->The future ain't what it used to be.
-->-- Unknown
----
[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder:Advertising]]

-> It's the year 2000. But where are the {{flying car}}s? I was promised flying cars! I don't see any flying cars! [[RepeatedForEmphasis Why? Why? Why?]]
-->-- '''Creator/AveryBrooks''', ''[[https://youtu.be/iI_OneNV4CY IBM Business Software commercial]]''
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Comics]]

->'''Doctor Thirteen''': '''I'm''' waiting on that ''jet-pack'' they promised us in the ''sixties''. \\
'''Architect''': As'm I... still.\\
'''Doctor Thirteen''': Well, you're not going to get it. But you still cling to the promise. We all do.
-->-- ''[[Franchise/TheDCU Doctor Thirteen: Architecture & Morality]]''

->'''Hsu:''' 2001 is '''OVER.''' All your hopes and dreams for 2001--dashed!\\
'''Chan:''' No flying cars! No hyper-intelligent robots! No pixie-like girls in shiny silver miniskirts!\\
'''Hsu:''' "Darn," on that last one, by the way.
-->-- ''ComicStrip/HsuAndChan''

->'''Hobbes:''' [[TheNineties A new decade]] is coming up.\\
'''Calvin:''' Yeah, big deal! Hmph. Where are the flying cars? Where are the moon colonies? Where are the personal robots and the zero gravity boots, huh? You call this a new decade?! You call this the future?? HA! Where are the rocket packs? Where are the disintegration rays? Where are the floating cities?\\
'''Hobbes:''' Frankly, I'm [[LuddWasRight not sure people have the brains to manage the technology they've got]].\\
'''Calvin:''' I mean, ''look'' at this! We still have [[WeatherControlMachine weather?!]] Give me a break!
-->-- ''ComicStrip/CalvinAndHobbes'', [[https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/12/30 December 30, 1989]]

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Fan Works]]

->"Antigravity? It is 2015 already. Where's my hoverboard, punk? Where is it?!"
-->--''FanFic/ShinjiAndWarhammer40K'', ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3886999/48/Shinji-and-Warhammer40k chapter 48]]''

->"You know what's so disappointing about the future?" growled the torrid half-Klingon. "NO {{FLYING CAR}}S!" She swung back her arm and hurled the speedster as hard and far as she could.
-->-- '''Attack of the 50-Ft Half-Klingon'''

->You will BE AMAZED by the INCREDIBLE FUTURE OF 2009 with its jetpacks, flying cars, domed cities, alien monsters and vast electronic superbrains! Where rocketships TRAVEL TO THE STARS and alluring robot girls cater to YOUR EVERY DESIRE! You will GASP AT INCONCEIVABLE MARVELS like mobile telephones, interstate highways, automatic sliding doors, artificial satellites, and weapons of mass destruction!
-->-- Blurb for ''Fanfic/Plan7Of9FromOuterSpace''

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Film -- Live-Action]]

->Wait a minute, this is the future... [[NerdInEvilsHelmet where are all the phaser guns?]]
-->-- '''Simon Phoenix''', ''Film/DemolitionMan''

->We used to look up at the sky and wonder about our place in the stars, now we just look down and wonder about our place in the dirt.
-->-- '''Joseph Cooper''', ''{{Film/Interstellar}}''

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Live-Action TV]]

->'''Leo [=McGarry=]''': Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.\\
'''Josh Lyman''': The personal computer...?\\
'''Leo [=McGarry=]''': A more efficient delivery system for gossip and [[TheInternetIsForPorn pornography?]] Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?
-->-- ''Series/TheWestWing''

->Are my shoes electric? No. Does [[RunningGag my pillow comb my hair at night]], while I am sleeping? No, sadly, it does not. So where, I ask you, is the [[HoverBoard hoverboard]] technology we all saw in ''[[Film/BackToTheFuturePartII Back to the Future 2]]'' over twenty years ago!
-->-- '''Shawn Spencer''', ''Series/{{Psych}}''

->We've all got gadgets coming out of our ears; ipods, satnavs, an electrical item for every job. To many, it must seem like we're living in the future. But to others, the cry has always been: "Well if this is the future, then where's my jetpack?" Well today, those people will definitely have a smile on their face."
-->-- ''Series/ThatMitchellAndWebbLook'' [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=vDIojhOkV4w&NR=1 Series 4, Episode 3]]

->Dear [[Creator/TheBBC BBC]]. Well it's now 30 years down the line, and I'm no closer to owning a robotic housemaid. ''Tomorrow's World''? '''''Tomorrow's Horseshit''''', more like!
-->-- '''Creator/EdByrne''', ''Series/MockTheWeek'', "Unlikely letters to be read out on ''Points of View''"

