In the 1950s and 60s, Americans were fascinated by the idea of flying cars and jetpacks that would let people soar above the traffic. But it wasn’t just the average commuter who was supposed to benefit from these space-age technologies. Emergency responders like police and ambulances were going to take to the skies to…
Paramount Ranch has been the location of countless movies and TV shows over the past 90 years, including the HBO sci-fi western Westworld. But that history has sadly turned to ash over the past 24 hours, engulfed by the flames of the Woolsey wildfire that’s devastating Southern California right now.
Filmstruck, the best video streaming service ever created, is dead. Well, it’s almost dead. The last day of the service is November 29, 2018, which means that if you already have a subscription, you can keep using it until then. But with just a month to go, you might be asking yourself what to watch. Below you’ll find…
The Twilight Zone episode “The Eye of the Beholder” is one of the greatest TV episodes of all time. And now you can own a piece of sci-fi TV history from this legendary show, provided you’ve got $10,000 burning a hole in your pocket. An original pig-nose mask from the episode is going up for auction next month.
“What’s tomorrow going to be like?” the opening of this 1945 newsreel asked. For many Americans who were watching, the answer was “a better life than my parents had.” World War II was winding down, the postwar boom was just around the corner, and planners were promising incredible things ahead—incredible things like…
Have you heard the good news? The flying car is almost here! At least that’s what so many news sites have been telling me this month. Take, for instance, this recent article from Auto Week about Terrafugia—a company that’s been promising to deliver a flying car for over a decade now—headlined, “Your Flying Car Is…
Have you ever wanted to own a piece of the moon? Now might be your chance, if you have a million bucks lying around. Next month Sotheby’s in New York will auction off some of the only moon rocks that can be legally owned by private individuals.
Back in 1938, TV wasn’t really a thing yet. But that didn’t stop people from already dreaming about the wild future of tiny, personalized TV sets. One perfect example is this bizarre contraption from a British company, dubbed the “Television Monocle.”
As AT&T rushes to pare down its business in an apparent attempt to not seem like a giant monopolistic media company sucking at the teat of the American public by relying on subsidies and overpriced data plans to stay afloat, some hard choices have to be made. The latest is devastating for anyone who likes old films. …
You’ve probably heard about Thomas Edison’s infamous 1903 film where he electrocuted an elephant. It’s just as horrifying as you’d imagine. But fewer people know that this wasn’t actually Edison’s first electrocution film. Two years earlier, in 1901, he produced a film re-enacting a famous execution. Perversely, it…
The U.S. National Archives is doing a special Facebook Live at 11:30am ET/8:30am PT and just sent out a special teaser, with the question, “what’s in the cans?” And now I’ve never wanted to know the answer more to anything in my entire life.
Students at Shenandoah University in Virginia recently opened a time capsule from the ancient, mysterious world of 1993. What did they find inside? Bizarre contraptions like a so-called “cassette tape.”
The 1932 version of The Mummy starring Boris Karloff is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, right up there with the 1930s versions of Dracula and Frankenstein. And now an extremely rare movie poster for The Mummy could become the most expensive in the world after it goes up for auction starting today and…
Facebook announced its new Portal hardware today, a limited-purpose device that allows users to video chat on Facebook almost exclusively. And there’s something strangely retro about the concept: This is the standalone videophone device that George Jetson had in the 1960s and that AT&T imagined in the 1990s—the device…
You might not know the name Will Vinton. But if you grew up watching TV in the 1980s and 90s, you definitely know his work. Vinton was the genius behind claymation characters like the California Raisins, the Domino’s Noid, and the M&M’s before they were taken over by CGI. Vinton died yesterday of cancer after a…
Leon Lederman, the former head of the Fermi National Accelerator Lab and winner of the the Nobel Prize in physics in 1988, died at a nursing home in Idaho on October 3rd. He was 96.
There were a lot of incorrect predictions before the 2016 presidential election. A lot of incorrect predictions. Savvy political insiders told us again and again that there was no way Donald Trump was going to become president. But I think I may have found the funniest prediction of them all.
Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams recently posted an interesting question to Twitter. Adams shared a graph showing that the percentage of people between the age of 18 and 34 who live with their parents skyrocketed after 2008. Adams tweeted, “The iPhone was launched in 2007. Is it a coincidence?” The implication, of…
Futuristic headlines here in the year 2018 might make you ask “why?” But back in the 1950s, illustrators in Detroit were asking “why not?” And perhaps nothing demonstrates that thinking better than this comic strip from 1958 by Arthur Radebaugh.
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