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What's the 80's version of "Steampunk?"

B

Blamo

Commodore
Commodore
For a while I've been a fan of the design/style of certain 80's sci-fi.

If steam punk was brass piping, steam power and Victorian designs, then the late-70's/80's version was lots of wires, bright flashing LED's, thousands of buttons and an anti-minimalist approach (I wonder if some writers/directors were just getting to grips with their video recorders). More then a little feeling of technology run a muck.

Examples: Alien, Blade Runner, Terminator, Star Wars (though it's to a much lesser extent, except for the Falcon's cockpit and the designs like the Star Destroyer). There was even a bit of it peeking into Firefly amongst the cowboy motif, specifically the alliance ships and Serenity's cockpit.

One of the reasons I bring this up now is because of the imminent release of Mass Effect 2. The first game was a bit of a love letter to the 80's, not just in it's deliberately Vangelis like music but also in some of it's design choices. Updated for the 21st century but with a good whiff of the 80's sci-fi punk to them.

So, anyone got a name for it (or if it doesn't deserve it, why not?) and is anyone else a fan of it? Anyone got any favourites or examples?
 
Wouldn't it be cyberpunk? That was the big trend in the '80s, and steampunk was kind of a spinoff of it (certainly the name was).
 
Blade Runner would be the movie most visually and conceptually aligned with "cyberpunk." Legend has it that on first trying to watch it William Gibson was unnerved by how much it resembled "what was inside my head."
 
Huge fan of "steampunk" or cyberpunk. Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies, especially in the visual and atmospheric sense.
 
Not sure steampunk compares to 70's/80's design. Steampunk is a forced amalgam of 2 different settings, the future with the late 1800's. Where as the future look used in 70's/80's media more often than not was a result of repurposing "found items" in order to keep budgets low. This resulted in the highly "greebled" from use of items such as model parts and surplus store lights, switches, etc, definitely tended to give some homogenized aesthetics as seen in Star Wars, original BSG, and others.
 
Lord Garth said:
Huge fan of "steampunk" or cyberpunk. Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies, especially in the visual and atmospheric sense.
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Oh yeah. I remember being in awe of the atmosphere Blade Runner generated when I first watched it. I had to check the original date of the movie's release to be certain I was really seeing a product of the early 80s. It was extremely well made, in my opinion.
 
Steampunk already existed in the 80s. The 1984 animé adaptation of Sherlock Holmes (here Sherlock Hound) featured many Jules Verne-like steampunk invention, mainly those of Professor Moriarty.
It's interesting to note that Hayao Miyazaki directed the first six episodes...
 
Thanks, I'm trying to get the 80's out of my head -- big hair, synthesizers, shoulder pads, laser shows, huge "mobile" phones, and rhythmic lurching masquerading as dancing.
 
I don't like the idea of retroactively applying anachronistic labels like that. Those earlier works were precursors of steampunk, but that's not the same as actually being steampunk.
 
Christopher, you remind me of class mates I knew when I was in college during my Master's Degree. They were "working" on pre-raphaelite painters. I told them those painters were not good enough to have their own label! :lol: which is of course stupid because a genre can be labeled/qualified even if someone hasn't already coined said label.
 
But applying an anachronistic label can lead to misunderstanding of the true nature of the earlier work. Steampunk means more than just a story about Victorian sci-fi technology. The term refers to a genre that branched off of cyberpunk and is influenced by it in style and content. So earlier works that don't have that cyberpunk influence are not really steampunk, but precursors of steampunk.

This is the problem with labels. They oversimplify and stereotype things. They obscure understanding more than they enable it. Every label should be used with caution and skepticism, and the desire to lump all similar works under a single simplistic term and pretend that offers true understanding should be resisted.
 
Dennis said:
If we want to get picky, "The Wild, Wild West" was rather a steampunk series - in the 1960s.
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I think the Victorian-era time machine in "Time After Time" pretty much fits the bill of steampunk--in some ways even more so than the one in 1960's "The Time Machine."
 
Good "steampunk" stuff...The Adventures of Brisco County Jr, the novels of Jules Verne...the graphic novel series "Girl Genius" by Phil Foglio...
 
I pondered this recently, wondering about a future where Amiga didn't send production offshore, Commodore never made it across the Atlantic and Bill Gates mother whipped him into shape and he became a shoe shop manager.

"Spectrum-punk" doesn't really roll off the tongue, and perhaps its more of an idea for a one off story than an entire genre.

Maggie Thatcher doesn't fade away, she keeps going, artificial heart (made by Lucas) keeping her going. The UK shifts to the right and the HOTOL makes it into orbit. We electronically divide the country into areas on the Spectrum games network or the high speed educational Amstrad net.

Think of it as a really lame Ministry of Space, copyright mine :lol::p
 
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