Basic Trope: A depiction of the future that is conspicuously outdated.
- Straight: Space Opera is created in The '50s. It's the Turn of the Millennium In-Universe, yet men still wear fedoras with their spacesuits, women are typically either housewives, or in career fields such as teaching or nursing (which they plan to leave when they get married), the Cold War has not ended, and the schools are still segregated.
- Exaggerated: Space Opera is created in The '50s. It's the Turn of the Millennium In-Universe, which is depicted as the Victorian Era Recycled In Space.
- Downplayed: Space Opera is created in The '50s. It's the Turn of the Millennium In-Universe. Rather than being completely outdated, the show has some ideas and storylines that would be slightly conservative or dated today.
- Justified: A Fifties Space Opera's outdated clothing styles and slang are explained as a cultural reversion, e.g. a retro fad or a calculated attempt to meet the expectations of aliens who'd been monitoring 1950s Earth broadcasts.
- Inverted: A show about The '50s created at the Turn of the Millennium features sympathetic openly-gay characters, women in positions of power, a few men who choose to stay home with the kids, racially-integrated schools, and Eternal Sexual Freedom.
- Subverted: Some women are shown going to work, and some of them even have active sex lives.
- Double Subverted: But they are expected to quit their jobs when they marry, and never discuss or acknowledge their sex lives openly.
- Parodied:
- Space Opera, a Retraux show made in The New '10s and written as if it's in The '50s, is set just at the Turn of the Millennium and uses all the tropes from early postwar sci-fi, but throws in the occasional early-00s nostalgia reference.
- Anachronism Stew
- The characters speak Shakespearean English while greeting space aliens.
- Zeerust is an actual substance.
- Zig Zagged: Space Opera has no humans, but three races that look similar. One race has The '50s ideals, the second race has Turn of the Millennium ideals, and the third race has The Gay '90s ideals.
- Averted: Space Opera is overall a very good prediction of the future, with little appearing outdated.
- Enforced:
- Space Opera is a retelling of an ancient mythology, or a Charles Dickens novel, the works of William Shakespeare, or a religious text Recycled In Space.
- Write What You Know, Two Decades Behind, Small Reference Pools, Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: A Space Opera set 50 years in the future focuses on multiple mid-career professionals whose given names are the trendy baby names of the time the movie's made.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
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