Imaginary Worlds - The Optimist Behind Blade Runner's Dystopia

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

The late Syd Mead was a visual futurist who was hired to imagine the worlds of Blade Runner, Tron, Aliens, Elysium and other sci-fi films. His work in Hollywood has been lauded for decades, but there���s a new exhibit in New York that shows a different side of the artist. Syd Mead: Future Pastime is a collection of his personal and commercial paintings, which are all works of science fiction. Despite his connection to the dystopian world of Blade Runner, Mead’s personal vision of the future was unwaveringly optimistic. I talk with Mead’s husband and business partner Roger Servick, and the curators of the exhibit, Elon Solo and William Corman, about Mead’s predictions for the future of technology, sexuality and spirituality. (Image courtesy of Syd Mead Inc.) This week’s episode is sponsored by ShipStation and Hims Go to shipstation.com and use the code IMAGINARY to sign up for a free trial. Get your free online visit at hims.com/IMAGINARY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. In the early 1980s, Sid Mead was an industrial designer. He had been working for decades designing cars and other vehicles and machinery. But he was starting to pick up work in movies. At that point, he had designed the computer world in Tron and the sentient machine Veger in Star Trek The Motion Picture.

And then Ridley Scott hired him to design the flying car for the character Deckard in the movie Blade Runner. As the story goes, Ridley Scott is only hiring Sid to design Deckard's spinner car. That's it. Elon Solo is one of the curators of a new exhibit on Sid Mead. And Sid naturally is like, well, I can't just design the car. I need to understand the context and starts designing one element and another. The parking meter of the street, the people, the buildings, the businesses, the buildings in the background, the economy, the history,

the world. And after a few weeks, all of a sudden, all this work is just and Ridley's Ridley, as you probably know, is also an artist himself. So they just go in and then all of a sudden, after a few weeks, all this art is delivered to the art direction of the production design team. Sid naturally is a ghast. He's so humble and so kind. He doesn't want them thinking he's trying to steal their job. And obviously, these very traditional, in many cases, very English production designers are like, well, you know, obviously he's not the production designer. So they have to kind of like figure this out.

And then finally, okay, he's a visual futurist. He's just here to imagine this future. And then it will be fettered down to the production team to actually, you know, manifest into reality. When Sid Mead died in 2019, the headlines and many of his obituaries labeled him as the artist behind Blade Runner. That's how I first heard about him. He also worked on Aliens, Short Circuit, Johnny Mnemonic, Elysium, and Blade Runner 2049. I've always loved his work. In fact, for my birthday one year, I asked for a book of his concept art.

The new exhibit in New York doesn't focus on the work he did for movies. It shows his private artwork and commercial illustrations, which were all science fiction. Getting a tour of the gallery, I ended up with a whole new understanding of Sid Mead. First of all, his personal view of the future was not dystopian. He was much more optimistic. Here is Sid Meade in a 2016 interview. Somebody says, Mr. Meade, why do you think the future is going to be so crappy when you work on Blade Runner? And I said, it was a professional job. Ridley wanted to make a noir science fiction film, so I helped him do that. I said, I think that we should celebrate and rehearse for a bright future

and maybe it'll come true just like that. I don't know. But I don't have time to illustrate misery or dystopian scenarios because they'll happen if you let everything go, they'll happen anyway, unfortunately. How did this industrial designer end up having a second career in Hollywood?

Sid Meade had always stood out for his talent. His college education was paid for by Ford. The car company hired him right after graduation. He's there for 26 months, kind of realizes very quickly. There's a lovely, lovely quote, which I paraphrase, where he says, all staff corporate design work is the same if suddenly Ford one day decides to stop doing cars and started making washing machines,

the job would be the same. So he was not okay with that. But futurism was always present. From the very, very, very, very, he was always obsessed with painting the future, articulating the future, but with a very, very deep engineering, very, he was always obsessed with painting the future, articulating the future, but with a very, very deep engineering and industrial design underpinning.

