Exceeding Our Wildest Retro Dreams

When we finally got “hoverboards” in real life, they were so much lamer than they’d appeared in science fiction. And that makes sense. Writers and filmmakers don’t have to figure out how this shit would actually work! They just have to imagine how cool it would be. So this is the pattern you’d expect across a wide variety of technologies. Gizmos from movies and TV are way cooler than the real-life innovations they presage.

For another example, compare Alexa and company to their far superior fictional counterparts: The Star Trek ship’s computer, Tony Stark’s J.A.R.V.I.S., even HAL 9000. Sure, a couple of these flirted with mass-murder tendencies, but when they weren’t snuffing us N.I.s, they could sure do a whole lot more than play songs on request and data-mine our private conversations for marketing purposes. (In my experience, even Alexa’s competence as a jukebox is pretty lacking.)

High-tech wristwatches might be the lone exception to this rule. Because real-life smart watches are pretty rad! And also the gadget watches of make-believe were surprisingly weaksauce.

Dick Tracy’s 2-Way Wrist Radio is probably the granddaddy of them all. It was just a C.B., but small. (It became a 2-Way Wrist TV in 1964.) That’s pretty cool, actually — especially as it predated the invention of the transistor by a few months — but nothing compared to the comms capabilities of worn electronics today.

James Bond is the king of stupid gadget watches. The dumbest of these might have been the one that spat out ticker-tape messages (in The Spy Who Loved Me). How much tape is supposed to be in there? What’s he supposed to do with this top-secret communiqué after reading it? Eat it? Why doesn’t the message just display on the LCD?

What better wrist-worn technologies did sci-fi creators give us to fantasize about? Penny’s mini videophone from Inspector Gadget? That’s just Dick Tracy’s watch again, decades less innovative. Maybe Spider-Man’s web-shooters? Pretty cool if you have spider-strength to swing yourself from skyscraper to skyscraper, but not much use to those of us with slightly less than the proportional strength of an adult man. For some reason, fiction writers left the coolest ideas in wrist-worn tech to real-life engineers.

Because here in the real world, we’re sporting Martian smartwatches that serve up notifications and takes voice commands, with Amazon’s digital personal assistant Alexa integrated, and the capacity to connect with Siri and Google Voice Assistant too. Considerably more impressive than the dumb-ass “hyperintensified magnetic field” watch with which MI6 saw fit to equip 007 in Live and Let Die. (Oh, but that one also had a little powersaw in it. Great job, Q Branch, really terrific idea.)

Unlike most of the above examples from fiction, our Martian watches actually look pretty handsome too. See, a few of us future people of tomorrow still care about how our appearance – which is why we never adopted the lycra unitard so many sci-fi prophets were convinced we’d all be wearing by now. We’re living better than they ever dreamed!

Suck it, science fiction visionaries!