->The new millennium[[{{beat}} ... ]] Sucks! No flying cars. No flying cars!
-->-- '''Creator/LewisBlack''', ''[[http://www.cc.com/video-clips/3weeg7/comedy-central-presents-the-millennium Comedy Central Presents]]''

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Music]]

->''Ah, you may leave here for four days in space\\
But when you return it's the same old place''
-->--'''Barry [=McGuire=]''', "Eve of Destruction"

->''I thought by now we'd live in space\\
and eat a pill instead of dinner\\
and wear a gas mask on our face, \\
a President of female gender.\\
Though progress marches on, \\
our troubles will grow strong\\
and my expectancies, become my fantasies.\\
You turn my blood to sand, the earth stands still again.''
-->-- '''Music/DanielAmos''', "(It's the Eighties, So Where's Our) Rocket Packs"

->''Where's my hovercraft?\\
Where's my jetpack?\\
Where's the font of acquired wisdom that eludes me now?''
-->-- '''Music/TheyMightBeGiants''', "The World Before Later On"

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Newspapers]]

->When I first saw the film I was impressed by the giant billboards with moving, speaking faces on them, touting Coca-Cola and other products. Now I walk over to Millennium Park and see giant faces looming above me, smiling, winking, and periodically spitting (but not Coke).
-->--'''Roger Ebert''' on ''Film/BladeRunner''

->Staring out of my window in Manhattan's East Village the other day, it struck me suddenly that the street scene below did not differ in any significant way from how it would have looked in 1967. Maybe even 1947. Oh, the design of automobiles has changed a bit, but combustion-engine-propelled ground-level vehicles are still how we get around, as opposed to flying cars or teleportation. Pedestrians trudge along sidewalks rather than swooshing along high-speed moving travelators. And even in hipster-friendly New York, most people's clothes and hair don't look especially outlandish. From the trusty traffic meters and sturdy blue mailboxes to the iconic yellow taxis and occasional cop on horseback, 21st century New York looks distressingly nonfuturistic. For a former science science fiction fanatic like me, this is brutally disappointing.
-->'''Simon Reynolds''', [[https://www.salon.com/2007/05/12/jetpack/ "Back to the future"]]

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Video Games]]

->'''Old Johnny:''' Can someone, ''anyone,'' explain to me what the hell is going on?\\
'''Younger Johnny:''' Right? I've been in the future for a whole hour and I haven't seen one jetpack. Not ''one''.
-->-- ''VideoGame/MortalKombat11''

->"I see the evil of the times to come. No flying cars! '''EVER! HAHAHAHAHAHA!'''"
-->-- '''Vigo the Carpathian''', ''VideoGame/GhostbustersTheVideoGame''

[[/folder]]

[[folder:WebComics]]

->Stupid [[OmniscientCouncilOfVagueness Department of Jetpack Suppression...]]
-->-- RunningGag in ''Webcomic/SkinHorse''

->'''Boy:''' It's 2011. I want my flying car.\\
'''Girl:''' Dude. You're complaining to me on a phone, on which you buy and read books. And which you were using to play a 3D shooter until I interrupted you with what would be a video call if I was wearing a shirt.\\
'''Boy:''' Can't I have a flying car, too?\\
'''Girl:''' You'd crash it while texting and playing ''VideoGame/AngryBirds''.
-->-- ''Webcomic/{{xkcd}}'', [[http://xkcd.com/864/ "Flying Cars"]]

->This device can contact nearly anyone in the world, locate me on aerial maps, and plot directions to any location in the country. It is unquestionably the future, and you would have crashed your stupid flying car anyway.
-->-- '''Webcomic/ThreePanelSoul''' on [=iPhones=], [[http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-advancements On Advancements]]

->'''Mark''': This isn't the future! THIS IS THE LOUSY STINKIN' NOW!\\
'''John''': We still have hope for 2030 or even 2020. I mean, people are working on humanoid robots as we speak!
-->-- '''A filler comic from {{Tropers/StongRadd}}'s webcomic-to-be'''

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Original]]

->Where are my robowhores? Bring me my robowhores!
-->-- '''The Perfesser''', [[http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2006/08/reynolds-universal-robots.html "Reynolds' Universal Robots"]]

->"We just don't care," said a woman I stopped, who agreed to speak on behalf of the global population. "It's completely irrelevant to my life." Wall Street also gave no reaction whatsoever to the news, staring at me blankly for a few seconds before asking to borrow my lighter and returning to the trading pits.
-->--''Irrelevant News'', [[http://www.irrmag.com/irrnewz/550-scientists-crushed-nobody-cares-about-moon-water.html "Scientists Crushed - Nobody Cares About Moon Water"]]