And this is before he ever took a class in industrial design. Firstly, he starts delivering designs where he's done the assignment plus a bunch of future stuff. And they go, Sid, can you just do the car, please? And then he kind of can't turn that bulb off. And then after a while, because the futurism is so good, they're like, man, you know, this is actually really great

and we're not gonna really kind of stop him from doing this. And then words start spreading that there's this future kid. He left Ford and joined a PR company. One of his biggest clients was US Steel. Roger Cervick was Sid Meade's husband and business partner. He says U.S. Steel needed Sid as much as Sid needed the work. Aluminum was encroaching on the U.S. Steel market, so they wanted to recapture some of their market. And Sid's assignment was just to come up with futuristic uses, better uses of steel. So with the minimum of instruction,

Sid was free to create in ways that the rest of us would never have come up with. It was his imagination that showed off all these grand images of the uses of steel. And because US Steel was using them as promotional images, they were giving these away. I was surprised by how much leeway they gave Sid Meade. The cars and vehicles he designed for the catalogs are super sleek and streamlined.

The world around them is clearly sci-fi, but it doesn't look like a dated vision of the future. It looks cool and believable. I'd be happy to live in that world. The catalogs built a cult following that went way beyond the clients of U.S. Steel. Sid had a best seller on his hands without even trying to sell a book. They were all being handed out free. There was a vehicle that he called the Sentinel. That image as a gleaming four-wheeled vehicle.

An engineer brought that home to his son, and his son was like nine years old at the time, and he fell in love with that car and had it on his wall all the years that he was growing up. And he grew up to be the head of Hot Wheels. And he hired Sid to design the top, the front, and the back of that car so that they could produce a Hot Wheels model of it because he was so impressed with that car.

The catalogs were also very horizontal, like a movie screen, so they captured the imaginations of production designers in the film industry. And as far as Sid was concerned... He'd been making movies his whole career, he felt, but one scene at a time. Every one of his renderings, every one of his drawings is a movie. They were always part of a larger story and there were reasons why you saw everything that was in one of his renderings. Elon showed me one of Sid's images from the US Steel catalog. We see these giant white machines

walking on a snowy landscape. And if you're thinking, wait, that actually kind of sounds like you're not wrong. So these snow walkers are from the 1969 United States Steel catalog. Those are 100% the ADAT walkers except for the tops. Yes, so the only difference here, and this is just going off of a little bit

of George Lucas instruction, a little bit of, you know, Lucasfilm design department wizardry, is just merely the massively profound and amazing transformation. The legs and the feet are as identifiable and signature as possible, but obviously the legs are much shorter and goes to a more kind of conventional flat flat cargo bay and cockpit and the only real change that happens in Empire Strikes Back is they turn it into a bit of a

menacing canine as we all know these guys these like these these attack wolves that are Yeah, slowly lumbering through the snow. That's really the only profound difference that happens there. It was finally publicly acknowledged about 14 years ago in a big interview that Joe Johnston did. Joe Johnston was an art director on the original Star Wars trilogy. Now he's a director.

And very proudly talked about how they all had copies of the US Steel catalog. And the moment that the order for creating a snow walker came in, they knew exactly what they wanted to do. And very proudly, he even says, we didn't even call it the ad-ats, we just called it the snow walker, because that's exactly how Sid called it. And as we walk through the gallery of Sid's work, I saw the influence that he continued

to have on the Star Wars universe. As a lot of the attendees kind of come in, they keep on being like, oh, that was in Star Wars. We go, yeah, it's probably. There's a lot of happy, healthy homages in pulling. And one thing I'd like to point out there is a, for any Andor fans listening, if they go to the episode in the antique shop and watch Mon Mothma's entry into the antique shop,

it's a full recreation of one of Sid's US Steel artworks done as an homage to Sid. And only those deep Sid Meade fans that know that image will see it there. I have no idea if Sid Meade ever used the website ShipStation to ship his artwork, but I imagine he would appreciate the design. The world can feel chaotic,

but when you're looking at a Sid Meade painting or using ShipStation, everything feels like it's in the right place. It's a nice feeling to have. With ShipStation, you can automate shipping tasks and manage orders in one simple dashboard. At the click of a button, you can smoothly print shipping labels

