The video, 2001: A Who Odyssey, creates a CGI mashup between the 1968 movie and "The Wheel In Space," a 1968 Who story, complete with cybermen, HAL and Patrick Troughton's piccolo floating in zero-g. If only Kubrick had had a chance to direct a real Who...

[YouTube] (Via

[seek&speak via Super Punch]

Here are five pieces of wisdom that we've gleaned from the last six months (and handful of days):

President Obama Is The Greatest Hero Of All
As his many comic book appearances have demonstrated, there's no end to our current president's ability to save the world from any genre of threat. Amazing Spider-Man has him fighting supervillains, Youngblood shows him carrying massive laserguns to shoot renegade soldiers taking over the White House, Drafted gives us an alien-invasion-battlin' Barack and Barack The Barbarian brings everything back down to sword and sorcery basics. He's like a modern-day Arnold Schwarzenegger - and enough to make us wonder just how the comic industry would've dealt with John McCain winning the election instead.

Threats To Humanity Are Getting Weaker
Last year, it was the Large Hadron Collider and the possibility that it would rip existence apart when someone flipped the switch, and this year, it was... Swine Flu. It can't just be me, can it? I mean, Swine Flu... Doesn't that seem like a step down from the technological "Our Quest For Knowledge May Destroy Us All" conceptual genius that threatened us last year? Even calling it "the H1N1 Influenza Virus" still sounds kind of shit. Okay, so there's no chance of "hardon" spoonerisms, but still: Pandemics? Haven't we done that already? I'm holding out hope that sewer monsters will brighten the remaining months of the year, however.

The BBC Should Stop Making Us Feel Old
Yes, we know that it's just one of those aimless homilies that you know that you're getting old when the policemen and doctors start looking younger, but selecting a twelve year old to be the new Doctor Who really doesn't make us feel very good about ourselves nonetheless. I know that we started with the oldest of the Doctors and have progressively gotten younger since then - well, roughly - but between David Tennant and Matt Smith, I'm convinced that we'll have our first pre-teen Timelord by 2015. And then, the next one will be a little baby, just like in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Joss Whedon Can Defy The Laws Of Nature
If nothing else, the renewal of Dollhouse proves that he can defy the laws of television. I wouldn't put money on him being unable to fly if he really wanted to.

Fuck Dystopia
Terminator Salvation and Watchmen - two downbeat movies offering popcorn versions of pessimistic views of humanity ("Ultimately, man's greed and laziness will lead us to become disconnected from our fellow man and controlled by the machines and mechanisms that we created to ease our daily existences - but doesn't this slow-motion action sequence look hot?") - both failed to meet expectation at the box office, while Star Trek's hopeful, colorful version of a future that may be too lens-flarey to be cuddly but is nonetheless positive surpassed expectations. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles also died a slow death on television. The obvious conclusion? No-one wants to their entertainment to end with the lesson "We're all screwed." The Dark Knight's glossy hopelessness was so last year, people. We hadn't experienced so much of the economic downturn and/or the hopetrain of Obama back then. We were all so much more innocent and desperate to be mistreated by our movies. (Along the same lines - Size Matters: Terminator, featuring human-sized robots, fails to become a hit. Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, featuring giant robots, breaks box office records. I think you can see what I'm saying here. See also: Robot On Robot Action Is More Acceptable Than Robot On Batman Action and Megan Fox Is Hotter Than Moon Bloodgood. Sorry, But There It Is.)

Bolstered with this new knowledge, we look forward to what the rest of the year can teach us - presuming, of course, that the sewer monsters don't decide to team up with Joss Whedon and end the world before then. Pray for us.

1950s and 1960s:
Space vessel design in the actual Space Age tends to involve either sleek rockets or funny flying saucers — until Star Trek comes along, with the U.S.S. Enterprise's weird mix of saucer and rocket-like nacelles, bonded to a tuber shaped main section. Not to mention the fierceness of the Romulan warbird and the gun-like Klingon warships. Model design is already starting to change drastically:

1968 to 1977:

And then with 2001: A Space Odyssey, you start seeing more rugged, lived-in-looking ships, with weirder shapes, like the probe's long neck and rounded front. And ships start having more bumpy weird bits. This trend only continues with Space: 1999's squat Eagles, which look like they could survive anything (even blowing up multiple times) but aren't as elegant as an old-school rocket.

