhearing at least one "where are you?" cell phone call a day.
* ''DefyingGravity'' is set in [[strike:2052]] 2009 with manned interplanetary travel. Seriously, they didn't even ''try''.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Music]]
* Donald Fagen's song "I.G.Y. (International Geophysical Year)" straddles the line between Zeerust and IWantMyJetPack, depicting a world where the US definitively won the space race, computers are benevolent overlords, and everyone wears spandex jackets in a world with perfect climate control.
** Fagen's 1993 album, ''Kamakiriad'', continues to invoke this trope intentionally. It is set TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture, but the album art implies that this is 1999 as imagined from 1959. The inlay notes begin:
-->''Kamakiriad'' is an album of eight related songs. The literal action takes place a few years in the future, near the millennium.
-->In the first song, "Trans-Island Skyway", the narrator tells us he is about to embark on a journey in his new dream-car, a custom-tooled Kamakiri. It's built for the new century: steam-driven, with a self-contained vegetable garden and a radio link with the Tripstar routing satellite.
* The video for The Postal Service's ''We Will Become Silhouettes'' is set in a 1950's style household. Except, of course, they didn't have synthesizers in that era.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
* Cyberpunk 20XX: A game released in the mid-'80s/early '90s (2013 was released in '85, 2020 in '90) hilariously depicts "cellular cyberdecks" as massive, expensive, and unwieldy. While taking place about ten years from now. The stats for the cyberdecks were listed in real life units: one of the top-of-the-line cyberdecks had a massive 256 MB of RAM and ran at a blazing 100 MHz.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Video Games]]
* Parodied in SNK's ''Metal Slug'' series, which takes place in a near future in which nearly all "futuristic" tech is intentional Zeerust, such as [[MilitaryMashupMachine land battleships]] or [[RobotBuddy pulp robots]]. In a related note, almost all of the "contemporary" tech is inexplicably WorldWarII-era.
* The ''{{Fallout}}'' series of {{RPG}}s ''lives'' on this trope. Fallout is set in an AlternateHistory in which the Cold War never ended, and technology progressed in much bigger strides than ours, yet the aesthetic of it is based on the Art Deco suburban athmosphere of the 1950s. Also, while technology as a whole advanced immensely, many scientific breakthroughs never happened (for example, all computers have monochromatic monitors and run on vacuum tubes instead of transistors, which first were invented in the 2070s.)
* In ''{{Bioshock}}'', the city of Rapture is all designed in a 1940s Art Deco style, somewhat behind the times even by 1960 when the game takes place. It looks less out of place after you learn Rapture was apparently built in 1946.
* The ''[[CommandAndConquer Red Alert]]'' series loves this trope more than life itself, especially with the Soviet side.
* The game "Stubbs the Zombie" takes place in the 1950's with what they believe will be futuristic techonology. There are lots of flying cars, simplistic robots with bare-bones AI etc but no e-mail, interent, etc. The game developers make the game seem futuristic, for the 1950's.
* The original ''{{Contra}}'', being a ''{{Rambo}}''/''{{Commando}}''/''{{Aliens}}'' pastiche, stars a pair of musclebound commandos fighting against an alien army in the jungle. The game is set in the year 2633 according to the Japanese canon, but despite the presence of improbable weapons and bases, there's no real reason to suspect that the game is actually set in the future. Because of this, the localization actually claimed that the game was actually set in the present when they brought it to America. This continued until they decided to keep the futuristic setting for ''Contra III'' and even then the city where the game starts, as well as the car in the first level, looks late 80's - early 90's.
* Thought it might not be as obvious as some of the above example, ''MassEffect'' is an intentional version of this trope although the zeerust it invokes is not 1940s or 1950s zeerust, but rather 1970s and 1980s zeerust - according to WordOfGod anyhow.
* Essentially the entire concept behind the style of dress of the Team Galactic {{Mooks}} in the Generation IV {{Pokemon}} games.
** Their buildings too have an almost RaygunGothic style. Some NPCs actually comment on how strange their headquarters looks.
* {{Lampshaded}} by more than one character when used as part of the character design of Chester in {{Ar tonelico}} 2, even leading to him being nicknamed "Fuglycool" by one character.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Comics]]
* ''[[http://www.drunkduck.com/I_Was_Kidnapped_By_Lesbian_Pirates_From_Outer_Space/index.php I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space!!!]]'' is a 1950s and 1960s Fest of this trope.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Original]]
* The website [[http://www.davidszondy.com/future/futurepast.htm Tales Of Future Past]] goes into the phenomenon in detail.
