Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts
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The Forgotten Sci-Fi Film That Predicted Video Phones but Got Everything Else Wrong

Long before Zoom meetings, FaceTime calls and awkward work catch-ups from spare bedrooms, Hollywood imagined a world where people could see one another while speaking over the telephone. One of the strangest examples is Just Imagine, a 1930 musical science-fiction comedy that leaps forward to the year 1980. Its vision includes screen-based communication, airborne traffic and a society organised around technology, yet almost every other prediction goes gloriously off the rails.

That makes the film a perfect fit for the kind of genre archaeology explored by Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts. Hosted by Mike and Iris, the podcast approaches forgotten cinema with affection, mischief and a sharp eye for the ideas hiding underneath cheap effects, wild costumes and dubious futurism. Just Imagine may look like a relic, but its accidental insight into video calls gives it an unexpectedly modern pulse.

Just Imagine A Future From 1930

The film opens in the then-distant future of 1980, a date that sounded impossibly remote to audiences living through the early years of commercial aviation and radio. The story follows J-21, played by John Garrick, a man who wants to marry his sweetheart, Mary. Unfortunately, marriage is controlled by a bureaucratic system that demands official approval, suitable social standing and the right number of children.

That premise gives the film a comic foundation, but the production design supplies its real attraction. People travel through the sky in personal aircraft, meals arrive in pill form, and citizens use numerical names instead of ordinary ones. The future is sleek, regimented and obsessed with efficiency, although it still has plenty of room for musical numbers, romantic misunderstandings and broad slapstick.

The result is less a serious forecast than a Depression-era fantasy about escaping everyday limitations. Audiences in 1930 were watching a world transformed by machines, mass production and radio culture. Imagining 1980 allowed the filmmakers to exaggerate those developments until cars grew wings and dinner became something you swallowed in a capsule.

The Video Phone Prediction

The film’s most striking idea is its version of the videophone. Characters communicate through devices that transmit both sound and moving images, allowing them to see the person at the other end of the conversation. The apparatus is bulky, theatrical and completely impractical, but the central concept is remarkably familiar.

What Just Imagine understands is that communication technology would eventually shrink distance in an intimate way. The screen is not merely a public broadcast or cinema display; it becomes part of a private conversation. That distinction matters. The device anticipates the emotional oddness of seeing someone’s face during an ordinary chat, whether the caller is a lover, a family member or a colleague checking in from another city.

It also predicts the social performance built into video calls. Characters do not simply speak; they appear. Their clothes, expressions and surroundings become part of the message. A modern Australian calling from a cramped flat in Carlton, a noisy share house in Newtown or a remote property outside Alice Springs would recognise the same basic problem: the other person is suddenly looking into your space.

Where The Future Goes Sideways

Almost everything else in the film’s forecast is cheerfully wrong. Personal aircraft have not replaced traffic on Parramatta Road, and commuters are not launching from suburban rooftops to reach the office. A trip from Melbourne to Sydney still involves an airport, a timetable and the familiar gamble of a delayed connection rather than a privately owned sky machine.

The food pills are another entertaining failure. The promise of nutrition in tiny tablets appears repeatedly in old science fiction because it reflects a desire to defeat domestic labour. No one wants to spend time cooking, shopping or washing up. Yet in Australia, supermarket shelves are still packed with ingredients, takeaway counters remain busy after work, and a barbecue continues to be treated as a social event rather than an inefficient nutritional ritual.

The film’s social predictions are even less convincing. Its bureaucratic marriage system imagines that romance can be processed like a government form, while its numerical identities suggest that efficiency has erased individuality. In reality, technology has produced a different kind of paperwork: passwords, Medicare details, customer numbers, digital logins and endless verification codes. The future did become administratively exhausting, just not in the manner the film expected.

The Film’s Hits And Misses

Just Imagine remains fun because its mistakes reveal what people in 1930 feared, desired and misunderstood about progress. Its future is clean, fast and heavily managed, yet human beings remain vain, jealous, romantic and easily confused. Those contradictions are more interesting than a technically accurate prediction would be.

Ideas It Accidentally Gets Right

Predictions That Miss The Mark

The videophone is especially revealing because it seemed impossible in 1930 but ordinary by the time smartphones became widespread. The film could imagine the hardware before it could imagine the culture around it. It did not foresee muted microphones, camera anxiety, virtual backgrounds or someone saying “you’re on mute” from a kitchen in Brisbane, but it recognised that seeing a caller would change the nature of conversation.

The Australian Distance Test

Australia makes the videophone idea feel particularly significant because distance is built into everyday life. A family in Perth may have relatives in Melbourne, Darwin or London. Friends can move between Adelaide, Sydney and the Gold Coast for work, while people in regional communities may travel hours for medical appointments, school events or specialist services. A screen call cannot replace physical presence, but it can soften the gap.

The country’s communications history also adds a practical twist. Australians have long dealt with uneven access, from unreliable regional connections to the particular frustrations of getting decent internet in the bush. The futuristic promise of instant contact feels different in the Sydney CBD than it does in far north Queensland or a station several hundred kilometres from the nearest major town.

There is a distinctly local comedy in comparing the film’s airborne optimism with modern life. Its citizens glide through an immaculate future, while actual viewers cope with NBN dropouts, mobile dead zones and the eternal question of whether a video call will survive the walk from the lounge room to the backyard. The technology arrived, but the infrastructure still has moods.

The market for older science fiction is also different here. Australian viewers often encounter obscure films through late-night television, second-hand DVDs, festival screenings, imported discs and streaming services whose libraries change without warning. A film can be unavailable for years, then suddenly turn up on a niche platform and find a new audience among genre fans who enjoy its oddness more than its intended message.

Why It Belongs In Cult Cinema

Calling Just Imagine a forgotten film does not mean it has no historical importance. It sits at an intersection of musical comedy, speculative fiction, aviation fantasy and pre-Code Hollywood spectacle. The film’s appeal comes from its mixture of confidence and naivety: it assumes the future will be dazzling, but has no idea what people will actually do with dazzling tools.

That tension links it to later exploitation and cult cinema. Genre films routinely take one technological idea and inflate it into an entire worldview. Sometimes the result is prophetic; more often it is wildly misguided in a way that becomes entertaining decades later. The pleasure lies in watching filmmakers build a future from the materials available to them, then noticing which fragments survived.

Mike and Iris bring the right sensibility to this kind of discovery. A movie like Just Imagine can be discussed as a technical curiosity, a social satire, a piece of Hollywood history or a gloriously silly night at the pictures. It does not need to be defended as a lost masterpiece. Its strange costumes, airborne traffic and romantic bureaucracy are enough to earn it a place in the conversation.

For listeners who enjoy tracing these cinematic oddities across decades, the podcast’s episode archive offers a broad route through horror, martial arts, Euro cinema, sexploitation, zombie films and other corners of genre history. The same spirit that makes a forgotten videophone fantasy worth revisiting also applies to obscure action pictures and bargain-bin nightmares: the stranger the film, the more revealing its assumptions can become.

Just Imagine ultimately matters because its one accurate prediction is surrounded by so many failures. It reminds us that forecasting the future is less about guessing individual gadgets than understanding how people will live with them. The film saw the screen in the conversation, but missed the mess, banter and domestic chaos surrounding it.

Give the film a spin, then pair it with an episode of Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts for a lively tour through cinema’s wrong turns and accidental prophecies. The future may not have delivered flying cars or food pills, but it has provided plenty of strange movies worth bringing back into view.