History Main / Zeerust

Something -- be it a piece of technology, character design, outfit, vehicle or building -- used to be someone's idea of futuristic. Nowadays though it has, ironically, acquired a quaint sort of datedness to it: inevitably, it will be more reminiscent of the era the work ''came from''. Also sometimes called "Retrofuturism".

Think of mobile phones as a simple example. Once, they were large, cumbersome, and it was considered that they would only ever be available to the rich. Works from that era will tend to depict even a 'futuristic' phone as still no smaller or sleeker than a brick plugged into a suitcase. Later, when they became widely available and shrank dramatically as technology improved, for a while it was assumed they would keep getting smaller and smaller; depictions of the future from this period will show people using tiny communication devices. Again, TechnologyMarchesOn and the preference has shifted to them to growing increasingly large once more yet thin enough to slide into the back pocket of your jeans. Any current depiction of the future featuring such slablike devices will also turn into a time capsule of the period it was made in, if and when flexible and foldable phones become commonplace. And so on.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Cyberpunk}}'': A game released in the late '80s/early '90s (first edition was released in '88, second in '90) hilariously depicts "cellular cyberdecks" as massive, expensive, and unwieldy. While taking place about ten years from now. The stats for the cyberdecks were listed in real life units: one of the top-of-the-line cyberdecks had a massive 256 MB of RAM and ran at a blazing 100 [=MHz=].
** Also, according to the depictions in the game material, the most popular kind of music in the 2010s/2020s is basically an updated version 80s hair metal with cyberpunk-themed lyrics. One of the eight character classes you can choose from is that of a rebellious rock musician called "rockerboy". The game writers must've thought rap and electronic music were just passing fads, as they are not mentioned.
** The name "Adam Smasher". When the original TTRPG was written, atom smashers were the new cutting edge in high-energy tech and advanced research, and the PunnyName probably felt cool and futuristic ([[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast and fitting for a]] PsychoForHire). In 2020, when atom smashers are regular pieces of scientific hardware, and everyone calls them "particle accelerators" instead of "atom smashers", the name, while still fitting for a cruel villain, makes him sound like a typical bad guy from a particularly poorly dubbed Saturday morning cartoon.
* In ICE's 1990s 'Cyberspace' it is noted that by 2090 ''some'' portable phones are small enough to fit into a pocket.

* ''VideoGame/TeenageMutantNinjaTurtlesTurtlesInTime'' has the Neon Night Rider level that takes place in a futuristic city with hoverboards as a mode of transportation while zipping across a highway that is floating above the city, similar to what you would see in ''VideoGame/FZero''. The year the level takes place in? 2020 (the game was released in 1992). Despite the year having already passed, there is nary a hoverboard, a floating highway, or a futuristic styled skyline in sight.

* ''Franchise/StarWars'' features many elements of this, being an unusual ([[SeinfeldIsUnfunny for the time]]) combination of RaygunGothic and UsedFuture aesthetics. Technology is constantly breaking down and not working correctly, bundles of wire spark frequently, interfaces are all levers and flashy buttons, visual readouts are bright lines and enormous geometric shapes, and holographic visual displays are monochrome with crackling static. And in the very first movie, the [[MacGuffin plans for the]] [[BigDumbObject horrifying superweapon]] are on "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#History data tapes]]" (although tapes are still used for some specialised purposes, and can store terabytes of data). The prequels, set before TheEmpire forced the galaxy into a constant state of war and deprivation, [[RaygunGothic feature shinier and more streamlined technology]] with next to none of the grit. At any rate, it ducks the whole Zeerust discussion in the first place by stating that the story takes place "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away." Thus, it's not the future and it's not our technology.

* ''Film/SoylentGreen''. Nice arcade machine you got there, Shirl! The film is set in 2022, but Shirl plays a full-sized stand-up arcade game in a swooshy plastic enclosure that couldn't be more 1971 (it's actually the seminal vector-graphics game "Computer Space"). The police callbox also qualifies.

* ''Film/RoboCop1987'': It is amazing how they were able to build a fully functional cyborg, while still using floppy disks. Robocop's visual displays are also in monochrome. Even the computers used by the police station and OCP's corporate headquarters [[OurGraphicsWillSuckInTheFuture have pretty crappy graphics]], although that may be because the setting of the film is a CrapsackWorld. Lastly, those [[EveryCarIsAFord Taurus Wagon]] police cars looked very futuristic at the time, but not so much now.

