The vehicles on international roads must once have been a peculiar sight, but though sportscars try their hardest to push envelopes, the transportation we use isn’t really changing in any dramatic way. In fiction, however, there are plenty of fantastical or innovative ways to get around. Just a shame that some of them are really, really silly.
5 The Talking Car
The talking car actually seems a whole lot less ridiculous these days, considering that satellite navigation is giving our dashboards whatever deeply irritating MR T impersonation we choose to give them. But the idea of a fully sentient car still creeps me out. Being inside a living thing has no happy connotations, especially when said living thing speaks to you in a camp voice and argues with you incessantly.
4 The Giant Robot
The human condition eh? We always want more than we’ve got, even when we’ve got something extraordinary. Take the Japanese, perpetually discontented by their inability to make a twenty foot tall bi-pedal tank despite being the foremost authority on sensibly sized robotics.
The Japanese make a distinction between their ‘Super Robot’ and ‘Real Robot’ shows, though they often seem equally fantastical. The difference is essentially that ‘Real Robot’ pilots only make emphatically Japanese sounds of incredible effort (‘Heeeeuuuurrrr!!!’, ‘Teeeeeerrrrr!!!’) as they slash at you with a beam-sword, whereas ‘Super Robot’ pilots like to name and announce their attacks (‘Rocket Punch!’, ‘SHINING FINGAH’) whilst pummelling you with a glowing fist.
Oh, and if you expect to be any good at doing any of this, you better still be a teenager. In fact, if you’re over fifteen and you haven’t discovered your father’s secret twenty foot-tall robot, it’s time to start giving up on your boyhood dream. What? A girl? In a giant robot? Good luck with that.
3 The Broom
You have the power of enchantment, and can choose any object that gives you the power of flight. So why on earth would you choose a broom? Ok, I get that you’d want an innocuous item that was close by for a quick getaway, but why a broom? If you’re a peasant in medieval Europe or the middle ages, virtually everything you own is ‘innocuous’. So why not choose something you can sit down with some degree of comfort? Like, I don’t know, a chair?
‘But all witches are female!’ you exclaim. Well, except the very first person to ‘confess’ to using one to fly, Guillaume Edelin in 1453. Oh, and all those quidditch players. Perhaps they have special cups stuffed down their robes or something. And even if you don’t have meat and two veg down there, you’re still going to get splinters on your thighs.
2 The AT-AT
So, technically the AT-AT is another giant robot, right? Well, yes, but it’s definitely worthy of its own entry in this list because it’s pure liquid awful. I suppose when you have a military presence that spans an entire galaxy, your R&D budget covers some spectacular moments of blue-sky thinking. Who was it who sat there and went: “hey, you know how many quadrupeds are herbivorous animals built for flight rather than fighting? What if we took that design, made them giant and really, really slow and gave them the ability to fire forwards only”.
According to the various Star Wars fansites, the main body of the machine is actually a heavily armoured ‘troop section’. Shame The Empire Strikes Back doesn’t actually show this, leaving us to formulate our own theories about what’s inside. Several stomachs, capable of digesting soldiers and plant-life from all-terrain types, I imagine.
1 The Catbus
If you haven’t been fortunate enough to see Hayao Miyazaki’s amazingly sweet family-friendly anime My Neighbour Totoro, you’ll still probably be able to guess what’s involved here. It’s a bus right, that’s also a cat. Or to put it in more vividly disturbing terms, a furry bus that runs on caterpillar-like legs, has headlights in its eyes and a creepy-Cheshire cat grin.
Of course, the Catbus is pure fantasy whilst most of the above all contain a shred of a viable idea in them. However, it features the essentials of every item in the list: it’s a living thing you get inside, like the Talking car. It’s an everyday thing made indiscriminately magical like the Broom. It’s an entity made giant for no particular reason, like the Giant Robot. And like the AT-AT it’s a rather impractical idea that only makes sense in its own fiction.
To top it off though, Miyazaki created Mei and the Kittenbus, a short-film sequel that suggests an entire genus of feline vehicles (including trains and Miyazaki’s beloved airships). Not to mention the Kittenbus itself suggests that Catbuses procreate. Only in Japan, I guess.