1977 to 1986:

And then Star Wars comes along, with its awesome space dogfights, and suddenly, hugeness and imposing scope are a must. It's no accident that later iterations of the U.S.S. Enterprise are way huger than the 1960s original. The crazy shapes of the T.I.E. fighters and other craft inspire some other weird models in things like The Black Hole. And the X-Wing fighters inspire everything from Buck Rogers' fighter ship to the Last Star Fighter's vessel.

1987 to 1997:

Star Trek: The Next Generation saw in a whole new era of space opera, but the main thing that changed in the late 1980s was the rise of CG effects, allowing spaceships to look much more diverse and weirder than models ever could. From the Borg cube to the many bizarre shapes of vessels in Babylon 5, starships no longer had to look like a few pieces stuck together.

1998 to present:

I can't think of one defining franchise of the past decade that has shaped how we view space opera the same way these earlier franchises did. Star Trek has kept innovating, but so have BSG, Farscape, Stargate and a number of others. CG has gotten a lot smoother and ships can move in much more natural, organic ways — just look at the Narada, to bring us back to our first example. At the same time, as nostalgia has reigned the genre, we've come full circle and resurrected a lot of classic designs, with a few tweaks.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

Le voyage dans la lune (1902)
French cinema pioneer Georges Méliès' silent classic is generally considered the first great sci-fi film, with the first great indelible image in movies, of the rocket ship hitting the moon smack in the eye. With his tale of scientists who shoot a rocket from a cannon to the lunar surface, where they meet hostile aliens, Méliès knew he had a hit; alas, Thomas Edison pirated the movie and made a mint from it in America before Melies could taste that sweet overseas box office. Watch the whole silent film below; it's only eight minutes.

Cat-Women of the Moon (1953)
The early 1950s saw a spate of movies built around lunar expeditions. This is one of the silliest — and, in the right light, the most fun. Did you know that there were giant spiders on the moon, or that in lunar caves the air is breathable enough to take off your space mask? The tale of a race of hot chicks on the moon planning to take over the earth has been parodied often, most notably in 1987's Amazon Women on the Moon (which often apes this film shot for shot), but for campy laughs, it's hard to top the original.

2001: A Spacy Odyssey (1968)
It's hard to come up with enough praise for the lunar segment of Stanley Kubrick's mind-expanding space opera. Plotwise, very little happens, save for the discovery of the monolith on the moon that sends Dave Bowman hurtling toward destiny But oh, those visuals! Even while trying to depict commercial space flight as an ordeal as mundane as airline travel, Kubrick still makes it look graceful and lovely. Same thing on the moon's surface, where eerie quiet coexists with beautiful desolation.

Space: 1999 (1975-77)
The whole series (shot in Britain for ITV and syndicated in America) took place on the moon, though not in our solar system. The premise of the show saw the moon sent careening out of earth's orbit and into deep space after a nuclear waste dump on the far side of the moon exploded (oops!), leaving the crew of Moonbase Alpha to fight for survival in hostile encounters with strange creatures. The season 2 opening credits told the story economically, as you can see.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
Terry Gilliam's overstuffed fantasy did have one minimalist sequence: its trip to the moon. That's because the production ran out of money, so Gilliam's plan for a vast set and a cast of thousands was canceled. Instead, Gilliam settled for a cast of five and a lunar city that consisted of little more than the former Monty Python animator's production sketches shuffled about. The changes worked, however, resulting in an austere yet enchanting sequence in which the human characters encounter the king and queen of the moon, two giants with detachable heads. As the jealous king, Robin Williams brings his usual bagful of crazy, but just imagine the sequence if Gilliam's first choice, Sean Connery hadn't bailed when the money got tight.

A Grand Day Out (1989)
The short that introduced the world to Wallace & Gromit (and to claymation king Nick Park) features a wonderfully daffy story that has the tweedy inventor and his silently suffering dog building a rocket in their basement in order to fly to the moon to satisfy their jones for cheese. This 20-minute short is as brilliant and hilarious as the rest of the Wallace & Gromit tales, and if you haven't seen it, or can't remember the unique nature of the creature our heroes meet on the moon, you must watch now.

Space Cowboys (2000)
Clint Eastwood's adventure about four oldtimers — NASA also-rans who didn't quite have the right stuff — who get another chance to blast off as seniors is a surprisingly sentimental story. But the finale, in which an ill-fated member of Clint's team finally gets his wish to reach the moon, gives the movie an unexpectedly lyrical and moving final shot.