->It's a kind of Globalist fairy tale, a myth for the heady days of the early postwar era, when rational discourse in the Hall of Nations would solve all problems. Only [[StrawPolitical religious bumpkins]], with their kneejerk paranoid delusions, stood in the path of our new utopia. (Could Clarke had conceived of a day when his country would orchestrate the installation of [[UsefulNotes/SaudiArabia the world's most aggressive theocracy]] as chair of the [=UNs=] Human Rights Council?)
-->--'''[[http://secretsun.blogspot.com/2015/10/childhoods-end-and-theater-of-apocalypse.html Christopher Loring Knowles]]''' on ''Literature/ChildhoodsEnd''

->We are a country that has the ability to build skytrains and have digital porn billboards, and yet, thanks to a divided Supreme Court and political stonewallers on both the left and the right, we're still gonna be arguing about the same, tired bullshit we always have fifty years from now instead of actually living in the future. What a load.
-->--'''[[http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-feed/2013/06/make-it-stop-the-worst-of-the-week-of-062813.html Drew Magary]]''', ''Make It Stop''

->Our pre-modern ancestors used waterwheels and handaxes from youth to old age. We play with cheap disposable technology as children that would’ve seemed like magic to them. And then, when we get old, we look back on that antiquated magic and laugh at it, while taking fresh miracles as everyday facts of life. And the byproducts of all this pile up as wreckage and waste and rubbish. Hence SF’s obsession with [[AfterTheEnd entropy and obsolescence and ruins]]. Hence {{time travel}}.
-->--'''[[http://www.philipsandifer.com/blog/tricky-dicky-part-1-maximum-stay-530-years/ Jack Graham]]''', "Bring Back the Stocks!"

->I feel sorry for those who think innovation will ever lead humanity to some new era of intelligence and social awareness. Hacktivists and crowdsourcing and cryptocurrencies and [=WikiLeaks=] are all proof...we’re not giving the elite much incentive to let us keep these freedoms, although mobile devices and the Internet are proving to be a [[BreadAndCircuses wonderful at pacifying people]] too.
-->--'''[[http://metagearsolid.org/2011/07/video-games-in-the-master-plan/ Terry Wolfe]]'''

->'''O'Malley:''' How did you know these were rocket pants?\\
'''Whiskey:''' O'Malley, if you woke up in the future and you ''weren't'' wearing rocket pants, what's the first thing you'd do?\\
'''O'Malley:''' Kick '''''everything's''''' ass.\\
'''Whiskey:''' That's right. And since you weren't ducking when I woke up, I knew my pants could fly.
-->--''from '''[[http://www.cracked.com/blog/man-comics-dick-whiskey-in-one-millionth-century/ Dick Whiskey! Drunk Cop in the One Millionth Century!]]''' by '''{{Creator/Seanbaby}}'''''

->For a hundred years now we had assumed we were building to something -- that there was some sort of stable endpoint that all the churn and upheaval pointed towards. Whether that endpoint was utopia or armageddon was up in the air, but the broad idea that history was going somewhere wasn’t. Instead, however, the wheels simply fell off, and the tow truck never came. We sat, abandoned on history’s roadside, left thinking, “is this all there was?” And, seeing no sign of civilization, we tweeted about it.
-->--'''[[http://www.philipsandifer.com/2014/03/pop-between-realities-home-in-time-for.html Dr. El Sandifer]]'''

->''"Unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. [[OppressiveStatesOfAmerica Here you go]]."''
-->-- '''Kyle Marquis'''

->Assuming that we dodged the ''[[Literature/NineteenEightyFour 1984]]'', ''Literature/BraveNewWorld'' bullet, our future was supposed to be a sort of technocratic, atomic-powered, computer-controlled, antiseptic, space-travelling Jerusalem that would at last free us from the curse of Eden and original sin...We expected a sort of bloodless, benign French Revolution with Hugo Gernsback as our Voltaire and Creator/CarlSagan as our Robespierre. And what did we get? The City of Man with Tivo.
-->-- '''''[[http://davidszondy.com/future/futurepast.htm Tales of Future Past]]'''''

->''I'm going to write a story set after {{the Singularity}}, a million years hence, when we are all intergalactically-empowered immortal sentiences in the Beyond, and people will STILL BE COMPLAINING ABOUT NOT HAVING SODDING JETPACKS.''
-->-- '''[[http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011324.html Patrick Nielsen Hayden]]'''

->[T]he problems with flying cars won’t be fixed by one more round of technological advancement, or a hundred more rounds, because those problems are hardwired into the physical realities with which flying cars have to contend. One of the great unlearned lessons of our time is that a bad idea doesn’t become a good idea just because someone comes up with some new bit of technology to enable it.
-->--'''Creator/JohnMichaelGreer''', ''[[https://www.ecosophia.net/progress-and-amnesia/ Progress and Amnesia]]''

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Video]]

->Wait a minute, ''those'' existed in the 50s?! What a rip-off! I want one! I demand one right now!
-->-- '''WebVideo/TheSpoonyExperiment''', during his riffing on ''Captain Z-Ro''

->"''In the year 2015: They got everything wrong!''"
-->-- '''[[WebVideo/{{Caddicarus}} Caddy]]''', on the opening of [[VideoGame/LEGORacers LEGO Drome Racers]].

