Iconic Anachronisms and Stuff that Only Exists in Movies

Case 13. The Reel-to-Reel Tape Recorder

A lot of artifacts serve the same general purpose, fear of anachronism (in the form of old technology), thus a lot of entries on this thread will be redundant. The old VHS tape, the old CRT television, just about every prop you saw in Dark City, anything that is spooky simply because it is old.

One such iconic anachronism is the old reel-to-reel tape recorder. Consider the unit from the Evil Dead series.



Read More: https://www.looper.com/869320/the-un...-evil-dead-ii/

Given the provenance of this prop, it is not quite "unbelievable" that we might have found one of these in 1981 or even 1987, back when the time of their regular usage was only a decade or two in the rear view mirror. In these movies, the device is a simple. The voice on the tape says the words (do we expect our teenage kids to read ancient Kandarian?) simply to get the proceedings started, a booster rocket which is quickly discarded (no super shuttle, this old thing).

In Session 9, however, the reel-to-reel slowly brings the nature of the threat into focus, with some nice voice acting, with additional creepiness supplied by simulated wow and flutter in the reels (unexpectedly and disturbingly pitching the voices up and down).



Following the same pattern of the CRT, the old reel-to-reel was an icon of the future in productions like TV's Mission Impossible.

Techmoan has a series that covers these devices in detail.



Once again, the promise of the future has become the specter of the past.

Cases 14-16 Classic American Muscle Cars

There are many classics. That stated, not every deserving big iron go bucket of the late 60's and early 70's can be done justice here. Classic American muscle came from three American auto makers.* I have decided to spotlight three models which are indelibly associated with cinema and car culture.

The Ford Mustang

The Chevrolet Chevelle

The Dodge Charger

We will visit each in greater detail. Each represents an aesthetic. They hint at the character of the people who drive them, their physicality, their style, their socio-economic station.

These cars did not begin as stuff you only see in the movies, but they were natural born American Icons. And they stuck around for a few decades. In the 1980s a teenager could still reasonably hope to acquire a semi-functioning example of one of these cars, assuming that they were willing sacrifice all of their disposable income into keeping them rolling. Better of Dead (the black Mustang) and My Science Project (the red GTO) feature kids who love these aspirational objects. These films are telling the truth of the time. There were a few gearheads (or wannabe gearheads) in each high school who sported muscle cars. In the 1990s, culture shifted. Small Japanese sports cars (e.g., the Subaru WRX) captured the imagination of boys lusting after speed. 2001's The Fast and the Furious largely features turbo-charged imports of (then) recent vintage, but Dominic is revealed to have an old Charger tucked away. And as the the series continued (and continued to get more and more ridiculous) more and more implausible classic cars of the past appeared as street racers. In the new century, however, these cars were now anachronisms.

They were not built all that well to begin with. Rust never sleeps. Sports cars are notoriously abused. The rarity of these items means that they're not street cruisers anymore. The anachronism is the muscle car of the everyman (or boy) who just happens to be putting around in a car more than a half-century old.

These cars do exist, but they're the province of the old, the rich, the collector. Specimens you'll find today are largely garage queens that come out for meet-ups and car shows.

*Yes, AMC made the Javelin/AMX, but this is the RC-Cola of the era. And AMC is a more associated with the Gremlin and the Pacer, so with respect, get real.

Case 14. The Ford Mustang 1964-1968



Dismissed by some as a "secretary's car" and originally only predicted to sell 100,000 units, the '65 became the most successful product launch for Ford since their '27 Model A. Small, lithe, defiant, sexy. Fastback, Convertible, or original hardtop, they all looked good.
This is Coke Classic.

The original Mustang looks a little undersized compared to other cars (especially cars of the period, including muscle cars). The 'Stang has the ethos of the underdog, a David burning rubber against Goliath, a lithe Cheetah--claw against hoof--running down an impala. The car chase in Bullitt gives us the ethos of the muscular and agile hero vs. the hulking, imposing baddie in the classic showdown between Mustang and Charger.

I don't include Mustangs after 1968, because they started bulking up. At their best, they started looking like the rest of the pack. At their worst, they simply looked fat and bloated like the original Eleanor from Gone in 60 Seconds.

In the original film, Eleanor is more of a "Fat Amy" because she's a '74. The remake wisely reclasses her as a '67.

As an icon, the Mustang is unmistakable. It is the an aspirational object of the tar-planes of yore. Charlie Brewster may be an 80s kid in Fright Night (1985), but he drives a '66 Mustang. When Jerry Dandrige first takes his revenge, he starts with the kid's car. Cold blooded.

