Jan 17, 2008 03:30 PM
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Wed Feb 10
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This alien-looking newspaper from the movie Ultraviolet recently turned up on a movie props site. I love the weird font that screams "Vampire Epidemic!!!" with the three exclamation marks. It's good to know that even in a dark dystopian future where plague victims drink your blood, sober responsible journalism will reign supreme. Here's a roundup of the strangest scifi newspapers.
In Minority Report, newspapers constantly update themselves, thanks to miracle e-paper. While you look at the cover of this e-paper version of USA Today, the headline changes from "Molecular nano-technology?" to "Precrime Hunts its Own!"
Minority Report takes place in 2054, but we could have the technology to make this type of paper happen as soon as 2015, a Washington Post reporter predicts. And here's a prototype.
One of the earliest interactive newspapers turns up in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, where it's called the mediatron:
Bud took a seat and skimmed a mediatron from the coffee table; it looked exactly like a dirty, wrinkled, blank sheet of paper. "'Annals of Self-Protection,'" he said, loud enough for everyone else in the place to hear him. The logo of his favorite meedfeed coalesced on the page. Mediaglyphics, mostly the cool animated ones, arranged themselves in a grid. Bud scanned through them until he found the one that denoted a comparison of a bunch of different stuff, and snapped at it with his fingernail. New mediaglyphics appeared, surrounding larger pictures in which Annals staff tested several models of skull guns against live and dead targets.Minority Report isn't the only future vision to include USA Today, thanks to that paper's awesome powers of time-spanning product placement. Here's 2015's version of the paper, according to Back To The Future 2. Not much difference, except for spacey futuristic fonts:
The short-lived TV show Early Edition features a regular newspaper that time-travels. Gary Hobson mysteriously receives tomorrow's edition of the Chicago Tribune today, and tries to avert the terrible things he reads about there. Here he is trying to save a weathergirl (really!) from getting the forecast wrong:
The second-to-last episode of Journeyman featured our time-traveling newspaper reporter landing in 1984, where he drops a digital camera. When Dan returns to the present, everything has changed because someone reverse-engineered his digital camera. Everybody's using fancy nano-tech and smart electronic paper. It sucks that we don't get a really good look at the newspaper Dan works for in this alternate 2007 before he changes the timeline back.
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