Basic Trope: A depiction of the future that is conspicuously outdated.
- Straight: Space Opera is created in The '50s. It's the Turn of the Millennium In-Universe, yet men still wear fedoras with their spacesuits, women are typically either housewives, or in career fields such as teaching or nursing (which they plan to leave when they get married), the Cold War has not ended, and the schools are still segregated.
- Exaggerated: Space Opera is created in The '50s. It's the Turn of the Millennium In-Universe, which is depicted as the Victorian Era Recycled In Space.
- Downplayed: Space Opera is created in The '50s. It's the Turn of the Millennium In-Universe. Rather than being completely outdated, the show has some ideas and storylines that would be slightly conservative or dated today.
- Justified:
- A Fifties Space Opera's outdated clothing styles and slang are explained as a cultural reversion, e.g. a retro fad or a calculated attempt to meet the expectations of aliens who'd been monitoring 1950s Earth broadcasts.
- The setting is deliberately based on a Raygun Gothic aesthetic.
- Fedoras, trenchcoats, and suspenders for men and bouffant hairdos and polkadot dresses for women are simply back in vogue in regards to fashion. As for the technology, the designers had to break out some museum peices to deal with the "realities" of space travel. Vaccuum tubes are immune to EMP. Mirror-coat helps to deflect radiation (especially lasers). Retro Rocket "fins" are actually thermal radiators to keep from roasting the crew alive with the waste heat of the ship's single-stage-to-orbit bimodal radio-thermal engine, and they pull triple-duty as landing gear and atmospheric control surfaces. The cigar-shape also keeps a narrow profile to make hitting the ship more difficult. The crew's weapons are particle-beam based. The large, parabolic mirror muzzle brake shields from backscattered radiation, a fin does double-duty as a sight and radiator, and thus their Ray Guns look exactly like what pops into your head when you hear the phrase "ray gun." Furthermore, their white Fantastic Plastic hardshell spacesuits reflect heat and pull double-duty as body armor. Sociologically, a conservative government heavily incentivizes traditional gender roles and Good Old-Fashioned Family Values TM, resulting in women mostly coming out of the workforce and becoming housekeepers (not that there's much housework to do with cheap robotics giving every home mechanical servants).
- Inverted: A show about The '50s created at the Turn of the Millennium features sympathetic openly-gay characters, women in positions of power, a few men who choose to stay home with the kids, racially-integrated schools, and Eternal Sexual Freedom.
- Subverted:
- Some women are shown going to work, and some of them even have active sex lives.
- Outdated terminology is used such as guards having 'beepers'. It is actually a cell phone but the narrator is a Scatterbrained Senior who remembers the names of older items which resemble it.
- Double Subverted: But they are expected to quit their jobs when they marry, and never discuss or acknowledge their sex lives openly.
- Parodied:
- Space Opera, a Retraux show made in The New '10s and written as if it's in The '50s, is set just at the Turn of the Millennium and uses all the tropes from early postwar sci-fi, but throws in the occasional early-00s nostalgia reference.
- Anachronism Stew
- The characters speak Shakespearean English while greeting space aliens.
- Zeerust is an actual substance.
- Zig Zagged: '
- 'Space Opera'' has no humans, but three races that look similar. One race has The '50s ideals, the second race has Turn of the Millennium ideals, and the third race has The Gay '90s ideals.
- The Space-Force is Zeerust by nescessity, but on Earth, technology that is clinically white and gently-rounded, and comes in compact, pocket-friendly sizes dominates as The Aesthetic. One colony has bulky Super Wrist Gadgets reminiscent of radio watches or pip-boys to go well with their 1950's-era costumes. Some colonies have a space-fantasy aesthetic and dress up their Space Marines in shiny knight armor and tabbards, and arm themselves with Enhanced Archaic Weapons. One colony has Organic Technology instead of metallic technology. Finally, the aliens are Little Green Men in Flying Saucers.
- Averted: Space Opera is overall a very good prediction of the future, with little appearing outdated.
- Enforced:
- Space Opera is a retelling of an ancient mythology, or a Charles Dickens novel, the works of William Shakespeare, or a religious text Recycled In Space.
- Write What You Know, Two Decades Behind, Small Reference Pools, Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance
- Lampshaded: "If it's 2573, why does it look like 1956?"
- Invoked: A Space Opera set 50 years in the future focuses on multiple mid-career professionals whose given names are the trendy baby names of the time the movie's made.
- Reconstructed: An alternate history took place that prevented society from advancing in a number of ways, effectively locking Earth in the overall look, feel, and style of a past decade.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Terms like 'time running on the computer' are used but computers or paperwork aren't done on screen making it unclear if they are referring to advanced supercomputer time or if that is the only computer available.
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