The Time Machine (2002)
This update of the H.G. Wells story (and the 1960 George Pal film) isn't that great (even if it was directed by H.G.'s great-grandson, Simon Wells), but it's on this list for its striking sequence of lunar destruction. Time traveler Guy Pearce learns that, in the early 21st century, we sent demolition teams to level the lunar landscape in order to build condos on the moon, and, well, we broke it. D'oh! Watching the moon crumble over the heads of panicky earthlings is an awesome and horrifying sight.

Bruce Almighty (2003)
Given God-like powers, Jim Carrey emulates Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life, except his ability to lasso the moon to give it to his gal is literal. Who wouldn't swoon the way Jennifer Aniston does to see such a magnificent moon, almost close enough to touch? Unfortunately, Carrey learns the next day, his moon-yanking stunt caused tidal waves in Asia. Gravity's a bitch.

Bruce And Grace Romantic Evening - The funniest movie is here. Find it

Watchmen (2009)
During the revisionist-superhero saga's celebrated opening-credits montage, there's a brief moment that pays homage to a celebrated urban legend. When Neil Armstrong lands on the moon, Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) is already there, taking his picture. Armstrong can be heard saying, "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky!" It's a reference to the old joke (which some believe came from an actual Armstrong utterance), in which Armstrong supposedly followed up his boffo "That's one small step for man..." line with a reference to something he'd heard a neighbor's wife say years before, that she wouldn't give her husband a blow job until the kid next door walked on the moon. Alas, it's not true. Armstrong never said it. Snopes says so.

It's hard to quibble with their picks for best movies and books. Being mostly Brits, the New Scientist group put Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy at the top of the novel heap. Iain M. Banks would have won, but his vote was split among a few of his books. (Including Feersum Enjinn. Really?) Frank Herbert's Dune also came close to winning. The best movie, according to the NS crew, was Blade Runner, followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris and Serenity.

The "worst" lists might be a tad more controversial. The worst SF books include 3001, Arthur C. Clarke's fourth and final book in the Space Odyssey series, and L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. The worst films were The Blob and David Lynch's Dune. Several people apparently also voted for The Matrix (the original) for worst film, but others named it one of the best. One person said of The Matrix:

It has one of the worst backplot elements ever: using people as power sources. I could write an essay on how ludicrous that is.

Finally — and here's the part where some people may disagree violently — the New Scientist staff named Primer the "most incomprehensible" science fiction movie.

"Well worth watching," said one of our editors, "though you might be excused for wondering if it makes any sense at all."

You can vote for your own favorite books and movies, and give your reasons, at this link. Or you could just write a diatribe about why Primer really does make sense, if you watch it eight times. Shape-shifting robot image by Mondolithic Studios for New Scientist. [New Scientist]

The survey - carried out by one of the British arms of Rupert Murdoch's empire, Sky Movies - discovered that the majority of academics questioned feel that Stanley Kubrick's 1968 adaptation of the Arthur C. Clarke novel was not only the most realistic SF movie they could think of, it was also the one they most admired for its use of real world science. Not to mention something that appealed to their seemingly pessimistic natures:

Mark Brake, professor of Science Communication at the University of Glamorgan, said: "2001 raised science fiction cinema to a new level. The unfolding four-million-year filmic story brilliantly portrays Arthur C Clarke's disturbing man-machine encounter with HAL a computer turned murderer.

"This unsettling scenario is not something we would ever want to imagine happening in reality, but it is not beyond the realms of possibility that artificial intelligence could turn on its creators."

Barry DiGregorio, research Associate for the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology, and a member of the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return, said: "I have been campaigning against NASA's plans to bring back samples from Mars as I believe they could possibly endanger the Earth's biosphere with microbial contamination from the planet.

"In a worst case scenario this could lead to an Andromeda Strain-type situation. My concerns are based on the Viking biology data that were conducted on Mars in 1976. NASA have always opposed the claim that their data found microbial life on Mars, however, two NASA astrobiologists have publicly stated otherwise and I have worked with them to bring attention to their finds."

