Several episodes of Star Trek TOS explored telekinesis too, most notably "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "Plato's Stepchildren" Actually, the thought of Kirk with telekinetic powers is disturbing to say the least....

Referring to the "energy balls" the Enterprise would fire, those would be the tailfire of photon torpedoes (too expensive or impractical to show actual torpedoes launching I suppose), but other ships like the Romulan warbird prototype and Nomad did fire pure energy weapons like that. Also you beat me to the War of…

David Lynch's 1984 version of "Dune" had definite steampunk elements in it too, but you can go back to a 1960 version of HG Wells' "The Time Machine and get a glimpse of the Moorlock's underground steampunkish tech as well (only I'd decline politely their offer to dine with them).

This is an awesome article full of memory-jogging moments of my long history of watching/reading good (and BAD!) sci-fi through the deca—umm—years.

More likely it's given Lucas' homage to the 30's pre-movie sci-fi serial format (e.g. Flash Gordon), given the retro-metro design of the buildings (also the pre-WWII metrotopian idealisms of "Metropolis and "Things to Come"). Even so, the speeder-chase scene from Episode II (2002) looks like it borrowed heavily from…

LOL I remember that but considering the satirical tone of the film, I thought they were just mocking video game control joysticks with their thumbs. Either way, it was hilarious!

You could probably even go back to the 1936 HG Wells film "Things to Come" which not only semi-predicted WWII (by then a lot of folk pretty-much expected it), but had its own version of the hyper-city (as well as nailing the development of the holographic projector). Also, gotta love the pre Von Braun concept of the…

Some movies too. I'm thinking "Runaway" (1984—Tom Selleck) and "Screamers" (1995—Peter Weller).

"Space Battleship Yamato" was full of WWII references, the show did come out only one generation removed from the event. Not only the dogfight scenes, but the aircraft carrier design of the Gamilon's (Gamilus?) space battleships, the mushroom cloud aftermath of the impact of the "planet bombs" on earth, the…

I hope this doesn't mean this erstwhile intelligent show isn't going to be "dumbed-down" for the kiddies.

It's even harder to find interspecies romance that's truly human/alien (and I don't mean the cop-out humanoid prosthetic ears-and-head-bumps crowd of Star Trek; even bold and saucy Babylon 5 barely hinted at it), especially in American movies and tv (probably too risky for a publisher/producer to freak-out the…

Um... About how many of THESE does it take for the Millennium Falcon to do the Kessel Run? ;)

"Revolution" seems to me another high-concept show that will be severely limited by a tv-show budget. Might as well call it "Survivor: Blackout".

That's also known as the TV budget two-step. Unfortunately, it's just not financially feasible to show the global meltdown of society in great detail on a TV show; by the nature of the venue the settings have to be necessarily myopic in scope with most of the "good stuff" happening outside the show's POV. Of all the…

In a way we're both lucky and unlucky with the solar system we're stuck in. On the downside, Earth seems to be the only planet with life (at the moment, and that we know of...), but this solar system also has a good number of rocky planets and moons that could be candidates for colonizing and in some cases (like…

I'd give a slight honorable mention to "The Black Hole" (1979), a film that featured a huge space ship similar to "Event Horizon" that didn't quite make it through (or did it?).

I watched this without really reading the disclaimer and simply presumed the size of the text was a kind of 3-D "stacking" of several overlapping simultaneous events close together.

My thought exactly as I mentioned on my comments, though you managed to put it more succinctly than my droning pedantry.

The animation went by so fast it was hard to see most of the individual events. Also I didn't see a way to zoom in on a particular "hot spot" for more details. As far as the lack of activity in some places like Africa and the pre-colonial Americas, that could simply be because of a lack of verifiable historical data…

Watching this animation, I thought there'd be some comments about how most of the battles seem to be in Europe and eastern Asia (and later on in the colonial Americas). My thought is that this doesn't mean European and Oriental cultures/races are more warlike, but they are simply the cultures that kept the most…