->[[Film/BackToTheFuturePartII In five years, we're gonna have flying cars and hoverboards and self-lacing shoes]]... it better happen. Otherwise they should have made it the year 3000. Even if they made it 2100, we'd all be dead! It wouldn't make a difference anyway! Better to be a mystery than to be '''wrong'''!
-->-- '''WebVideo/TheAngryVideoGameNerd''' on ''VideoGame/StreetFighter2010''

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Western Animation]]

->'''Birdboy:''' Ooh, sansabelt! You don't see that much anymore, you guys from Florida?\\
'''George Jetson:''' No, we're from the future.\\
'''Elroy:''' Yeah, the 21st century!\\
'''George Jetson:''' The ''magnificent far-off year of 2002!''\\
'''Harvey Birdman:''' ''(looks at his desk calendar, dated 2004, then back to George while narrowing his eyes) Really.''
-->-- '''WesternAnimation/HarveyBirdmanAttorneyAtLaw'''

->You can't say everyone's got a water buffalo when everyone does ''not'' have a water buffalo! We're going to get nasty letters saying 'Where's ''my'' water buffalo?' 'Why don't ''I'' have a water buffalo?' and are you prepared to deal with that?! I don't think so! Just [[PunctuatedForEmphasis stop. Being. So. SILLY!]]
-->-- '''Archibald Asparagus''', ''WesternAnimation/VeggieTales''

->How can we breathe with no air? Where's Grandpa Max? If this is the future, does everybody have jetpacks? Who won the last five world series? No seriously, ''where are the jetpacks?''
-->-- '''10 year old Ben''', ''WesternAnimation/Ben10UltimateAlien''

->'''Scientist''': We the scientists of the world are sick of hearing about jet packs! "Oh, Mr. scientist, where's my jetpack? We've been waiting since the [[TheFifties 1950s]]!" Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh! Well, we tried, okay!?
->''([[FailureMontage shows 5 jetpack tests, all failing]] [[MadeOfExplodium by exploding]])''
->'''Scientist''': Satisfied? Now please leave us alone, so we can get back to making your iPods smaller!
->''([[MadeOfExplodium And it explodes.]])''
-->--'''WesternAnimation/RobotChicken'''

->[=WayneTech=] promised an electric car by this year. I put a deposit down. Where's my goddamn electric car, Bruce?
-->-- '''Joker''', ''WesternAnimation/HarleyQuinn2019''
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Real Life]]

->Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that [[ScienceIsBad we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.]]
-->--'''Creator/KurtVonnegut'''

->The irony is that last century’s modernism cannot turn into a thing of the past without losing its identity, because it wanted so desperately to embody the future. Like the glass and steel cubes of modernist buildings, it cannot afford to become old, to become the past, because that is totally undermining its ''raison d’être''. When the future becomes the past, the one cancels out the other and the result is emptiness.
-->-- '''John Borstlap''', ''The Classical Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21st Century''

->Today it is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy's edge. But in the process, [[JobStealingRobot we have lost the human element]]; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create 'one world.' Instead of one world, we have '[[UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan star wars]],' and a future in which dumb, dented human toys will drift aimlessly about the cosmos [[InYourNatureToDestroyYourselves after our small planet's dead.]]
-->--'''Creator/GoreVidal''', "On Flying"

->An actual life-sized robot, clearly influenced by Johnny Five from 1986's ''Film/ShortCircuit'', or Paulie's [[{{Sexbot}} sensual butler]] in ''Film/RockyIV'', Kevin has such an advanced level of Artificial Intelligence that, for military applications alone, he'd be worth billions. Here we are, 25 years later, and AI still hasn't progressed past video game characters who spend their days [[ArtificialStupidity running into walls.]]
-->--'''Stuart Millard''' on ''Series/SavedByTheBell'' ("The Beauty and the Screech"), ''So Excited, So Scared''

->We wanted flying cars; instead, we got [[Website/{{Twitter}} 140 characters]].
-->--'''Peter Thiel'''

[[/folder]]
----