In the past few months, I’ve been re-watching The Cosby Show in entirety. I’m currently on season 6, when the show jumped the shark by bringing in Olivia to replace the no-longer-cute Rudy.
The Cosby Show went off the air in 1992 – 19 years ago – after 8 seasons, so it began 27 years ago. And, as TV works, the show becomes a time capsule. It’s hilarious, in this digital age, to see people wondering where so-and-so is and remember they don’t have cellphones. To see kids looking up stuff for homework in encyclopedias – no Internet.
And such is the days we live in, the days we’ll speak of in history classes. The day the future arrived.
It’s something I first thought of during a 2007 visit to the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. Standing in front of Hoverboard props from Back to the Future Part II, it rang clear and true. We’ve got only eight years until 2015! I was this close to starting Project 2015, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing a mass-produced flying skateboard.
But after figuring out that was silly, I started thinking: We’re already living in the future. The future years were here ever since we hit all those years we imagined “the future” to be, even in the ’80s, from George Orwell’s 1984 to Terminator‘s Judgment Day nuclear strike in 1997 to the animated Transformers: The Movie happening, as the narrator says, “in the year 2005.”
Here we are in 2011, with iPads, cellphones, eyeball-popping CGI, surgery robots, rovers on Mars, holograms and HDTVs, and Tron feels possible. And a generation of children who will know only a digital world. That as a 30-year-old, I’m in the tail end of the last generation to remember the analog world.
My 30something geeks, we’re the ones who will remember rotary phones heavy enough to bludgeon someone dead; hitting electronics when they went on the fritz; mixtapes used actual cassettes and CDs were new. Computers with disk drives. The treasured sitcom chestnut of boring people with vacation photos, gone, thanks to digital cameras, Flickr and Facebook.
We’ll remember programming VCRs (or not knowing how), wood paneling on electronics, and using journals before blogs – and blogs before Twitter. Remember how weird it was to see Doogie Howser typing his journal in WordPerfect on his PC?
I’ve already trained myself to stop using the word tape as a verb instead of record, lest I appear a fuddy-duddy. It all happened so fast, didn’t it?
I don’t know what it means. I wish I did. I remember hearing President Clinton telling us about the so-called bridge to the 21st century. And even though 2000 came and went, it never really felt like the 21st century yet. But when I came out of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek in 2009 showing a 23rd century that felt close despite spaceships flying around. The slogan of that film’s posters? The Future Begins. And then Obama became the first president born in the 1960s, and one who didn’t have to address the Vietnam War in his campaign. We’re here.
And yes, we don’t have flying cars or jet packs. But given how people drive on roads on the land, I do not want sky-highways, let alone what flying-car accidents would look like. Jet packs would be cool, especially for all those hours of my life I spent waiting for buses and trains.
But really, I’m just waiting for my Hoverboard. And maybe a Tron suit and lightcycle. Yeah, some of those.