and seamlessly integrate with services and selling channels that you already use so you can deliver a better customer experience. ShipStation is the fastest, most affordable way to ship products to your customers with discounts up to 88% off UPS, DHL Express, and USPS rates, and up to 90% off FedEx rates. Over 130,000 companies have grown their e-commerce businesses with ShipStation, and 98% of companies that stick with ShipStation

for a year become customers for life. Calm the chaos of order fulfillment with the shipping software that delivers. Switch to ShipStation today, go to shipstation.com, and use the code IMAGINARY to sign up for your free trial. That's ShipStation.com code IMAGINARY. Before we go from painting to painting, I want to describe the exhibit overall. The paintings in the gallery are not part

of a larger chronological story. Many of them were commercial assignments, but there's a clear and consistent iconography. There are lots of images of public events, like parties, a boat race, or a car show. William Corman co-curated the exhibit with Elon Solo and he says, Sid Mead believed that in the future we'll keep doing the same leisure activities that we enjoy doing now. Why wouldn't we? When we talk about Sid's futures, they're not these totally far-fetched,

you know, absurdist, you know, visions. it always feels like the present stretched gracefully forward. In different paintings, I saw similar anti-gravitational scoreboards and floating ships that look like hot air balloons. And the surfaces are shiny and reflective. One of the proudest things we love pointing out when we're walking people through the exhibit is that every time you see a reflection, it's indicative of an entire side of the world beyond the frame that is designed in his head only to make sure that the reflections are accurate. I didn't even think about that of course because in the reflections and the floors you're actually seeing more than what's actually in the frame. And that's a thoroughness that I think probably couldn't have come from the production design world which obviously is world building but it's usually just world building for the scene.

Sid in many ways represents the beginning of the modern era of cinematic world building. When an artist creates a world, it can tell you a lot about the artist themselves. And according to Roger, Sid's vision of the future came from his childhood. People sort of condemn these chrome glass, shiny, metallic objects of the future, this world that's too cleaned and too perfect and too, what they call sterile, and continue

to harken back to having their own goat or picking their own chicken. I grew up on a farm. It gets pretty rugged. It's a lot of work. It's difficult, but to be in control of it and to be able to live the life you want to is the vision that Sid wanted for all of us. And so did Sid have, you're talking about your own child, you're like, I grew up on a farm. You're saying that he didn't grow up with much money too. Was this also in the same way for him,

like creating a future very different from the world he grew up in, the physical world he grew up in? Oh, very much so, yeah. I asked Roger if he had a favorite painting in the exhibit. One of his images that astounded me, and it astounded a lot of people was the running of the six Drex, which was modeled after a dog race. It was supposed to be the ultimate race,

where a huge stadium was built specifically for six-story tall mechanical dogs, is what they were. And they had a crew that managed these things as they raced around the stadium. And huge throngs of people were able to be in pods that came within inches of the machines as they went by to enjoy and bask in the excitement of the actual race. That painting looks like it would fit perfectly in the Star Wars prequels,

especially the scenes on Tatooine. But William showed me that not everything in the painting is out of this world. And then you'll look closely and you'll see people are holding these, what look like remote controls, but they're betting wands. And the thing I love to note is in 1993, you know, this is very odd but today it's very commonplace for if you're at a concert, everyone has their phones out and they're photographing the scene.

Yeah, they look exactly like you would today except the bottom is kind of black. So maybe they look like almost a transitional kind of iPod iPhone. but again, not even 20, 30 years earlier. Yeah, pretty surreal. That work was commissioned by the World Sports Fair in 1983. Elon says this was a typical assignment for Sid. So one hired him to imagine the future of fill in the blank. There's another painting from 1975, which was commissioned by the Kentucky Derby in honor of their 100th anniversary. It imagines what the Derby would look like on their 200th anniversary.

It's a more pastoral scene with real horses, not mechanical ones. The stadium blends 19th century architecture with 21st century technology, as Sid imagined it. One of the more profound things that most people realize right away is that there is a full screen cellular phone device, a video device in the hands of one of the more prominent subjects. We also notice, and usually tends to be one of the first things people notice, is the word internet on a floating communications platform over the track. As it happens, the word internet had only been coined in 1974, making this, we believe, to be the very first artwork in which the word actually appears.

