io9
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.
Comments
Intelligent Vampire....
I just want to say this site is one of the best new Blogs from the Denton stable EVER. Keep it up and don't get lazy like those folks over at Idolator.
yeah, you know what e-paper will lead to: Pop-up ads when I'm trying read the metro section. Ok, not really..while trying to do the crossword. Ok, the jumble. Ok, while reading the comics.
@moncapitaine: good point.
I regularly read the newspaper... in which many articles decry the decline of newspapers and the print media. Of the examples in the post, Minority Report's is the most plausible; but by then most people would probably get their news from their cell phone.
There's a great H.G. Wells story in which a character somehow receives a newspaper from a hundred years or so in the future. Unforunately, his cleaning lady throws it out before he realizes its significance. I can't remember the name of the story, but I remember that it, too, had weird typefaces and paper and high-tech printing.
@mumblingmynah: "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper"
Written in the 1930's, the paper was from the 1970's.
is mumblinmynnah invisible ? come on, what the hellisthus? Am I hired yet?
I love that font in the first newspaper! Quick... someone find it online or re-create it.
This is all mere speculation
That's "Vamprism Epidemic!!!"
You gotta learn to read right.
I missed the newspaper in ultraviolet--but how does that fit into the overall logic of that universe? If I remember correctly, they had smart stuff like disposable phones--so it stands to reason that newspapers would have more of a digital interface--especially with the whole fear of tactility in the film.
That newspaper is the residue of the "Clark Kent" era uberness...
@SoulCarnival: No vampire would be caught undead reading that paper--
Ultraviolet: terrible movie but nice to look at!
I think that the UV Newspaper reads "Vamprism Epidemic". I completely agree with Heathermylove; Ultraviolet was visually and conceptually very appealing, but somehow was sucky. (haw haw, I made a vampire funny!)
@SoulCarnival: I'm glad I'm not the only one who caught that...
In "Total Recall", there was a quick shot of a newspaper vending machine selling "MARS TODAY". Looks just like USA TODAY except the logo is red (geddit?).
There's also the 1940s movie "It Happened Tomorrow" and the Twilight Zone episode "Printer's Devil", both featuring precognitive newspapers.
H.G. Wells's SF tale "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper" takes place on 10 November 1931. Brownlow accidentally receives a copy of the Evening Standard (a real London newspaper) for 10 November 1971, 40 years in the future. In 1971, on the actual date in Wells's story, the real Evening Standard reprinted his story, then made a comparison of the actual news in that day's paper versus the futuristic news Wells had predicted in 1971.
Here's another time-glitch featuring newspapers and H.G. Wells. The movie "Time After Time" was released in late summer 1979. In that movie, H.G. Wells time-travels to California in November 1979 and visits Mary Steenburgen. (So far, so good.) To prove he's a time-traveller, he takes her into her time machine, brings her ONE day into the future, then tells her to check the date on the nearest newspaper (expecting it to be one day later than when they stepped into the time machine). Wells tells her (and us) what the date will be on the newspaper. Steenburgen picks up the newspaper, but instead of looking at the date she notices the headline ... which reports that she was murdered the previous day.
What makes this scene an error was something the film-makers couldn't have anticipated. In real life, in early November 1979, Iranian terrorists invaded the U.S. embassy in Teheran and took all the Americans hostage. On the date that H.G. Wells cites in his dialogue, the front page of every newspaper in the U.S.A. would have carried headlines about the hostages in Iran ... not some local murder.
"
Actually, Gary got the Chicago Sun-Times on Early Edition. I liked that show.
@F_Gwynplaine_MacIntyre: Thanks for all that fun info! Sounds like a crappy movie, though. Wouldn't H.G. Wells have better things to do?
propcircle is another great prop site, with a ton of quality SciFi stuff, espcially from Serenity/Firefly by some folks who have gone on to do work for Qmx...
@the memorexe: There was logic in Ultraviolet??
@mcox567: Thanks for the tip!
@mumblingmynah: Wells was chasing an acquaintance who happened to be Jack the Ripper, played by David Warner.
Avoid watching Ultraviolet by any means necessary. Ugh.
That prop site is killing me.
WANT. WANT NOW.
You forgot the newspapers on Babylon 5! IIRC, weren't those custom-made for you on the spot?
The newspapers in Children of Men that paper the safe house are pretty good too. IMDB has a good list of the headlines.
@hardcle:
Finally! I was wondering when someone would bring up Early Edition!
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