Academics reveal Sci-Fi film they think comes closest to our future [icWales]

The article - which begins "When 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered 40 years ago, living and working in space full time was science fiction. Today, three resident crew members are aboard the International Space Station 365 days a year operating one of the most complex engineering projects in history," letting you know just what you're in for - lists the many ways in which the "ultimate trip" has come true:

— One of the most notable visions is the large, low Earth orbiting, revolving space station in the film. Although the shape is different, today's space station is permanently crewed and international. 
— Flat-screen computer monitors that were unheard of in 1968 are now commonly used on the space station.
The film imagines glass cockpits in spacecraft, which are now present on the flight deck of the space shuttle. 
— The film also envisions in-flight entertainment in space. Today there are DVDs, iPods and computers with e-mail access. 
— Another famous scene from the movie depicts an astronaut jogging in space. Aboard the International Space Station, exercise in space is routine. In April 2007, 210 miles above Earth, astronaut Sunita Williams ran the Boston Marathon while in orbit.

It's a chilling thought, though; 2001 is many things - long, ponderous, ultimately sterile and a product of pretension and the late '60s zeitgeist to name just a few - but I've never thought of it as a model of the kind of world that I'd want to live in. Can't The Last Starfighter come true, instead?

1968 Science Fiction is Today's Reality [PhysOrg]

To some extent, it's understandable that space adventures play fast and loose with physics. After all, who wants to watch Han Solo spend years on the journey to Alderaan, only to find that the planet has twice Earth gravity and he can barely stand up, much less swagger?

The categories of mistakes in our report card should be pretty self-explanatory, but just in case, I'll expand on them a little bit:

• There's no sound in space
• Not all planets have Earth gravity
• Planets should have diverse climates, instead of one unified climate across a "desert planet" or "forest planet."
• It shouldn't be too easy to communicate with alien creatures, without some kind of high-technology "translator" explanation.
• And it definitely shouldn't be too easy for humans to interbreed with aliens.
• Humans exposed to vacuum without a spacesuit shouldn't explode or shatter. And a "hull breach" where the ship's crew is exposed to vacuum should kill everyone instantly.
• You can't have fires in space, unless there's oxygen leaking out somehow.
• Asteroids or other objects shouldn't be able to float close together without falling into each other's gravity
• People shouldn't be able to dodge lasers and other speed-of-light weapons
• And there's no reason why someone would move in slow-motion in zero gravity.
• Faster-than-light travel is probably not ever going to be possible.

Usually when we throw together a list of "the best this" or "the definitive that," we're willing to concede that we might have missed something. But this time, we're screeching and flinging our own feces with the total confidence that we have covered all of the space monkeys in history. Mostly thanks to the obsessive-compulsive maniacs at Monkey Conspiracy, who compiled an exhaustive list of monkey films. Plus Mr. Monkey's List of Famous Monkeys. Top image from Adrian Platts.

First of all, of course, there are the Planet of the Apes movies, which are almost their own genre. (We won't even get into the thorny question of whether apes are monkeys.) it's the distant future, except in the Burton version where maybe it's an alternate Earth, and apes have taken over, and humans can't talk. It's all part of some bizarro analogy for race relations in America.

Space Chimps, coming this summer, is an animated movie about the grandson of the first chimp in space. Ham III gets blasted into space by an unscrupulous senator. Then, somehow, he gets zapped to a faraway star system, where he has to help overthrow the evil ruler of another inhabited planet. Good thing two other smart, resourceful chimps are on board his spaceship.

Captain Simian & The Space Monkeys. An animated show from the mid-1990s, and yet another story about astronaut monkeys. This time, a monkey-naut in the 1960s gets lost in the outer reaches of space, only to get picked up by a race so advanced, nobody can pronounce their name. The monkey gets an upgrade, including enhanced intelligence and high tech, and recruits a squad of other monkeys to fight a villain who's half-human, half-black hole (and who wants to destroy the universe.)

Lost In Space. The TV show and the movie had many important differences, but one central element remained constant: Penny's space monkey. In the TV show, she befriends a weird alien monkey with long ears named Debbie, or Bloop, after the funny noise she makes. In the movie, the monkey's named Blarp, and instead of being a real chimpanzee with a funny hat, she's CGI mixed with animatronic:

Star Trek: Voyager. In one of the most memorable episodes of Voyager, "Resolutions," Captain Janeway and Chakotay get bitten by an insect, so they can never leave a particular planet. Voyager has to go warping off without them, leaving Janeway and Chakotay to put on funny vests and take up gardening and pandering to J/C shippers. But there's a complication: Janeway meets a cute-ass monkey, who threatens to steal her affections away from Chakotay. Which one will she choose? Luckily, Voyager comes back with a miracle cure before Janeway has to decide. That was close!