The next painting appeared in a publication called Automobile Quarterly in 1969. It shows people standing in an open plaza. Many of them are wearing giant shells on their backs called unipods. The front part of the pod is a transparent bubble. The back looks like the shell of a turtle or a beetle, but maybe made of plastic and steel. Each unipod is attached to a pole on wheels.

The top part may seem fantastical, but the bottom part of the unipod is attached to a pole on wheels. The top part may seem fantastical, but the bottom part of the Unipod looks exactly like a modern day Segway scooter. But Elon doesn't think the top part is totally off the mark. And by the way, he refers to the Unipods as monopods. He's basically predicting that we're each gonna be in kind of our own little bubbles as we take our technology with us. I like to joke that we have

monopods today they're just metaphoric and not literal and then only when people need to interact with others do they emerge from their pods and actually start interacting with each other. Yeah everyone is literally in their own bubble here. But one of the main purpose points of the monopod is there's vast distances between spaces so we see all the monopodlings here on their way to whatever next great space or event they need to go to with this general idea of, oh, you might have to go a little bit of a distance because the buildings are so big and so spectacular. The idea of a technological bubble comes up in another painting.

We see a self-driving car that's so aerodynamic it could be a Waymo designed by Apple. It's a car that has no windshield. It's for people. It's a personal transport, but it doesn't have a steering wheel. It's an extension of your own personal space. There are sensors and cameras on the outside. The inside is meant to have screens if you want, but it's obviously anticipating what industrialists and futurists have known for about 30 or 40 years and only now everybody else is waking up to. Which is that if our future is automated, it means so many of the things we're

manually responsible for now are just going to naturally become extensions of our own personal and private spaces. Did Sid Mead predict this technology, or were engineers inspired by his ideas? It's hard to say, but the influence that he had on science fiction is more clearly documented. For instance, Katsuhiro Otomo, who directed the 1988 anime film Akira, has said that Akira's motorcycle was inspired by the light cycles that Sid designed for the 1982 film Tron. This cycle of respect went in both directions. There's a painting in the exhibit from 2004.

It shows a gigantic, red, futuristic motorcycle at a racetrack. Sid Mead said that this motorcycle, which is called a monster bike, was inspired by the motorcycle in Akira, which was originally inspired by Tron. Now that painting was not supposed to be about Akira. It was commissioned by Honda. But Sid took the opportunity to do a visual shoutout. Another painting shows an O'Neill cylinder. In 2018, I did an episode about O'Neill cylinders. They're theoretical space stations which curve up like wheels.

They were designed by a physicist named Gerard K. O'Neill. Sid Mead was one of the first artists to paint an O'Neill cylinder. This work was commissioned in 1979 by National Geographic. In the painting, we see buildings and farmland curving up on both sides of the space cylinder, with a body of water in between. Many people who are coming here are either calling out Interstellar or they call out

the Neil Blomkamp film Elysium. They go, oh, that looks just like the space wheel in Elysium. I was actually going to mention that one too, yeah. And we go, yes, Neil Blomkamp built Elysium off of this image. Really? Yes. And was kind enough to go to Sid and ask him at first for permission to use this as inspiration.

That's the beginning of the conversation. And by the end of the conversation, Neil has hired Sid to do about 60% of the designs for the film. So it's actually funny to say that, oh, this is the image for Elysium. And many people will discover the main difference is that there's kind of an open

atmospheric system in the space wheel in the film as opposed to this which is enclosed. But that actually no, this is not the actual reference because Sid designed a brand new one for the film. And again, they're both technically dystopic in the film because you have the rich people up in space and the poor people on the ground, but Sid designed both. There's another painting from 1979, which shows a different kind of future. We see a three quarter moon against a blue sky, like at dusk or dawn.

Highways crisscross the moon, and there's a giant belt around the middle. It sort of reminded me of the Death Star, but it's not ominous. It feels hopeful. His explanation is that this is an agrarian colony on the moon for the purpose of the earth being able to regreen itself.

