Back when I finished the original Macross series, I wrote a little post about how movies and television perceive future technology and yet get them completely wrong. I'm now on Macross 7, a show that was created a dozen years after the first series, and I'm still fascinated how they messed things up.

For example, one of the main characters Mylene owns a tablet that has many of the functions we use today: She reads newspapers on it, she keeps her contacts and schedule, etc. And yet it doesn't have wireless technology. Each time she wants a new issue of her magazine, she has to go to the wall in her apartment, insert the tablet into a hole much like a toaster, and take it out once the articles are uploaded. The directors of this show never conceived of everything automatically being transmitted to her tablet like we would today, and the first wireless routers hit the consumer market about four or five years after this show was aired!

Years ago on my xanga, I mentioned I preferred shows that take place in an alternate universe because it's easier for me to suspend reality, but simultaneously when they create a new world they need to have an understanding of our own to properly project how technology, weather, politics, or religion affect people. For Macross 7 I'm laughing how a show that takes place decades in the future doesn't have WiFi. But simultaneously as a medievalist I look at the fantasy genre and think, "Well, clearly they didn't study history because the moment that (e.g. flight, industrialization, printing press) hit the scene, everything changed and we left the Middle Ages."

Admittedly many of the people making these aren't really thinking about that. The goal of the Macross series is to show how music and culture can change warfare, not whether the universe they create is in line with the current projections of future technology. Clearly they didn't give a shit when they threw Hikaru out into the atmosphere of Pluto with just a fucking jacket and helmet to collect a giant floating fish, and said that worked fine with the laws of physics.

Still, Macross 7's and other scifi's mistakes show us the other possibilities. And how fucking terrible it could've been. Can you imagine every time you need to update your newsfeed you have to go to an uploading station placed strategically around the city?