These cars are anachronisms because they're now well out of the comfortable reach of secretaries and the Charlie Brewsters of the world. These are now the province of rich old men who restomod them and remind the rest of us that we're poor.

Case 15. The Dodge Charger 1968-1970

Meet the villain. Or, rather, meet the car that the anti-hero, the rebel, the dark protagonist drives. Big. Bulky. Imposing. Blocky. And yet still elegant and simple.
This is the car you use when you're hunting vampires.

This is the car you use when you're still pretending you're a bootlegger.

This is the sort of car Stuntman Mike drives.

What makes this car iconic is that huge grill. When the headlights are off the front of the car looks like a giant maw that could swallow a dozen Camaro's. It's a Doomsday Street Machine.
It may be controversial to have picked this as the Chrysler entry. There is no denying the distinct look of a '71 Cuda or the '70 Challenger from Vanishing Point. The Charger is just pure attitude. It is a slab of a car with a fat ass and menacing face. An exercise in simplicity that makes a bit more distinctive than its sisters. The black 'Cuda from Phantasm is sweet, but I wouldn't blame you if you mistook if for a Camaro or GTO. There is no mistaking the Charger. And so it remains as a filmic icon which keeps popping up on the screen, no matter how preposterous it is to imagine this dinosaur still hunting unwary prey on the streets of somewhere, USA.

Case 16. The Chevrolet Chevelle 1968-1972

Why the Chevelle? Of all the Chevy products, why feature this? Surely, the Corvette is more distinctive? Certainly, the Camaro was more of an apples-to-apples competitor for the Mustang? Why? Because the Chevelle is the everyman, the workman. It's iconicity lies, in part, in its apparent accessibility. This is the vehicular equivalent of the girl next door. What makes it memorable is that, paradoxically, it looks so much like so many other cars of the era. It's a rather unambitious and inoffensive combination of elements that says "muscle car," the sort of thing you see in video games when developers don't want to pay licensing fees.

This car has had countless appearances in film and television. 1,600 if you believe this random internet source.
Jack Reacher drives one. Dave Wooderson drives on in Dazed and Confused. It's a frequent entry in the Fast and Furious films.
If what you see on the screen is not a classic SS (with the stripes) in pristine condition, you are likely to see it featured as a s**t-box from the other end of the spectrum, the classic "project car" (the kind of project which never gets finished) such as one might see a redneck driving in The Bondsman.Basically, it's "every other muscle car." Chevy fans might get mad, but that's OK. They know, deep down, what I am saying is true.

I remember this one series of films that all took place in modern day times, yet they had dinosaurs running around all over the place!
Boy, did that series have its anachronisms mixed up!

The Tyrannosaurus did not live at the same time as the Triceratops.
Tricera-cop is almost certainly an anachronism (see below).

Mr. Rex isn't even from the Jurassic period.

Exploring the Why of Anachronism for a Moment

In terms of psychology, the power of anachronism is that we are attracted and repulsed by the past. Nostalgia reels us in. Continuity, stability, familiarity, identity, these are all powerful hooks. On the other hand, alienation repulses us. The weirdness of the past, its inappropriateness, its scent of decay, its mystery (e.g., there are growing millions of people who are stumped at the prospect of driving a manual transmission). We want the past to live (e.g., we want to imagine WWII vets with us, even though they're dead now) and we want the past to die (e.g., The Shining). And, or so it seems, the past feels the same way about us, inviting us back into a comforting womb of memory (e.g., "San Junipero" in Black Mirror) and hunting from the perspective of an alien judgment (e.g., Frailty). Anachronism is a magnet with two poles.

In terms of practicality, anachronism is a matter of convenience. The disk icon remained in the Microsoft suite long after the disk drive was gone.Think of those old words that have survived by being trapped in antiquated expression. "Kith" and kin? To and "fro"? Think of those dead metaphors. Do you sound like a "broken record"? Or think of the antiquated "record scratch" sound effect they use for comedy trailers (which lets you know something has gone comedically wrong). Have you ever literally "battened down the hatches" on ship? Probably not. But these are familiar and so they serve. And so for people making movies so too does the lingering image of the Ford F150 pickup from the 70s that nobody really drives and anymore.

People making film and TV are in a rush and everything (or so it seems) has to be compressed into a shorthand that immediately communicates what is going on and how you should feel about it. This is why we have stock character--they allow us to focus on the main action. This is why we have genres, formal properties offer a short hand for story telling, we know who we are, when we are, we know the morality (e.g., a western features rugged heroic individuals willing to stand up to bullies), and the metaphysics of the story (e.g., is the universe fatalistic or contingent?). Our story-telling today is so impatient that we just keep rebooting the same origin story, again and again and again, like Bill Murray trying to make Andy MacDowell fall in love with him in Ground Hog Day. And so we watch Bruce Wayne's parents get murdered again and again and again, an obligatory walking of the "Stations of the Cross." Was it all that different when bards kept the Iliad and Beowulf alive by retelling them again and again and again?

