Screens Onscreen

Here’s a shot from the classic 1960s Batman TV show. It’s set in the Batcave, and it shows Batman and Robin watching a newscaster on the Batcave television. The TV’s picture is a rounded rectangle, like the CRT TVs of the day. But this one looks like it’s slightly widescreen. Either Gotham City had HDTV way earlier than the rest of the world, or the Batcave TV is cropping the bottom and the top of the SDTV picture. (I mean, it’s not a real TV, I’m pretty sure they added the picture to the TV in post, so I am really overthinking this.) Like much of the equipment in the Batcave, the TV has a little sign on it that explains its purpose. The TV’s sign reads “television” in all caps.

I like it when the TVs in modern movies are old-style CRTs for some reason. And I am assuming Havoc, released in 2025, is also set in modern times. Other than the TVs, everything seems pretty modern. Anyway, this is a shot from Havoc of a small 13-inch CRT TV. The great Forest Whitaker, in a tux, is on the screen. He plays a corrupt mayor in this movie, and a news chyron on the screen states “Beaumont Investigation Dropped.” The TV is in a little table in a bodega, but all you can really see in this shot is the TV, a jar of candy, and a Christmas tree in the background.

I stand corrected!

This shot from the Super Friends is set inside the Legion of Doom's headquarters. The members of the Legion are seated in chairs except for Lex Luthor, who is standing at a lectern-type thing. They're all looking up at a large oval-shaped screen that's way high up, like 30 feet. It seems uncomfortably high, to be honest. Anyway, there is a three-headed Venusian on the screen. The Venusian is wearing a green shirt.

I’m sure I’ve seen it explained before, but, at the moment, I can’t remember how the TVs on the Flintstones work. Are there little dinosaurs in there acting out all the scenes? Anyway, this TV is technically from The New Fred and Barney Show, a Flintstones TV revival from the late 1970s. The TV’s overall shape and its screen shape are both roughly hexagonal. The image onscreen is of two American-style football players (one wearing red, one wearing yellow) and a referee. There are two big knobs below the TV’s screen.

In this shot from Cosmopolis (2012), Robert Pattinson is lying down on one of the long chairs inside a stretch limo. There’s a mini bar at his feet, and there are a couple of screens built into the mini bar. It’s hard to make them out, but I think they’re showing charts and graphs. Pattinson’s character is into the stock market, so I am assuming the charts and graphs are supposed to represent market data. One of the screens is behind a little shelf, and there is a bottle of dark liquor and an empty glass on the shelf. You can kind of see out the windows of the limo, but they’re obviously dirty on the outside and partially covered in red, black, and blue spray paint.

I posted a point-of-view shot of the electronic binoculars from Star Wars the other day. I just noticed that the look of the point-of-view of the electronic binoculars from The Empire Strikes Back (1980) is pretty different, but still cool. The Empire look maybe even leans further into the flickery analog vibe than the Star Wars look. The view itself here is not that interesting — it’s just a bunch of snow blowing around after a meteor hit (which was actually not a meteor but an imperial space probe). The image is bordered in kind of a fat barbell shape, with two circles side-by-side connected by a rectangle. There is tiny red text in the area outside of the image.

I love the set in this shot from Flash Gordon (1980). I mean, I love most everything about the movie. But this set is Dr. Zarkov’s lab. It has brick walls and a concrete floor. There are rickety shelves filled with messy piles of equipment in the background. There’s a large console in the foreground. It looks like it is still a work in progress — there’s a bunch of exposed wiring. There are a bunch of lights, switches, and knobs on the console. There are also two CRT-style TV screens built into the console. But they’re flatter than most CRTs of the era, so I am assuming their screens are working off some kind of rear-projection film thing. One TV is showing a volcano, the other is showing a news reporter. The news reporter is, of course, dishing out some exposition for the benefit of the people watching the movie. Zarkov, played by Topol, is sitting at a chair at the console. He’s turning a control knob.

In this shot from The Martian (2015), three people are in what looks to be a corporate meeting room of some sort. There’s a big table in the middle of the room surrounded by office chairs. There’s an American flag on a pole in the corner. The three people are looking at four flatscreen TVs on the wall that are set up in two rows of two. The four TVs are working together to show one picture — that picture is of actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Benedict Wong. Their characters are in another corporate meeting room. There’s a Cisco logo at the top right corner of one of the TVs. That’s a hint that all of these characters are on a video call. Though I’d guess if this movie was made today they would have made it a Zoom video call.

The main view screen on the bridge of the starship Enterprise from the original 1960s Star Trek TV show is an iconic onscreen screen. Usually it’s just shown by itself, with nothing in the foreground. In this shot, however, we can see Sulu and another guy in the foreground, both sitting at their stations. Sulu is looking back toward us. Bonus: on the screen is space Abraham Lincoln sitting in a chair floating in outer space. Yeah, this is pretty silly, but space Abraham Lincoln is a terrific character all the same.