* The ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'' series of {{RPG}}s ''embodies'' zeerust. ''Fallout'' is set in an AlternateHistory in which the Cold War was between the US and China, and ended in nuclear war. The pre-war USA was a ''Jetsons''-esque future where it's the Fifties, but with {{ray gun}}s, atomic cars and domestic robots. All computers have monochromatic monitors and run on vacuum tubes instead of transistors.

** ''VideoGame/Wasteland2'' splits the difference between the two through the simple means of having the same vision of the future as the original game (with some minor changes to accommodate the better graphics), comically exaggerated near-future apocalypse as seen from the late 80s, but being made in [[SequelGap the early 2010s instead of the late 1980s]], so it is ''deliberately'' retro-Zeerusty like Fallout.

* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Firebird General Motors Firebird]] concepts from TheFifties, none of which would look out of place in a Fallout game. All four concepts have [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_turbine gas turbine]] engines and lots of fins, with some of them having conceptual guidance systems not unlike modern autonomous vehicle technology. Despite the name and several design carry-overs, they share a little in common with their Pontiac SpiritualSuccessor pony cars of same name.

* ''Literature/LegendOfTheGalacticHeroes'' is a SpaceOpera that features absolutely no noteworthy computers during its entire run. The novels were first written back in the 1970s. Its pilot movie was shown in cinemas in 1988. By the time the series had finished airing in 1999, current technology had outrun them completely, with super computers the like of which the author ''Yoshiki Tanaka'' could have never imagined during the inception of his masterpiece.

* The original ''VideoGame/{{Contra}}'', being a ''Franchise/{{Rambo}}''[=/=]''Film/{{Commando}}''[=/=]''Franchise/{{Alien}}'' pastiche, stars a pair of musclebound commandos fighting against an alien army in the jungle. The game is set in the year 2633 according to the Japanese canon, but despite the presence of improbable weapons and bases, there's no real reason to suspect that the game is actually set in the future. Because of this, the localization actually claimed that the game was actually set in the present when they brought it to America. This continued until they decided to keep the futuristic setting for ''Contra III'' and even then the city where the game starts, as well as the car in the first level, looks late 80s - early 90s.

As such, when a LongRunner franchise is outflanked by the progress or direction of technology/aesthetics/societal values while it is still going on, but it is tied to its pre-established version of them, this may lead to ZeerustCanon over time.

* The modern day Venture compound in ''WesternAnimation/TheVentureBrothers'' is practically ''built'' on Zeerust, from the X-1 (nuclear powered superjet) to the punch card sleeping beds, to the moving walkways, etc... [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] in that "Rusty" Venture is not a very good scientist, and is mostly coasting on minor updates to or repackaging of the inventions of his father, who was very much a 60's Adventure Scientist. He built the X-1, which was cutting edge 50 years previously, and the Venture compound looks like a 60's rendition of the World of the Future.

** ''Futurama'' also plays this trope straight in that many episodes feature 'futuristic' takeoffs on then-current technology, which start looking unironically oudated over time. A 2000 episode about the Internet includes a joke about how it took Prof. Farnsworth years to logon to AOL (AOL!), for example. "Kidnappster" (a pun on Napster.com) is another good one - by the time "I Dated a Robot" (the episode featuring Kidnappster) aired, Napster itself was on its last legs, having endured a lawsuit from the government over copyright violations (it would shut its doors later that year). The nature of Internet file-sharing was already starting to evolve beyond Napster by this point. In another episode Amy uses a magnifying glass to operate a minuscule cellphone; Similarly, when Leela sees Amy coughing, she asks her sympathetically "aw, have you swallowed your cellphone again?"; cellphones had been getting smaller and smaller by the early 2000s but the advent of touchscreen smartphones reversed this. In yet another episode, Fry is taken to a museum to see the complete archive of world literature written so far, which consist of two DVD s, labelled "Fiction" and "Non-fiction" (DVD being the early 2000s standard medium for storing data).

* Creator/IsaacAsimov:
** ''Literature/TheEndOfEternity'' by Creator/IsaacAsimov is about a secret organization which regularly changes the whole history of humankind, by combining TimeTravel, ButterflyEffect and magical computers, powerful enough to calculate what the new reality will look like after the change made by a ButterflyOfDoom. They also use... wait for it... punched cards. There's a partial implicit HandWave at the end of the story: [[spoiler: we never saw ''our'' future, and that was the case already when the book was written in 1955: a minor change in 1932 led to a different course of technological development.]]

