Jeff sent me a link to an awesome, fun, faux-vintage sci-fi short film a while back, and I mean to share it with y’all, but it slipped my mind… until I was flipping through a sketchbook and found this hastily scrawled list of cultural references that I saw while watching it for the first time:

She-Ra, Princess of Power. Lord of the Rings. American Apparel advertisements. The Neverending Story. Mario Bros. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. “The Clapper”. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Space Invaders. Silverhawks. Batman. Thundercats. Tron.

These things, in no particular order, sprung to mind immediately for me. Some of them are obviously intentional, others perhaps unintentional but likely to be seen by anyone who grew up when I did and watched the same stuff. Still others were triggered by a small detail or action in the video that other folks might not notice or associate in the same way. Anyway, here it is!

ELA in Love At First Byte by PepperMelon:

ELA in Love at First Byte from Fernando Sarmiento on Vimeo.

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Speaking of otherworldly creatures, check out these Golden Age Mexican lobby cards:

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There is ice, actual frozen water, on Mars. I am not lying. Where there’s ice, there’s water — and where there’s water, there’s life. Life on Mars means actual Martians. They could just be protozoa at this point, but the mind whirls.

It could mean terraforming, too — like, creating actual offworld colonies with homegrown ice for cocktails to drink in the dusty sunset.
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