The examples we're exploring here are just samples that are at the edge of extinction. They are memes which are no longer dank. They're a particular type of cliche or trope. They're the old lady getting gussied up to play "cougar." Or, they're the old man dying his hair and sporting his old letter jacket. The last gleaming of the frayed familiar is arguably alienation, that moment when we recognize the old thing as no longer welcome or plausible. It's when we realize that we don't want an old relative or friend come visit anymore (e.g., we reject their politics, we view them as having failed to grow up-living in the past). There is this uncanny moment when the thing looks familiar to us and yet feels entirely out of place. Beyond the moment of the thing's plausibility, however, once it traverses that uncanny valley of fitting/not-fitting, it can return to us as a welcome fantasy, precisely because we know we would never expect to see it in our world (e.g., a knight and a castle). The death is not permanent, but the space we're exploring here is a sort of "dying ground" -- a space strewn with artifacts which don't quite belong and which, therefore, attract and/or repulse us.

Case 17 The Mini Gun

Ain't got time to bleed?

Is a Desert Eagle not big enough? Well, when you absolutely positively have kill everyone in the tri-county area.
When aiming does not matter.
When firing $3,000 of ammo a minute is a financially viable proposition for you. There's "Old Painless."

Put this one the category of "stuff that only exists in the movies." The mini-gun is real enough, it's just that no one outside of the movies carries one as a hand-held weapon. This is the sort of thing which gets mounted to helicopters and armored personnel carriers.

It's heavy. Even if you had the strength to tote the gun around, you would also have to carry around the ammunition. Oh, and it's battery powered, so, I hope you don't mind also rucking a few car batteries to make those barrels turn.

Movie magic melts these problems away. It looks good. That's all that matters.

Since the age of Arnold, it has been a staple of big dumb action movies. More meme now than it is truly a spectacle, it still shows up on screen. The video below offers a deep dive, if you want to get wet.

Case 12 Continued. The Oscilloscope, a subcategory of CRT

A staple of science fiction. Dynamic, evocative of a heartbeat and sometimes an ocean wave, but sufficiently vague that it could be a representation of almost anything, the oscilloscope is one of those plausible devices that found work simply by looking good (you know, like Denise Richards).

Below is an image of a device which may be rented out as a prop in the United Kingdom.

The website for this device reports that this is a
Here is a post which appeared on a forum on September 18th, 2016 which appears to mark a moment of falling popularity of these items. Our post is written by user "Sid Nails"
This website offers a deep dive on Tektronix devices which have features in everything from 2001 to War Games.
See below for a particularly famous oscilloscope which was use to make the video game "Pong" and the "Apple II" computer.

It should be clear, that these were real devices that had real jobs to do, but people were also fascinated just at looking at these things as they could produce a dazzling array of images.

Techmoan, for example, has a nice bit showing how moving pictures can be created from input soundwaves with these devices.


And this is why it made it into film and television. It was technical, but ambiguous, serious looking, but also somewhat playful, a blend of the rigidly ordered realm of the mechanical with the chaos of natural dynamic motion. It was the perfect peanut butter cup of sci-fi proppery. Today, it's an anachronism, but one that still pops up from time to time.

Yeah, Brian Zane had a good bit about that in his review of Taboo Tuesday 2004:
h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=GiZ3TIYUZVs&t=282s


"I also love the fact that it's a control center, so you gotta have all these computerized things to make it look real high-tech, like putting a waveform monitor there, something that has nothing to do with the Internet or computers, everything to do with video and light exposure; let's put the waveform monitor there though, so it makes things look very technological."

Such a fun subject! Iconic anachronisms really show how movies sometimes bend reality for the sake of storytelling or style. It’s always amusing to spot things that clearly don't belong in the time period. Can't wait to see more examples!

Case 17. The Red Swingline Stapler: Pure Fiction Becomes Anachronism

If there is one nice thing about capitalism, it is that it doesn't judge. It just wants to give you what you want in order to make a quick buck. Consequently, even fantasy can be made reality if there is enough profit in it.

This is where the movie Office Space (1999) comes into the conversation, a film that features tech companies that don't exist (e.g., "Intitech"), restaurants that don't exist (e.g., "Chotchkie's"), and also an item that, up to that point, never existed, a red swingline stapler.


The lore of this object is covered at various sites online.

See here.

And here.


The short version is that the movie was such a success that Swingline decided to cash in on the cult following of the film by making a red stapler available for purchase. Indeed, Amazon shows several models for sale.