Citizen Kane (1941) famously opens with a lengthy (approximately 12 minutes) newsreel about the death of the titular Kane. At the end of the newsreel it’s revealed that a group of journalists is watching it in a film screening room. This shot is right before that reveal, when we get a view of the movie screen from the side. The room is smoky so the projector light really plays in the shot — I am pretty sure they shot this practically based on the projector light. As for the image on the screen itself, it’s the end title card for the “News on the March” newsreel. “The End” is shown in large letters at the center of the screen with “News on the March” shown at the bottom of the screen in smaller letters. The background for the text is several flags, attached to the kind of staffs that might be carried in a march.

I’ve always loved the point-of-view shots for the electronic binoculars (I think they’re known as macrobinoculars in-movie) in Star Wars (1977). The shots manage to look lo-fi and high tech at the same time. This shot is of a couple of banthas, which are kind of like elephants with horns instead of trunks. The image is desaturate and has scan lines like you’d see on an old CRT TV. The image is set inside a rounded rectangular border, and there are various numbers that I guess are supposed to indicate distance or something, but mostly they just add to the high tech vibe.

In this shot from the first season (originally aired in 1973) of the Super Friends cartoon, Wonder Woman is sitting in front of a console with a large square-ish screen. There are buttons and switches on the console, and there’s a man dressed in a military uniform on the screen. He’s sitting in front of a map, and his mouth is opened like he’s saying something. He has a moustache and he’s pointing up with an index finger.

Before it was a 1960s TV show, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was a 1960s feature film. As you might guess from the title, a lot of the action on the show takes place on a submarine. Here’s a shot from inside that submarine that features some gauges and switches on the wall and a submarine door with one of those big circular handles on it. There’s also a CRT TV built into the wall. The TV is showing a news broadcast featuring a white-haired guy behind a desk.

Them! (1954) is an atomic age giant ant movie. In this shot, a group of men seated at a table watch a movie about regular-size ants via film projected onto a pulldown screen. The projector is in the shot, but I’m not sure if it’s 8mm or 16mm. I can tell it’s smaller than 35mm. There’s a man standing beside the projector, but we just see his back. Oh, and this screen grab is from a rip of the Them! laserdisc from my personal collection.

In the Mouth of Madness (1994) gets very meta at the end when the main character, John Trent (played by the great Sam Neill), staggers into a movie theater and sees the events of the past few days playing back on the big screen. This shot shows a scene playing on the movie screen with Trent wearing a straightjacket and screaming from behind a locked door with a glass window. The movie screen takes up most of the shot. It’s bordered on the left and right by orange and brown curtains.

Here’s an unassuming close-up shot of a TV from my favorite movie of all time, The Thing (1982). It’s an RCA CRT TV, I’m guessing maybe 15 inches. There’s some faux woodgrain accents on the TV and one knob is visible. The image on the TV is in black-and-white. There are five or six people wearing parkas and carrying a bunch of flags. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that this is footage of Norwegian scientists right before they discover an alien spaceship buried under the Antarctic ice.

Here’s a screen on a screen onscreen. This shot is from the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special (1978). The main screen is the Star Wars version of a 1970s portable TV. It’s a yellow box with at least one knob on it, plus a silver round thing that is maybe a dial or maybe an antenna or maybe something else. That screen is playing a scene from the Boba Fett cartoon, AKA the cool part of the Holiday Special. That cartoon scene features a square-ish TV-looking screen built into a wall, and Darth Vader himself (well, the animated version of him) is on that screen. This is all being watched by a young wookiee, but you can’t really tell that from this shot — said wookiee is in the foreground of the shot and out of focus.

In sci-fi movies, does a hologram count as a screen? A hologram is kind of a screenless screen, right? Anyway, I haven’t featured any sci-fi holograms yet, so here’s one from The Black Hole (1979). This shot is from the interior of the space ship U.S.S. Palomino. There’s a human and a spherical robot hanging out near a big circular console, and the console is projecting the image of the titular black hole. Yes, the black hole itself isn’t visible, but there’s a bunch of blue/purple cosmic material being sucked into the black hole, and the hologram is showing that.

This is the best shot I could get of the AV cart from Monsters, Inc. (2001). It’s in the background, partly obscured by a control console, but you can tell that it features six CRT-inspired TVs, stacked two high, three across. I say CRT-inspired because the shapes of the TVs are odd, more trapezoidal than rectangular. There are drawers below the TVs, and the whole cart is on caster wheels. The images on the TVs are hard to make out, but I think they’re all showing playback footage of the monster training exercises. There are two monsters present. One is crab-like, with six legs and five eyes. He’s wearing a vest and suit jacket. There’s also a blue monster with four arms in the background. He’s on a set made up to look like a room in a human’s house.

Low-angle shot of the bad guy (Drax, played by Michael Lonsdale) from the James Bond movie Moonraker (1979). Moonraker has a sci-fi vibe because that was hot in the years immediately following the release of Star Wars. Drax is in his lair, and the walls behind him are set at odd angles — they get closer to each other the higher they go. The walls are covered in screens (rear projection, I’m assuming), and the screens are showing various rocket imagery. There’s also a clear sphere hanging next to Drax with a purple and green plant inside it. The whole set is cool, which isn’t surprising given that frequent Bond production designer Ken Adam excelled at coming up with cool villain lair sets.

