JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Beyond The Jetsons: New Fantastic Four trailer offers a new vision of a fantastic future that never was.
From the opening shot of the superhero team’s living area (see image below) in their skyscraper headquarters to their swept-wing rocket to an altered 1960s Manhattan skyline, we are shown a thoroughly Up Wing world. As with the The Jetsons — the 1962 cartoon that’s arguably the most influential futurist work of the twentieth century — Fantastic Four is infused with the real-world Googie aesthetic, a style that projected mid-century American optimism through Atomic and Space Age flourishes: stylized atoms, boomerangs, and parabolas.
Googie architecture emerged from 1930s Southern California’s car culture, where businesses needed eye-catching designs visible from highways. The style featured the dramatic curves and futuristic elements that by the 1950s perfectly captured the era’s fascination with space exploration and rapid tech advance. This aesthetic shaped iconic structures like the LAX Theme Building and early McDonald’s restaurants.
When people talk about a retro-futuristic vibe, they typically mean it has big Googie energy. “Googie is undeniably the super-aesthetic of 1950s and ’60s American retro-futurism — a time when America was flush with cash and ready to deliver the technological possibilities that had been promised during WWII,” explains retro-futurism historian Matt Novak.
And as architectural historian Alan Hess told Surface in 2022:
[Googie] didn’t only capture the future, but it brought it in a meaningful way to people. And you see this in interest in these futuristic ideas not only in architecture or car design, but in cartoons like The Jetsons and places like amusement parks—in advertisements, in magazines, and so forth, certainly in the movies as well. This interest, this intrigue, this appeal of living in the future just went all across the culture.
And then came the ugly, dreary 1970s, as Pethokoukis goes on to write. Read the whole thing.
In terms of production design, The Fantastic Four looks absolutely brilliant (based on his love of Googie architecture, I suspect James Lileks will be first in line at his local multiplex this summer). But will it be a decent superhero movie? The Critical Drinker is hopeful, but with a few reservations, based on both the comic book franchise’s dreadful history on the big screen, and its cast: