Archive Gallery: How the Space Age Influenced Design

Coleopter looks like a modern deep sea submarine.

2001 is the only flick to ever get the silence in space thing right. It still stands out as the single greatest SF movie ever made, IMHO.

And for more on the Philco Predicta: http://www.irememberjfk.com/mt/2010/07/the_most_stunning_tv_ever_made.php

> 2001 is the only flick to ever get the silence in space thing right.

Geez. Like everyone doesn't already know it works that way.

The "sounds of space" are dramatic license. Do you criticize a Shakespearean play because the actors don't 'die' correctly, s...ting and p..ing themselves as they pass from this mortal coil?

Hell, Mel Gibson put in a couple vaguely realistic touches of warfare into Braveheart and the nancy boy critics almost crapped themselves over how it was "too realistic".

2001 was a work of art, but the audience will only put up with one or two such stories a generation. Most of the time they want stuff that emphasizes drama and action over "pure realism".

You can stray too far, but there are much, much worse things in "movie science" you can complain about than "space sounds"... like the macguffin of Chain Reaction, in which a Physics professor, lecturing an intro class (yeah, that happens) clearly fails to grasp the difference between a chemical/molecular reaction (hydrogen bonding to oxygen to make water) and a nuclear reaction (fusion energies from molecular oxy-hydro bonding)... or The Core, which I won't bother to describe it's so excreble, or Sunshine, which postulates a crew of people *only* 50 years in the future working to "re-ignite the sun". Ah-huh... Like we'll even be close to doing any job THAT huge by then.

Re: The Urbmobile... amazing how some idiots keep wanting to re-invent trains somehow.

We could -- and should -- have cars that we set and forget for the trip, but the engineers are too busy trying to solve the Holy Grail of visual recognition instead of the far simpler problem of "don't hit anything".

The second and third seasons of the original Star Trek series went silent in space. The TV series Firefly was silent in space, and although I don't recall for sure, I believe that sensibility was carried into the spin-off movie, Serenity.

But you're right, sound effects in space epics are seldom done right. Like how the Death Star explodes and the sound is not only audible, it's instantaneous. Battlestar Galactica (new series) tried to compromise with 'muffled' sound effects of explosions, which is probably right since explosions would involve gaseous waves buffeting the hulls of spacecraft.

Battlestar Galactica sucked when it came to space sounds... every time a damn spaceship would fly by it would always make noise--same with weapons firing and all that.

My friend tried to say "it was the sound you'd hear from inside the cockpit"... which would be okay, if they only played sounds from inside-the-cockpit perspectives... but they played sounds from outside the spaceship all the damn time!