2001: A Space Odyssey. There are some apes tossing a bone around on a lazy Sunday, and then a big obelisk/monolith thingy shows up. I don't think the apes ever get into space in this film, but space comes to them. So I'm including it.

Monkeys In Space. A twice-weekly webcomic about a group of monkeys zipping around the galaxy and trying to wipe out the remnants of the human race. And score some bananas:

Moon Pilot. Another movie about chimp astronauts, this 1962 Disney comedy features a space chimp who makes contact with a race of telepathic aliens, who just happen to look like hawt babes. No human astronaut wants to follow in the path of the alien-crazed chimp, until he sticks a fork in a young trainee's ass at a dinner party, prompting the man to volunteer by mistake.

The Right Stuff. NASA wants to send monkeys up into space before it sends up any trained astronauts, prompting the classic line: "The issue here ain't pussy, it's monkey." But why can't it be both?

Robot Monster. An alien invader, looking suspiciously like a man in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet on his head, manages to kill everyone on Earth... except for six people. The film was such a huge disaster, the director reportedly attempted suicide (unsuccessfully.) Here's a clip:

Rocket Man. A spaceship full of humans blasts off into deep space, with the humans in suspended animation. But the ship's resident chimp (you have to have one, it's regulations) accidentally wakes one of the humans up, and he has to spend months entertaining himself while the other humans sleep. Good thing he's got a chimp to keep him company.

Space Ghost. In the original 1967 cartoon, Space Ghost had twin sidekicks, Jan and Jace. (Not unlike the wonder twins in Superfriends.) And Jan and Jace had a pet monkey, Blip. Similarly, the Wonder Twins had their pet blue monkey, Gleek.

The Existential Adventures of ASTRO-CHIMP, First Monkey In Space. An animated program on the Sci Fi Channel, this is yet another astronaut chimp show, which supposedly is incredibly boring and pointless despite its cool name.

The Monkey In The Rocket by Jean Bethell. A children's book about monkeys in the space program. Sample lines: "Sam and Bam are Monkeys. They are very special monkeys that live in a very special place... at the Blue Sky Rocket Base." Sam is the bravest little monkey, who volunteers (sort of) for a one-way trip to the farthest reaches of the universe... and oxygen starvation!

The Scary/Angry Monkey Show. On Invader Zim, Zim's robot servant Gir is obsessed with a TV show that's either called Scary Monkey or Angry Monkey. It seems to consist of a monkey, sometimes wearing a band-aid, looking somewhat pissy or freaky. He's obviously in outer space, or why would he be in such cramped quarters?

Dexter's Laboratory. The monkey Simion gets shot into space and becomes hyper-intelligent (of course) and then becomes a supervillain. His dastardly scheme: Invade Earth to get revenge on all the humans who helped make him the megalomaniac he is.

Monkey Business by J. Otto Sebold and Vivian Walsh. The first monkey in space, conveniently called Space Monkey, comes back to Earth and starts a business to capitalize on his fame: he builds a supercomputer that turns out objects that look like cubist cupcakes. Nobody's sure what they are, but they're tremendously popular. Then it turns out if you point a TV remote control at the objects, they open up into tiny apartments.

A.I. wasn't the only movie Kubrick failed to complete in the 1990s. He was also working on a movie version of A Shadow On The Sun, a cheesy 1960s BBC radio drama about a meteorite that brings a deadly virus to Earth. He got copies of the scripts and annotated them for hours, adding notes like: "DOG FINDS METEORITE" and "THE DOG IS NOT WELL" as he sketched the movie in his head.

The meteorite's virus gives people an unstoppable sexual appetite, leading to Eyes Wide Shut-esque scenes of depravity. In the radio version, it ends with this speech:

There's been so much killing - friend against friend, neighbour against neighbour, but we all know nobody on this earth is to blame, Mrs Brighton. We've all had the compulsions. We'll just have to forgive each other our trespasses. I'll do my part. I'll grant a general amnesty - wipe the slate clean. Then perhaps we can begin to live again, as ordinary decent human beings, and forget the horror of the past few months.