In The Iron Giant (1999), one of the characters is watching a black-and-white horror movie on an old CRT TV. Well, it’s a contemporary TV for the movie, which is set in the late 1950s. The animators really went the extra mile and added in the flicker and scan lines you would get if you actually filmed a real CRT TV with a film camera. You can kind of see that here, though the effect is more pronounced in the movie than can be captured in a single still image. This particular shot of the TV is a closeup from a low angle. The image on the screen features a brain on the floor in the foreground, and there is some broken glass in and around the brain. A man and woman are in the background of the TV image.

This shot from The Incredibles (2004) shows a guy with big hands holding something that looks like an iPad. But this movie was made in 2004, so iPads didn’t exist then, so this is a proto-iPad. Anyway, we can’t see the guy’s face, but we can see the not-an-iPad screen, and on it is a desaturated image of a blond woman wearing a blazer and sitting in front of a bookshelf.

Here’s a shot from the made-for-TV version of Fail Safe from 2000. It aired on CBS and was actually performed live, just like they did in the early days of TV broadcasting. The screen here is a big one, I’m guessing maybe 12 feet wide and eight feet high. There’s a map of the North Pole, Greenland, and the northern part of North America on the screen. The map is titled Airborne Alert Orbits - US Polar View. Given when this was made and the fact that it was broadcast live, I’m assuming the screen works via some kind of rear projection. The screen is in a large room. There are four men standing around in various parts of the room, plus a large desk console and a rolling chair. And there are smaller screens on the sides of the big screen. Those screens feature a Strategic Air Command logo and some smaller details that I can’t quite make out.

Here’s a shot from the original Underdog cartoon that originally ran from 1964 – 1967. There’s a military guy wearing headphones and sunglasses, and he’s turning one of the knobs on a console that has a CRT-style TV attached, plus some switches and gauges. On the screen is Underdog’s love interest, Polly. Like Underdog, Polly is an anthropomorphized dog. She has a platinum blond hairdo and is holding a microphone and an astronaut helmet. And she’s standing in front of a weird chair.

In this shot from Escape From New York (1981), the Secretary of State (played by Charles Cyphers) is center of frame. He’s dressed in a suit and tie and talking on a corded telephone. The great Lee Van Cleef is out of focus in the foreground on the right side of the frame. Most of the wall behind the two men is taken up by a huge flat screen, and on that screen is a colorful backlit map of Manhattan. In the world of the movie, the entire island of Manhattan is, of course, a walled-in maximum security prison.

This shot is set inside the panic room from the 2002 film Panic Room. Jodie Foster is standing in front of a sleek bank of at least six black-and-white 7-inch Sony CRT monitors and three VCRs. The monitors are showing security camera footage of different rooms in Foster’s character’s apartment. The lighting for the scene is dark and green-tinted — it looks kind of Matrix-y. There’s a landline phone system of some sort next to the monitors, and Foster is holding the phone handset. I won’t say the look on her face is panicked, but she doesn’t look happy. I’m not sure if these monitors were working on set or if their images were all added in post. The images are all very clean, but at the same time, they don’t have that added-later-in-post look. However they did the monitors, they look good. Which isn’t really surprising, given that Panic Room director David Fincher is famously attentive to detail.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) is probably the least popular of the original five Apes movies, but I dig it. I dig all the Apes movies, even the modern ones. Except for the remake from 2001, which has some incredible makeup effects but is otherwise unmemorable. Anyway, this scene is set in an underground bunker kind of room, and there’s a woman dressed in all black wearing a black skullcap seated at a console. There are a couple people behind her, and they’re looking up at 4 CRT screens built into a big metal box attached to an archway. The screens are showing security camera footage from other parts of the bunker in some scenes, but here they’re just showing static. I am pretty sure the screens’ pictures were all added as an optical effect in post.

Starcrash (1978) is a sci-fi movie made in Italy. It’s one of the first to cash in on the sci-fi/action craze that Star Wars kicked off a year earlier. This shot from Starcrash is set inside a spaceship. A guy with curly hair (we can’t see his face, but it’s actor Marjoe Gortner) in a black and red leather jacket is sitting in a chair and looking at a round screen. There’s a bald guy on the screen. Not much else is visible in the shot, but there are some colorful lights on the wall behind the screen.

This screen from This Island Earth (1955) is triangular, a weird shape for a screen, but that’s 1950s science fiction for you. The screen is attached to a big black metal box (approximately 48 inches high and 72 inches wide). The the old six-electron atomic symbol is on the front of the box, along with a glowing triangle and a colorful control dial. The box plus the attached screen make up a device known as an interocitor in the movie. Two men are looking at the screen, and a man with white hair and a very high forehead is on the screen. He’s an extraterrestrial named Exeter, and he’s played by actor Jeff Morrow.