Brand new '2001: A Space Odyssey' trailer is gorgeous

Polygon ^ | October 21, 2014 | Colin Campbell

[daler]

I stand corrected, it was a lotta years ago.

Funny, nonetheless.

[Steely Tom]

Class of 72?

'73.

2001 came out in Spring of '68.

You're right. I guess I was in seventh grade when I saw it. I started eighth grade in the Fall of 1968.

[beef]

Howard Johnsons
Pan Am

[FrdmLvr]

Since I graduated in 72, it’s always easy for me to remember what grade I was in in any particular year. Not earth-shattering, but I’m just weird that way.

[Jamestown1630]

I think the first MP book was published around 1954, and I believe these books did a lot to inspire young people to become interested in space and space travel. I must have been around 7 or 8 years old, when I found them in the school library.

Another fan has created a neat website:

http://peyre.x10.mx/MushroomPlanet/index.htm#Flight

[Steely Tom]

Since I graduated in 72, it’s always easy for me to remember what grade I was in in any particular year. Not earth-shattering, but I’m just weird that way.

Same here.

You finished grade "x" in a year ending with the one's digit of "x".

I started grade "x" in a year ending with the aforementioned digit.

I just have to keep that in mind.

[teeman8r]

So you’re an x man...

[fatnotlazy]

Howard Johnson’s is still around, sorta. There are only 2 restaurants left. I think the remaining hotels are part of the Wyndham chain.

[Patton@Bastogne]

.


Copy that, Houston ...


.

[PIF]

Class of ‘70 ... a civilian again.

[Vaquero]

my recommendation for those who have not yet seen this masterpiece.....

READ THE BOOK FIRST!

I did...back in 1968 and spent half the movie explaining things to those who did not read the book first(or more accurately Shushing them). I did see the film a good 6-8 times in the late 60s alone.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

I can’t wait to see this. It looks magnificent.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

How does one make a pen float in the air? One sticks it to a pane of glass.

At least in 2010: Odyssey Two it was done by putting the pen on an angled piece of thin Lexan. Angled so that no light would reflect onto the camera lens.

[RansomOttawa]

A 45 year old scifi movie that STILL holds up! And the tech predictions were fairly accurate.

I agree the movie still holds up visually, although I do find it looks a lot more dated than it did when I first saw it, in my teens, when it was 20 years old instead of nearly 50.

However, I really don't feel that the tech predictions really held up at all. Note:

• When 2001 was made, NASA was a year away from landing men on the moon. I was born in 1970 so I don't have firsthand experience of the era but I know that there was a very optimistic tone about man's future in space. I don't think Kubrick and Clark could have anticipated that man would lose interest in the moon, and set foot there for the last time less than 5 years later. Hence there are no moon bases, no regular commercial flights into space, and the closest we've come to a giant floating hotel is the ISS and its rotating crew.
• Now that people actually live in space for months at a time, we haven't seen the need for velcro slippers. Astonauts have adapted to living in a zero-G environment. (Mind you, I'm sure they'd probably have appreciated a centrifugal toilet if someone had actually invented one.)
• The computing paradigm of 1968 was timesharing on a central mainframe. Hence Discovery is built around HAL 9000, which oversees all its operations. Kubrick and Clarke didn't see the personal-computer revolution or distributed networking coming: even on spacecraft, computing power is distributed among many smaller computers, not centralized in one big one.
• HAL went online in 1992. It was optimistic in the extreme to think that he wouldn't be completely obsolete by 2001. Coincidentally I also bought my first PC in 1992. By 1996, it was too underpowered to do what I needed, and I'm pretty sure that by 2001 I couldn't even buy replacement parts for it.

They also didn't foresee the breakup of the Soviet Union, which rendered the Cold War subplot of 2001 (and 2010, for that matter!) obsolete. Nor could they have predicted that the bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie would ultimately lead to the demise of Pan Am, once the most prestigious airline company in the world.

We really can't fault them, though: what Kubrick and Clarke did in creating their "proverbial good science fiction movie" was intelligently extrapolate on current trends. Even when I saw it for the first time in 1988, it seemed very realistic to me.

[Tanniker Smith]

2001 trailer?? WooHoo! Let’s party like it’s 1999!

[LiberConservative]

If you didn’t read the book you simply won’t get it. I read the book. I got the movie. The most brilliant sci-fi story ever told. Thanks for posting.