The Organians (Star Trek.) Okay, so Trek is chock full of annoying space gods, from Squire Trelaine all the way up to Q. But the Organians are the worst. For one thing, they're totally passive-aggressive. They're like, "Oh, hurt us, we like it." And then when you get too feisty, they turn around and burn your hands off. And they literally wear tunics and have crappy beards. But worst of all, they're gods with ADD. It's like, "We forbid you and the Klingons to fight ever again. We're going to be WATCHING y— hey, is that a quarter? It was shiny! I think it rolled that way. Where did it go?" And then you never see them again, except for one prequel appearance on Enterprise.

The Guardians (Doctor Who.) They're color-coded deities with birds on their heads: the white one's good and the black one's evil. And they send the Doctor on the wackest quest in history, then come back and pester him. They keep changing the birds on their heads, so the Doctor can't tell which one is good and which one is evil. Oh, and they're all-powerful, but they can't intervene, so they have to recruit cowl-headed skull guys, schoolboys and pantomime pirates to help them. Lame. Here's the Black Guardian, pimpin:

The New Gods (DC Comics.) Yeah, I know, Jack Kirby invented paper, and he is the comix god. But the New Gods weren't among his better ideas. They're a weird fusion of superheroes and mysticism, with a healthy dose of 70s hippie stuff thrown in. You have the evil leader, named Darkseid (pronounced "dark side," I think) and the good leader, named Highfather. Death is personified by a shadowy guy on skiis named the Dark Racer. Everybody faces the "camera" and makes lots of weird speeches about good and evil and the Source Wall and the Anti-Life Equation. It's demented in a good way, but also a little too spiritual for that type of comic-book silliness.

The Hybrid (Battlestar Galactica: Razor.) The echo-y voice, the weird pretentious mutterings about "my children," the mystical-ish mutterings about the apocalypse and how all this has happened before and will happen again. Basically, he fell asleep in the bath and totally lost track of his sponge. In general, there are wayyy too many prophecies on Battlestar. My eyes glaze over any time someone mentions the Scrolls of Pythia or the bathroom graffiti of Hermes or whatever.

The pilots (Dune). Okay, so the idea that drinking worm barf could mutate you into a being who controls space and time is kind of silly. But are they gods? Let's ask famous SF author Norman Spinrad. Here's what he says intro to Dune:

Paul Atreides passes through these three ascending stages on his way to finally employing the drug to achieve the ultimate level, to become the Kwisatz Haderach, the fully Enlightened One, able to view the conventional realm of space and time from the outside, as Einsteinian four-space, a consciousness rendered therefore prescient up to a point, an Enlightenment that turns out to be both a godlike power and a tragic curse.

Jodie Foster's daddy (Contact). Jodie Foster zooms through a beautiful sweaty wormhole and then finds herself in the midst of a lovely, lovely, lovely, gorgeous nebula thingy that makes her go on an ecstasy trip. And then she's floats down onto a beach, in a mid-air fetal position. And then her dad shows up, wearing a really dorky dungaree-type outfit, and gets all condescending, with the "that's my scientist" crap when she asks questions. It gets really sense-of-wonder-y until you feel like you're getting a marshmellow enema, and the god-daddy gives a speech about how amazing humans are, withour beautiful dreams and our icky nightmares. "In all our searching the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other." Barf!!!! And then he condescends some more, when she tries to talk sense to his new-age crap. You can see why Penn Jilette hated this movie. Oh, and here's a pukey clip:

The obelisk dudes (2001: A Space Odyssey). An alien monolith comes to Earth during prehistoric times and helps the apes to evolve intelligence. Later, at the turn of the millennium, Dave encounters another obelisk orbiting Jupiter, and goes on a trippy-ass journey to a whole seven-ages-of-man diorama, until he turns into a super-fetus in space. It's zoomy and spiritual, and leaves you with a whole guided-by-divine-ish-beings feeling.

Designed in 1957 as part of Jacobsen's down-to-the-smallest-detail plan for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, Denmark, the cutlery was chosen by director Stanley Kubrick for a cameo role in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Visible for a few moments while the Jupiter Mission crew eat dinner and watch the news, Jacobsen's space-age design is still available today. It ain't cheap, but how else can you impress the new, improved generation of HAL supercomputers at your next dinner party?