** "{{Literature/Lenny}}": The character who gets injured by the LNE-prototype is a computer, meaning a human being employed as part of a team to do complex calculations by hand. Because this story was written in the late 1950s, it ''also'' begins to use the word computer to mean an electric machine capable of complex processing.
** "Literature/LittleLostRobot": Bogert raises the possibility of using the station's computers to help analyze their problem, before concluding, "We can't use computers. Too much danger of leakage." In 1947, "computer" meant a human being employed as part of a team to do complex calculations by hand — Bogert is worried about news of the problem spreading if the secret is shared with more people.

* Many of Creator/IsaacAsimov's robot stories, set in the 2000s--and even the Lije Bailey novels, set in about the 3000s--mention characters using slide rules. [[FridgeLogic Robots can't do math]]?
** Another weird one was that a plot point in one of the Lije Bailey novels revolved around the incredible idea of robots with interchangeable parts. Then there was concern about robot brains controlling starships (especially warships), because it wouldn't occur to them that other ships contained humans.
** Never mind that, try a robot with true A.I....that can't talk because text (or robot "thought") to speech is too complex. Really, it's amazing how his early robots had A.I. and could communicate in lots of ways, but couldn't talk. They can ''understand'' human speech perfectly well, however.
*** Particularly in the early days of electronic computing, there was a serious lack of understanding of what kinds of tasks are computationally easy and what kinds are computationally hard. It was thought that converting between speech and internal data representation in the system, machine vision, and walking would be fairly simple problems to solve while symbolic algebra and other advanced mathematics would be difficult, because that's the way it is for humans. The reverse is true, because humans are the result of several hundred million years of R&D in doing the former tasks while we've had almost no R&D for the later. It isn't that making sense of the visual world, speaking and understanding speech, and locomotion are easy problems, we've just got very, ''very'' optimized wetware for those tasks, while our ability to perform higher mathematics is more or less just a happenstance by-product of abilities that were useful to staying alive in a neolithic culture.

* Any use of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_(typeface) Westminster]] font after about 1990 = instant Zeerust. Considering the font was inspired by paper checks and the distinct way account numbers are printed on the bottom to be read by early character-recognition technology, it was inevitable that the font would become outdated before long. These days, you'd probably use [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A_font OCR-A]] (other than being monospaced, the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-B -B variant]] with its rounded letters isn't especially distinctive) or something based on the letters from 8-bit consoles like the NES for a "computery" font, if you bothered to come up with something at all.

* Any use of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_(typeface) Westminster]] font after about 1990 = instant Zeerust. These days, you'd probably use [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A_font OCR-A]] (other than being monospaced, the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-B -B variant]] with its rounded letters isn't especially distinctive) or something based on the letters from 8-bit consoles like the NES for a "computery" font, if you bothered to come up with something at all.

* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture Brutalist architecture]], which specializes in stylized raw concrete, was trendy in the United States and Europe in the 50's to the 70's. Part of it was because it looked ultra-modern at the time and politicians and corporations wanted to be associated with an idealized vision of the future. Another part was because Brutalist buildings lend themselves to durability; a ''nuclear missile'' wouldn't take one down, much less a tornado. However, the once-futuristic buildings now scream '''seventies''' or older, which has lead to a BrokenBase in cities where Brutalist architecture is prominent; some see the buildings as ugly, outdated eyesores, while others see them as part of their city's cultural heritage (though not always disputing the "ugly" part).

* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture Brutalist architecture]], which specializes in stylized raw concrete, was trendy in the United States and Europe in the 50's to the 70's. Part of it was because it looked ultra-modern at the time and politicians and corporations wanted to be associated with an idealized vision of the future. Another part was because Brutalist buildings lend themselves to durability; a ''nuclear missile'' wouldn't take one down, much less a tornado. However, the once-futuristic architecture now screams '''seventies''', which has lead to a BrokenBase in cities where Brutalist architecture is prominent; some see the buildings as ugly, outdated eyesores, while others see them as part of their city's cultural heritage (though not always disputing the "ugly" part).

* In the fifties through the seventies, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture Brutalist architecture]] was trendy because politicians and corporations wanted to be associated with an idealized vision of the future. It became dated quickly, and many people today find it to be brutally ''ugly'' in appearance. While durability was also a deciding factor--a ''nuclear missile'' wouldn't take these buildings down, much less a tornado--the once-futuristic architecture now screams '''seventies''' in many cities.[[note]]Expressions such as "Brutalism" or "Brutalist architecture" actually come from the French phrase "Béton brut", which means "Raw concrete" or "Unfinished concrete", referring to concrete structures that were not painted, decorated or otherwise finished, leaving the concrete as it was cast, showing its formwork seams and other imperfections. Brutalism had aestethic and practical reasons behind it, the former being to show the material's "truest form" (brutalist buildings often also have exposed metal frames and plumbing for this reason) and the latter being that brutalist buildings are cheaper and faster to build and design (apart from not being finished, saving on paint and decorations, brutalist buildings are mostly designed with straight lines and walls, and much fewer curved surfaces, which are more complex to design and build, and thus more expensive and time-consuming. Europe was rapidly filled with Brutalist buildings during reconstructions after UsefulNotes/WorldWarII for these practical reasons)[[/note]].