* See [[http://www.spaceagecity.com/googie/ Googie Architecture Online]] for real-life examples of Jetsons-inspired design.
* For some [[SteamPunk steampunkish]] {{Zeerust}}, see [[http://expositions.bnf.fr/utopie/feuill/index.htm this awesome collection]] of French postcards from 1900, trying to imagine what life would be like in 2000. It's surprisingly accurate in some regards.
**And then they have things like the [[ILoveNuclearPower "Radium-Powered Fireplace"]]
* [[http://www.retrofuture.com/ Retro Future]]
* [[http://www.paleofuture.com/ Paleo-Future]]. A look into the Future That Never Was.
* [[http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/news_events/futuristics/index.html Transportation Futuristics]]
* The art of [[http://www.sydmead.com/v/01/home/ Syd Mead]] (famous for his work in ''{{Bladerunner}}''). And [[http://www.flickr.com/photos/mstoll/sets/72157603779992640/show/ here]].
* These old articles from [[http://blog.modernmechanix.com/covers/ Popular Mechanics]] have countless examples of the AwesomeButImpractical machines of the future.
* [[http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/12/category-futurism.html Dark Roasted Blend]]. Photos including retro-art space-travel posters and [[ColdWar Soviet-era]] Zeerust!
* The website [[http://deepcold.com/ Deep Cold]] is devoted to CGI animations of ColdWar-era spaceships that never flew.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Western Animation]]
* "The future" in ''TheJetsons'' seemed to mean "the 1960s, but with more AppliedPhlebotinum."
** This was parodied hilariously in an episode of ''HarveyBirdmanAttorneyAtLaw.''
* ''MuppetBabies'' parodied this, when Baby Piggy claimed that the future would be "just like now, only more... [[BuffySpeak futurely]]!"
* Any of the old cartoons featuring "The House Of Tomorrow", which typically has, say, a pair of robotic hands manually scrubbing, rinsing, and drying dishes, instead of a dishwasher.
* ''JimmyNeutron'' is set in the Zeerust-styled town of Retroville, and Jimmy's futuristic inventions have a charming Buck Rogers quality about them.
** And in a strange contrast, the entire show is pretty modern 3D animation. So you get a Buck Rogers-esque mind control device that looks remarkably realistic, even though it appears to be a toy. [[TVGenius In retrospect (no pun intended), he probably intended it that way.]]
* Many episodes of ''{{Futurama}}'' parodied this by having futuristic technology that was ''already'' outdated in some way, such as interactive cinemas with monochrome newsreels. And then making them holographic. The ''Jetsons''-style "floating hoops around everything and everyone" is considered retro in the manner of a nostalgia cafe or disco.
** The creators HandWave any technology that seems outdated by claiming things have [[SchizoTech moved erratically]] since [[AfterTheEnd civilization was destroyed twice]] between 1999 and 3000.
* The modern day Venture compound in ''TheVentureBrothers'' is practically ''built'' on Zeerust, from the X-1 (nuclear powered superjet) to the punch card sleeping beds, to the moving walkways, etc...
* ''[[TransformersGeneration1 The Transformers: The Movie]]'' and the third and fourth series were set in the far-off year of 2005. The new characters all have 80s future-y alt-modes, although this can be excused as the Cybertronians having alien designs. (Why robots would transform into vehicles for people to drive is [[RuleOfCool beside the point]].) The fact that Soundwave and Blaster [[FadSuper still transform into cassette players]], not to mention the fact that the Cybertronian personalities can be stored on ''five-and-a-half-inch floppy disks'' makes this trope very clear. Daniel Witwicky's outfit (a jumpsuit with his initials on it) falls right into Zeerust, too.
* Historical Zeerust - Terry's friend is helping him study for a history test in ''BatmanBeyond''. She mentions "Come on. Clinton was the fun one, then came the boring one...", ignorant of the fact that the next president would go on to be called many, many, ''many'' things, but boring is certainly not one of them. You can assume they believed Al Gore would be elected.
** In addition, while the show correctly predicted the prevalence of cell phones in the future, the phones themselves look more like cell phones from the late 90s when the show was made. The creators even admit in one episodes commentary that they didn't predict how cell phones would shrink.
** Also, double-breasted suits no longer seem to exist in the ''BatmanBeyond'' future. However, this less of an attempt to predict future fashion, and more that the animators had grown sick of drawing double-breasted on the previous series.
* There's plenty of this in Ruby-Spears' [[{{MegaMan}} Megaman]]; despite taking place in at least 2010 (it's never outright stated, but the games give us a pretty good idea), the fashions and much of the technology are clearly 90s. Corded phones and phone booths. However, the [[{{RidiculouslyHumanRobots}} robots]] are pretty damned advanced.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Real Life]]
* Every World's Fair. Ever.
