Or, I Want My Damn Rocket Car!

It doesn't seem to matter which decade you grew up in, from the 1920s on the visions of the future all seem to have been way off the mark, from the World's Fair of 1939 to Disneyland's first "Tomorrowland" to Le Corbusier. And if you were a kid during any part of the 60s, you remember especially big visions of the future--at least according to movies, comic books, and TV shows. (And what else matters?) We were going to wear stretchy, white and silver clothes. We were all going to have platinum blond hair. We were going to buy new bodies when we got old, and new faces if we didn't like the ones we were born with. We were going to live on the moon, and maybe even Mars. We were going to have robot maids, zip through space in cute little rocket cars, and work at cool companies like "Spacely Sprockets." And often all this was going to have happened by the 1990s.

Well guess what? It's 2005, and I'm still taking a subway to work, at least when it's running. I don't have a robot maid, although that's probably a good thing if "West World" is any indication of the true hidden agenda of robot servants. I don't wear stretchy white or silver jumpsuits, I'm stuck with the crappy old body I have that's getting older by the minute, and I don't get pushed out of bed onto a conveyer belt every morning like George Jetson. And I still don't have a freakin' rocket car! Yesterday's vision of the future told us we'd have rocket cars and more. Man, what a gyp!

No discussion about completely off-the-mark visions of the future is complete without bringing up Criswell. And believe me, no description of his "Criswell Predicts" book can do it justice; you just have to read some of it yourself.