The Periodic Daily of Tomorrow

Or maybe it’s easier to furnish the future with accessories of today; time travel just to dress a set would be prohibitively expensive, unless Harry Harrison is right.

I’m not really sure what this site is. Part wiki, part tumble, part blog.

Welcome to The Periodic Daily Of Tomorrow – Periodic Daily for short.

What brings me to obsessively catalog the stuff of movies and televisions shows and their portrayal of daily life?

Boredom, fascination, annoyance. Some people (alisa) can speak eloquently to the under-representation of brown people in the media, others the deep social meanings in classic literature or the symbolism of old tales handed down orally. But I find portrayals of the future fascinating and hopeful; indenifiable with what is today and what could be.

Time was, popular stories were mostly of yesterday. Now they are ever more about the future. Keep looking forward.

And its cool. To me, anyway.

Others might be taken out of the story to see that every one on Caprica shopped at IKEA, and that the Battle Star Galactica (reboot) designers spent more on graphics than set design, but that’s jut the choice they made, of many. Which reminds me, why were the corners in the series of all papers lopped off?

But I grew up shouting at the movies; it was another way our parents helped us expand our world and set us on their moral path. MST3K helped, too. Not theatre movies; we’d whisper and giggle quietly so as not to disturb others. So it’s a way of sharing my madness and keep me amused.

I don’t remember the first movie I really noticed today tomorrow in. The earliest space or future movie I recall was The Black Hole.
Looking back at that era with the aid of wikiepeida and Netflix, I realize there was not a lot to choose from, future wise, that was both age appropriate and good. TV of the time, I recall, was limited to Battle Star Galactica (original), Buck Rogers, and for a brief time, Voyagers.

I first saw The Fifth Element on the small screen. Though I was dating a fellow fantasy and Sci-Fi buff at the time, we missed it in theatre (and were wary after being sucker punched by Event Horizon. One of my dads friends went to see it and the theatre lost power halfway into the movie. Lucky guy.).

But The Fifth Element will probably be one of the first movies I buy for myself on Blu Ray  – I just like it that much. I even have it stored on my futuristic “smart phone” to play when I really get bored.

I’ve always been a costume and design fan, so watching just everything they did with it was fascinating. The wine bottles in the Diva suite were the first thing I remember seeing in “”the future ” that caught my eye as a mundane but delicious little detail. After that, I was hooked on future dewing and how things do and will hold up through the years, the better mousetraps.

These wine bottles were Sigg bottles. They were strange and new to me then – they are old and outdated to me now. Scratchy insides that need a special bottle brush, tiny hole for pouring and serving ….

But now the better desings are out there. Though maybe a Sigg-like bottle will prove to be more appropriate for wine and spirits; I’ve always seen them in containers with small holes. Makes sense for tapping a barrel, but does the hole need to stay small?

Elsewhre in the movie, we see the protagonist, Dallas, with fuzzy dice hanging from his vehicles rear-view mirrors. The cops, in pursuit, have ordinary orange glow sticks apparently ziptied to their mirror. Both were mere set decoration – but nice little details.

Overall, the set decoration is all done very well and very “future” like, with ulitartian every day things for the “average guy” and faux retro, faux future, and ostentatious retro where needed – flavors each character a bit more.  But it’s not all simple compact apartments and travel couches; everything is functional, from the magnetized coffee pot to the bookish old look of the monastery appointments.  The sets add a very three dimensional reality to day to day lidfe.

Externally, trains and cars and food carts fly all directions with some semblance of order but not the single line chaos that you’ll see in Futurama or the Back to the Future movies – traffic control is somewhat do-it-yourself with administrative overrides.

But I digress. This will be all about digressions and assertions and HALLO THERE, SHINY ANACHRONISM and why the pancake aren’t there more women scientists out there on the screen?