* Cybergoth music and fashion. Both are intended to seem "futuristic", yet are firmly grounded in 80s and early-90s conceptions of the future (except with more falls).
* A lot of "classic" 1950s design elements, probably best seen in the [[http://www.doowopusa.org/ "Doo Wop" architecture of Wildwood, New Jersey]].
* Tomorrowland at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, originally conceived in 1955 as a portrayal of life in 1986, which over the years has become about half-Zeerust and half-rides-based-on-SciFi-Disney-properties, such as ''Lilo and Stitch'' and ''Buzz Lightyear''. Space Mountain doesn't quite fall into either, yet.
** Of particular note was [[http://www.yesterland.com/futurehouse.html Monsanto's House of the Future]] in Disneyland, which featured ultra-futuristic elements like plastics, a microwave oven, and a flatscreen television. While the House soon faded into Zeerust, one element remained steadfastly resistant to progress: when Disneyland decided to demolish the House, wrecking balls just bounced off the sturdy plastic construction. They had to use hacksaws and blowtorches to dismantle it.
** The Zeerust in Tomorrowland is mostly deliberate nowadays--a notable exception is the Carousel of Progress, which touts a "Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" that's at least a decade out-of-date.
** About 10 years ago Disneyland redesigned Tomorrowland to deliberately go "Retro-Future" ... that is, they stopped even trying to be prophetic and went for the future-as-envisioned-by-Jules-Verne look (essentially, part steampunk and part art deco). Carousel of Progress is supposed to showcase "cutting edge" stuff... when it opened, flat screen plasma TVs were brand spanking new. I haven't been since then, though, so I don't know if they've bothered to keep it up to date.
* EPCOT has been sliding toward this as well, to the point that the original meaning of the name (Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow) and Walt Disney's original conception of EPCOT as a genuine "city of the future" are [[RetCon no longer officially acknowledged]] by the Disney corporation. The original scale model of the EPCOT city plan can now be found as a generic "vision of the future" seen at one of the brief stops on the Tomorrowland Peoplemover ride in the Magic Kingdom.
** Said park also had an attraction called "Horizons" depicting future space and ocean colonization and desert agriculture. Somehow, nearly everything else looked incredibly dated within a decade, including a building that looked straight out of Buck Rogers. Opened in 1983, closed in 1995.
*** The same ride had a room nostalgically presenting the "The Future of the Fifties" as if it were a humorous departure from the sensible, realistic depictions in the rest of the attraction, demonstrating ''[[GenreSavvy awareness]]'' of this trope while still lacking ''[[HypocriticalHumor self-awareness]]'' of it.
** The current version of Spaceship Earth allows guests to customize an animated Zeerust future through a series of questions and an onride photo system puts their faces onto the cartoon bodies.
* To quote [[http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/columnarchive&column=MakingMagic Mark Rosewater]], Head Developer for ''MagicTheGathering'': "Because Future Sight's timeshifted cards are from the FUTURE (dramatic music) we wanted them to have a futuristic look, so we made a [[http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?&id=136151 futuristic frame]]."
* Culinary example: Dippin' Dots, a dessert made from liquid-nitrogen-cooled beads of ice cream and mostly sold at amusement parks, been marketed as "The Ice Cream of the Future" since 1987. [[http://www.theonion.com/content/news/time_traveler_everyone_in_the A 2008 Onion article]] parodied the slogan in an article where a time traveler with 1950s fashion sense arrives in the present day to report to the people of the world that, in the 22nd century, ''everybody'' eats Dippin' Dots and "real" ice cream is unknown.
* GM's "Dustbuster" minivans from [[TheNineties the early '90s]]. At a classic car show, as a radio mobile unit, [[http://www.flickr.com/photos/12458821@N08/2747601505/sizes/l/in/set-72157606639764611/ it didn't look out of place]].
* The Aston Martin [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/89_Lagonda.JPG Lagonda]] and [[http://www.astonmartins.com/v8/images/am398_bulldog.jpg Bulldog]]. Pretty hideous and dated but, to give them some credit, unlike today's Astons they aren't aping the sixties James Bond [=DB5=] in any way.
* 1980 Renault Fuego. Cutting edge then. Not so much [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Renault_Fuego_GTX_2.0_1981.jpg now]].
* The Lamborghini Countach. Now the earlier Miura and 4-door Espada look more modern. Even worse with the eighties versions with their huge wings and flared arches that make them look less sophisticated since newer cars don't really ''need'' giant spoilers.
