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alt title(s): Retro Future; Outdated Future
Because when I think of the future, I think of women using their hoses on the couch.
"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 Douglas Adams 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:
Compare The Aesthetics Of Technology, Crystal Spires And Togas, I Want My Jet Pack, Hollywood History, Science Marches On, Twenty Minutes Into The Future, Retro Universe, We Will Use Micros In The Future.
Examples:
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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 revolves around a computer network strangely prophetic of the real-world Internet, complete with online pornography and content filters. At that time there were 6 working computers in the world.
- That said, it's still loaded with Zeerust - although they have a very modern monitor-and-keyboard interface, the eponymous "logics" run on a combination of relay switches and "cold" vacuum tubes, and can literally figure out anything.
- 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.
- Jules Verne's Paris In The Twentieth Century, published in 1863 and set around 1963, involves the "picture-telegraph," which allows people to communicate and conduct business instantaneously from anywhere in the world. What Verne failed to predict was the display screen, and the narration mentions that France's consumption of paper has increased dramatically due to this new invention.
Anime & Manga
- Practically every iteration of Mobile Suit Gundam 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.
- Let's not forget how in Gundam ZZ one of the characters in a scene is listening to music on a Walkman
- 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.
- G Gundam has a scene where Master Asia holds up a floppy, claiming it contains vast amounts of information.
- Gundam Wing 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...
- Cell manipulation and holo-screens are already here, albeit either heavily stymied by government regulations or horribly expensive. Mechs are in their infancy. Space elevators? Who knows when, but possibly soon.
- The original Bubblegum Crisis, 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 the Soviet Union and East Germany still exist.
- Yoshiyuki Tomino's Space Runaway Ideon, 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
- Elvis Presley's outfits In Real Life tended to border on Space Clothes anyway.
- Most of the scif-fi works of Osamu Tezuka. 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 Schizo Tech, 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 Lampshade Hanging of this in the introduction to one of the paperback collections, where a character complains to Tezuka, saying that since it's the future, he should be wearing Space Clothes 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 Ultimate Universe 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 Terminals 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 Mazinger Z, evident in many of the vehicles and SuperRobots in the series.
- There are other examples in Uchuu Senkan Yamato, 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 bellbottoms!
 ◊
- Gamilon General Lysis composes his report on his first encounter with the Argo/Yamato on an alien typewriter.
Comic Books
- The Scott McCloud comic Zot! features the world of the present day, and the Alternate Universe wherein every cool thing thought of in the early 20th century came true.
- DC's 1980s Star Trek 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 The Sixties even though the comics were published well into The Seventies.
Commercials
- Have you ever used a phone booth with a video screen rather than just a cell phone? 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.
- In fact, the only Zeerusty thing about the commercial was the assumption that AT&T would be the main carrier for all — or any — of these technologies. Almost every one of those technologies exists in pretty much the form depicted in the commercial (except, possibly, for the voice-activated security lock), but most of them are either non-centralized or connected to the public Internet; the only way AT&T would make any money off of any of them would be as a patent holder.
- 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 that one from Demolition Man.
Film
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, Robert A Heinlein'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 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 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.
- It's not merely a matter of changing technology, but of changing mindsets. His classic (and arguably finest) story —All You Zombies—, written not long after WWII, fails to anticipate that the horrifying events of that war would lead to very strict legislation about medical procedures and informed consent. His central character is placed under general anesthesia — and wakes to be informed, after the fact, that s/he has been subjected without consent to gender reassignment surgery. In our world such a character would not be relegated to a hand-to-mouth living writing confession stories, because he would sue the hospital and doctor into bankruptcy.
- And by 'our world' you mean the US. It is different in many countries.
- Parodied in the Kim Newman 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, robots that are bugger-all use whatsoever, a "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 evolved "beyond" the petty motives for murder is a pretty big strike on the card as well.
- There's a touch of Hilarious In Hindsight in that the fashionable '70s clothes of the detectives would look no less comical to a modern reader than Tomorrow Town's unisex jumpsuits.
- The Dune books justified a non-computerized future by outright stating that any kind of computers were destroyed due to a past 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 geriatric/nootropic drug Melange (aka Spice). There are also hints of similar manipulation by the Bene Tleilax, who were portrayed as supreme 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.
- The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov made some amazing predictions decades before they should have rationally been expected (Pocket calculators, screen-displayed information, atomic clocks, etc.), but some of its technology has rusted along with the rest of them. Asimov predicted the continued miniaturization of information, but instead of computer memory it is all stored on microfilm; hard-copy newspapers are still being printed millennia after the invention of electronic displays; and the thought of an actual thinking computer that can perform sequenced actions, instead of one that simply processed mathematical calculations, was not even introduced until Foundation and Earth, a sequel-book written in The Eighties and taking place thousands of years after the invention of Faster Than Light Travel, whereas a modern-day programmer using Visual Basic can do the same thing with an If-Then code.
- End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov is about a secret organization which regularly changes the whole history of humankind, by combining Time Travel, Butterfly Effect and magical computers, powerful enough to calculate what the new reality will look like after the change made by a Butterfly Of Doom. 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 Ray Bradbury'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."
- Aldous Huxley's Brave New World 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 Powers That Be 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 Twenty Minutes Into The Future, as it does predict many plausible consequences of information technology.
- It's difficult to believe that A Clockwork Orange, even in the 1960s in which it was made, is meant to be set in the future.
- Burgess himself said that book was meant to be set in an alternate 60s. The film, however...
- Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man 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 Snow Crash 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.
- Enders Game was/is a well-known 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).
- Dragonriders Of Pern 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.
- 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 ramscoops, longevity drugs, etc.
- Many of Isaac Asimov's robot stories, set in the 2000s—and even the Lije Bailey novels, set in about the 3000s—mention characters using slide rules. Robots can't do math?
- Another weird one was that a plot point in one of the Lije Bailey novels revolved around the incredible idea of robots with interchangeable parts. Then there was concern about robot brains controlling starships (especially warships), because it wouldn't occur to them that other ships contained humans.
- In Harry Turtledove's Guns Of The South the South African white supremacists arming the Confederacy with AK-47s are from 2015, but the details given of that year appear little different from the late Eighties - early Nineties (published in 1992.) The only apparent reasons for the future setting are the time machine's span of 150 years, and the imvention of a time machine.
Live Action TV
Music
- Donald Fagen's song "I.G.Y. (International Geophysical Year)" straddles the line between Zeerust and I Want My Jet Pack, 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 Twenty Minutes Into The Future, 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.
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 M Hz.
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 land battleships or pulp robots. In a related note, almost all of the "contemporary" tech is inexplicably World War II-era.
- The Fallout series of RPGs lives on this trope. Fallout is set in an Alternate History 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 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, Mass Effect 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 Word Of God 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 Raygun Gothic 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.
- So, how about that 200X, eh? Remember when that mad scientist (who looked like Albert Einstein) stole a bunch of robots from his coworker scientist (who looked like Santa Claus) to take over the world? Aren't you glad the Santa-scientist refitted his personal assistant robot to become a super fighting robot who went on to stop that madman? Several times? Don't look now, I hear some scientist in the Soviet Union is threatening a similar attack...
- The obscure Street Fighter spinoff Street Fighter 2010 predicted that in 20 years, martial artists will be fighting aliens using performance-enhancing cybernetic suits and interdimensional warp gates. The year 2010 has come and there are still no cyborgs, no aliens, and interplanetary travel is nowhere near perfect yet.
- If Chrono Trigger is to be believed we should be have been living in dome cities by the time the 21st century rolled around, or at the very least had some time to before a giant parasite burst out of the ground and showered the earth's surface with bolts of magma. Somewhat handwaved by the technological timeline ingame being a little skewed (refrigerators and element stoves in 1000 AD, etc.)
Web Comics
Web Original
Western Animation
- "The future" in The Jetsons seemed to mean "the 1960s, but with more Applied Phlebotinum."
- Muppet Babies parodied this, when Baby Piggy claimed that the future would be "just like now, only more... 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.
- Jimmy Neutron is set in the Zeerust-styled town of Retroville, and Jimmy's futuristic inventions have a charming Buck Rogers quality about them.
- 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 modern day Venture compound in The Venture Brothers is practically built on Zeerust, from the X-1 (nuclear powered superjet) to the punch card sleeping beds, to the moving walkways, etc...
- 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 beside the point.) The fact that Soundwave and Blaster 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 Batman Beyond. 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 did not predict how cell phones would shrink.
- While we are in the DCAU, the idea of zeerust was deconstructed in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm; in a flashback, Bruce and Andrea are shown having a wonderful time visiting the Gotham World's Fair, with its lively and optimistic view of the future with standard things such as robot butlers. When the fair is revisited in the present, it is in ruins, seemingly paralleling Bruce and Andrea's future, and serves as the final battleground for the two former lovers and the Joker.
- There's plenty of this in Ruby-Spears' Mega Man; 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 robots are pretty damned advanced.
- My Life As A Teenage Robot uses a visual style akin to pie-eyed classic toons and is set in a near-future setting with very Zeerust aesthetics.
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 "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-Sci Fi-Disney-properties, such as Lilo and Stitch and Buzz Lightyear. Space Mountain doesn't quite fall into either, yet.
- Of particular note was 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 T Vs 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 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 1999.
- 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 awareness of this trope while still lacking 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 Mark Rosewater, Head Developer for Magic The Gathering: "Because Future Sight's timeshifted cards are from the FUTURE (dramatic music) we wanted them to have a futuristic look, so we made a 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. 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 the early '90s. At a classic car show, as a radio mobile unit, it didn't look out of place.
- The Aston Martin Lagonda◊ and 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 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 Advanced Passenger Train◊. Well it was in 1980.
- While on the subject of trains, Washington DC'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.
- PEOPLExpress. Yes kids, mauve and orange stripes were once the cutting edge.
- Southwest Airlines embraces their 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 Aptera Typ-1◊, a new hybrid car that wouldn't look out of place on The Jetsons. It's either awesome on top of awesome, or utterly preposterous. You want one. And a jetpack.
- The infamous 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 "Whomobile" from Doctor Who. 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. In The Eighties.
- There's some adorable Zeerust in this 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.
- 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.
- It's not that nobody bought the car- it never even went to production. It turns out that, in addition to being very aerodynamic, the (three-wheeled) Dymaxion was also very top-heavy and unstable. Development was tabled after the prototype killed a test driver.
- Some of the 1978-1987 LEGO Space sets 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).
- This video made in the '50s shows the highway system of the future to have things like heated roads to melt ice, prefabricated bridges, self guiding cars with thermal imaging, truck trains consisting of store shelving, vehicle elevators, underground roadways, and as it proceeds further from reality: floating cars that can follow roads that turn upside down for no reason. They did certainly get urban sprawl right, though.
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