The paradox is that in making the stapler "real" the film took something that was entirely a fictional conceit and made it into an anachronism. There was no such thing as a red swingline stapler when the world was preparing for Y2K (i.e., the specific time-frame identified in the movie), but because the movie was successful it made this item real, moving it from the category of pure fiction ("no such thing"), to anachronism ("a thing that exists, but which is fictional in terms of its placement in time"). There is something weirdly "grandfather paradoxical" about a film making a thing real in this way, but that is the power art. Art imitates life. Life imitates art. Be careful of your dreams, even the dreams you dream on the flickering screen, the power of intention poured into that dream can make it real (i.e., like "Slenderman").

NOTE: Even if they make a real-world "Winkies" I'm never eating there as a matter of principle.

Case 18. The Classic Cop Package

City Cop Package

Black and White 4-door sedan. "Gumball Machine" on top. Aviator mirrored sunglasses. White helmet or 8-point cap. Dress blues. Pornstache. 6-shot revolver (e.g., Richard Grimes, Roger Murtaugh, Harry Callahan).

Dudley-do-right with a gun. The last gasp of America's moral confidence in its institutional righteousness. Cops are the most direct and ubiquitous expression of the coercive power of the state. A cop that is righteous represents a state that is righteous. If you believe in the cops, then you believe in the state. And if you believe in that, I have some swampland for sale. After Vietnam and the Watts Riots, this image would be tarnished. But Dudley-do-right held on for as long as he could.

The classic cop image would shift around this time from one of competent bureaucratic control to oppressive authoritarianism. Assault on Precinct 13 presents us with a conflicted Dudley who is from the streets he patrolling. Bishop wants to do right, even though he is somewhat excluded from his brother officers. 1976 was a fitting year to feature a cop conflicted about his institutional role. When we get to Terminator 2, the classic cop image is merely an expression machine-like anonymous power.


The classic cop image is an anachronism now. Cops are no longer anonymously imposing nor institutionally assuring. They drive the same vehicles mommies use to drive their kids to soccer practice. They don't carry Colt or Smith revolvers. They're likely to be wearing plate carriers and sporting rigs around their waists that would make even the Dynamic Duo call for an intervention ("Holy janitor's keyrings, Batman! They are carrying too much Bat-crap on their utility belts!"). They look more like weeble-wobbles, figuratively and literally weighted down by modern bureaucratic rules and regulations, using gear to compensate for lack of training, fitness, finesse, etc. Modern cops are fat and nervous, blustery and uncertain. They are an expression of our loss of confidence in ourselves.

Country Cop Package


Chevy Blazer. White or tan or brown. Cowboy hat. six-pointed star badge.

The coding here is simple. This is a cowboy.

So, don't question why the Sheriff is using a lever-action rifle, or implausibly riding a horse, or why his badge looks like the toy surprise from some overpriced box of Cracker-Jacks. He is our anachronistic yearning for a noble past. He is the cop we can still believe in.

Interstitial Collation of Material: Retro Futurism

ALIEN, Blade Runner, Star Trek

You either die as a vision of the future or live long enough to become an anachronism.

Films live on through their franchises. They replicate. Cells dividing in celluloid. Interlinked. This creates a challenge. The demands of continuity require anachronisms. The demands of the actual future require deviations from continuity. The easiest fix is to side step the problem by "Steam-Punking" it or "Atom-Punking it" or whatever damnable snappy name they will come up with for the technological vibe of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Blade Runner 2049 clearly shows us that we're in an alternate future in which technology did not evolve parallel to our own. Somehow they came up with perfect simulations of human beings, but their computer displays stayed rather stuck in the past. The Soviet Union still exists in this timeline. There have been technological set-backs, but also leaps forward. ALIEN: ROMULUS is a heartless romp with our old toys (mechanical keyboards, CRT displays, sound effects, regurgitated lines, recycled characters, rehashed plots). It shows us a retro-future in which the world has leapt forward while also being retarded in many mays. Star Trek is the apotheosis of Atom Punk apologia. Follow-on series have offered narrative explanations for the retro style of the original Enterprise (e.g., why no holograms? Well, Pike didn't want them), the old look of the Klingons (Enterprise covers this one), etc. Of course, Star Trek updated for modern audiences is already hopelessly out of date. Consider the "remastering" of the original series which has effects which don't quite match the film stock of the original and shots of the Enterprise that look as dated (i.e., rushed CGI shots made on a a shoestring budget several years ago now) to us now as the Enterprise did to audiences when they decided to remaster it. It's a hopeless project, but so long as a beloved franchise attempts to stay in continuity, anachronisms of the original production will carry forward.