* In 90's media, VirtualReality was touted as the "future" of video games (and, in some cases, of [[{{Cyberspace}} internet-browsing]] as well). By the 2010's, VR finally came to exist in the real world, only to be relegated as a niche form of entertainment. Writers in decades past spent so much time speculating on the capabilities of VR, they never stopped to ask if people would actually ''want'' to be completely immersed in a computer world with no awareness of their physical surroundings. Once virtual reality became...reality, its AwesomeButImpractical nature became evident.

* In ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOps II'', the downloadable "Nuketown 2025" map was redesigned from its original 1950s aesthetic to Zeerust incarnate.

* The film ''Film/StarshipTroopers'' suffered from this more than the book. In the film version, [=CRT=] monitors were prominent despite flat-panel monitors already having been invented and in production by the time the movie was made.

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lestoil-zeerust_5334.jpeg]]

** The computers are solid-state, and Avon hacks them by rewiring their circuits instead of reprogramming their software.

** So when was the last time your computer (or even your ''television'') showed you static "snow" when the signal dropped? Happens on ''Babylon 5'' all the time. For that matter, while they do have touch screens, the interfaces are ridiculously blocky, over-sized and colorful, almost looking like a child's computer game from the 80s. This is most prominently on display in the fourth-season finale ''The Deconstruction of Falling Stars'', nearly the entirety of which is actually a series of recordings being watched by a man thousands of years in the future. The GUI of his recording program looks horrifically tied to the early 90s. (Granted, [[StylisticSuck some of it may be so that the]] ''[[StylisticSuck viewer]]'' [[StylisticSuck can parse it at a glance]], but it's one of those things you notice on repeat viewings.)

* Subverted in ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' novels, particularly the first one where Arthur, new to space, sees a spaceship and is impressed by how it looks so future-y. Ford, an alien who's been across space and time, is aghast by how garish and out-of-date it is. ''Literature/LifeTheUniverseAndEverything'' also drops a lead lampshade on the in-setting zeerust of the 'ultra-modern' courtroom where the Warmasters of Krikket were tried for attempting to destroy the rest of the universe, mentioning that this was 2 million years ago, "when ultra-modern meant lots of stainless steel and brushed concrete".

** ''Literature/SecondFoundationTrilogy'': Written by Benford, Bear, and Brin, this trilogy includes some industrial-scale lampshade-hanging and retconning of the entire Foundation saga. Part of what is written is a [[JustifiedTrope justification]] for why technology in ''Foundation'''s time is relatively primitive; [[spoiler:the robots that have been caring for humanity under the terms of the Zeroth Law of Robotics deliberately dumbed down human civilization to make the job more tractable.]]

* Invoked with many of Gru's gadgets and vehicles in ''WesternAnimation/DespicableMe'', in order to emphasize how behind the times he is. His car, for instance, looks like a [[TechnologyMarchesOn "futuristic"]] tank taken straight out of sci-fi from TheFifties. In contrast, Vector's tech is much more up-to-date for 2010 standards.

* ''Literature/{{Eva}}'', written in TheEighties, takes place in an unspecified future where holograms are commonplace and scientists have just figured out how to copy neurons. The protagonist communicates using a text-to-speech keyboard... which uses samples stored on audiocasettes.

** According to ''The 08th MS Team'', the Apsalus, a flying weapon of mass destruction, uses the same hard- and software components as a mid 1990s desktop PC, such as a 6X86MX CPU from the long-defunct manufacturer Cyrix. Along with [=DirectX6=], you can kinda tell why the first 2 versions of the Apsalus ended up crashing.

** According to ''The 08th MS Team'', the Apsalus, a flying weapon of mass destruction, uses the same hard- and software components as a mid 1990s desktop PC, such as a 6X86MX CPU from the long-defunct manufacturer Cyrix. Along with [=DirectX6=], you can kinda tell why the first 2 versions of the Apsalus ended up crash landed.

--->'''George Jetson:''' We're from the future.
--->'''Elroy Jetson:''' The 21st century!
--->'''George Jetson:''' The magnificent far-off year of ''2002''!
--->'''Birdman:''' ''(looks at his desk calendar - it's 2004)'' Really.