** The [=DeLorean=] probably belongs here too. Not helped by the fact that it was a dressed-up Lotus Esprit -- a car that has aged quite well.
** While we're on cars, pretty much every American car from the mid-to-late '50s. They're loved as classics for that exuberance now, but when they first fell out of fashion, they fell even harder than the '80s examples listed above. The fact that all that chrome was attached with bolts to holes drilled into the fenders didn't help matters -- the trim sporadically ''fell off'' when the holes rusted out, often before the car was even ten years old.
** That was because chrome was needed for the war effort, so cars were sold with wooden fenders and you would get the metal parts later from the dealer.
* The [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Apt_370004_-_euston_-_13-02-1980.jpg Advanced Passenger Train]]. Well it was in 1980.
** While on the subject of trains, WashingtonDC's Metrorail system almost certainly counts. It was a huge step forward when it opened in 1976, but its decor has changed surprisingly little since, and the elaborate automatic train control system has started to show its seams (the deadly crash that happened on the Red Line in 2009 has been blamed on failures in that system). Due to budget and time constraints, there are still some 1000-series cars in service, despite being over 30 years old and not having had a major overhaul since the 1990s; they're the ones with the disco-fabulous red/orange/beige interiors.
* [[http://www.airliners.net/photo/PEOPLExpress/Boeing-747-243B/0662385/L/ PEOPLExpress]]. Yes kids, mauve and orange stripes were once the cutting edge.
** Southwest Airlines embraces their [[http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2199/2359811060_0b826f715d.jpg?v=0 original livery's]] Zeerust-ness by keeping several planes in rotation with the old color scheme. And like all non-white based liveries, their current Blue/Red/Yellow version will someday be Zeerust. Any airline whose planes used to be chrome-colored also suffer Zeerust. Continental was the last American airline to hold out on that scheme.
** Also along the same lines, many films used Pan American airlines in their vision of the future... either showing Pan Am Space Travel, or something similar. A fact that's worth much amusement now that Pan Am not only fell from grace as '''the''' world's airline, but out of existence altogether.
* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Aptera_Typ-1_Wallpaper.jpg Aptera Typ-1]], a new hybrid car that wouldn't look out of place on ''TheJetsons''. It's either awesome on top of awesome, or utterly preposterous. You want one. And a [[IWantMyJetpack jetpack]].
* The infamous [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu_Houses Xanadu houses]], which were supposed to the "the house of the future". Built in the early 80s as automated homes and tourist attractions, their technology rapidly dated and the last of them closed up a mere ten years later.
* The "[[http://www.3wheelers.com/whomo.html Whomobile]]" from ''DoctorWho''. This was written into two episodes of the series, but was actually Jon Pertwee's personal car.
* To be fair, a lot of the futuristic predictions about fashion did come true. [[http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=0jpeuR_sK8w In The Eighties]].
* There's some adorable {{Zeerust}} in this [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9eAiy0IGBI 30s newsreel feature]] of what clothes in the year 2000 will be like ("Oh swish!"). Curiously, they weren't wholly wrong about portable phones or radio.
* [[http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/03/24/what-will-life-be-like-in-the-year-2008/ This 1968 article about life in 2008]] contains some fine, typical {{Zeerust}}: automated cars that hit 250mph on smooth plastic roads, all controlled by an infallible computer that has never caused an accident; cities covered by domes that keep them evenly climatized yearlong; moving sidewalks everywhere; intercontinental passenger rockets; four hour work days; housework is done by robots; and a lot more wacky stuff.
* The Seattle Center Monorail. As well as the Space Needle and the outdoor part of the Pacific Science Center.
* Biosphere 2.
* Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House, a cheap, energy-efficient mass-produced portable home that was never produced because it was butt-ugly. And the Dymaxion car, as fuel-efficient as a modern car at a time when massive gas-guzzling road-boats were the norm, easier to park, and no one bought it because its aerodynamic body looked like a fish on wheels.
** People do sometimes willingly buy or build houses at least as ugly as that. Fuller (in the introduction to ''Grunch of Giants'') said the Dymaxion House went nowhere because building codes effectively made prefab impossible.
* Some of the 1978-1987 LEGO Space sets [[http://guide.lugnet.com/set/?q=6985_1&v=z like this one.]]
* The Fascination concept car. First was proposed to use a "boilerless steam engine"(the closest thing to which is a hydrogen fuel cell), then an "electromagnetic association engine" (pure pie-in-the-sky {{vaporware}}).

[[/folder]]

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