So I was gonna say this looked like farmland, this belt around the moon looks like farmland. The moon has, I mean, in a weird way, I joke with people that in a weird way it's the moon has been reupholstered. So they've merely preserved the crust and in fact completely colonized the weird ways the moon has been reupholstered. So they've merely preserved the crust and in fact completely colonized the entirety of the moon and hollowed it out as Sid says specifically for the purpose of growing all of our food stuff so the earth can

have a break and regrow. Oh my god. So my joke and this is a little too corny I don't think Sid would ever say this but my joke is that if that's the Death Star this is the life star. I was literally going to say that. Sorry. No, no, no, no, I'm not like you stole my thunder. I was about like, we're on the same page about this. Yeah. It's the Life Star. I love it.

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Restrictions apply. See website for full details and important safety information. As we went further into the gallery, the world that Sid Meade painted began to change. The early paintings look like they took place on a beautiful spring day when the colors blue and green are popping. He also painted Southern California scenes with hazy purples and pinks.

The later paintings have more black and deep reds. The earlier paintings focused on public events and technology. People were part of the background. In the later paintings, there is a subtle shift in focus to the people themselves. But the people have changed. Now it looks like they are in a futuristic version of the Roman Empire. They are carrying Roman-like staffs which are long and thin with symbols on top. The clothing is draped, but it's not draped over much.

The men and women are mostly nude with sculpted physiques. The male bodies take more focus on the compositions. We got to a panoramic painting, which showed the future of the Pebble Beach Auto Show. There are cars from the 1920s, 80s, and futuristic cars. Although Elon and William told me the futuristic cars are supposed to be antiques for people in the painting who are living even further in the future. So this is Sid's love story of the history of transportation. And then also it should be important to point out,

Sid's car is too, right? So this is his. His Oldsmobile. Besides putting his own car in the painting, the image was personal in other ways. Again, here is Sid's husband, Roger. Sid designed things for a time when the sexual revolution has been won, and it's not an issue anymore.

We're not afraid of sexuality. We've come to terms with it and it's something that could be enjoyed and displayed. It isn't that big of a deal if you're comfortable with it. That's what's important. We have a queer artist who was showcasing what he truly believed the future would become, would be a world of individual freedom and understanding that people could be who they want to be and showcase themselves and their bodies however they want. So we see that through and throughout.

One thing that is very, very powerful for someone like Sid Mead, who one would think there's a lot of discourse around queer futurism, and then once you really start digging into it, you start realizing there isn't quite a gravity center to this discourse quite yet. In speaking with a lot of scholars, a lot of them are pointing out that the gay community was spending way too much time fighting for today to worry about tomorrow.

Yeah, because during the AIDS crisis, there were not a lot of gay artists who were doing these kind of utopian, beautiful futurisms. There's a lot of fight for today. Knowing that Sid was, for all intents and purposes, and living openly as a gay man in accordance with the dictates of the time, but in terms of the public finding out he was gay,

the public did not know he was gay until his obituaries ran. Yeah, that makes sense. I think what's interesting to me too is that, you know, a lot of what he does is what would be called, like, hard sci-fi, you know? And there's a lot of, like, cars and ships and, you know, not many guns, but robots and stuff that, like,

traditionally stereotypically straight guys would be into. And I think it's interesting that that's probably what a lot of people never occurred to them, that, you know, he was seeing this future for a queer lens. Yeah. You know, figures aside, the actual mood, the setting of this feels so sensuous. William brought me to a painting which showed a futuristic party.

People are mostly nude, but many of them are wearing helmets that look like daft punk. The space is more intimate. Someone is live streaming the event and projecting the image on a platform that people are sprawled on top of. It's dark, it's lustful. You look around this party and and you see these biomechanized arms and we see these metallic robes. But one thing you won't notice here are drinks. And what does everyone else have in their hand are these rings, these

metallic rings. Sid would call them high-low rings. They were sensory enhancers, a futuristic party drug of sorts, but for you to get higher and lower in unison, you don't have a bad hangover off of these. Sid kind of, you know, shoot away drinking in the future, at least in this particular world. This is a futuristic rave. But one that there's a calmness to it, a particular sensuousness that I think raves lose out on. Finally, we got to the most sci-fi image in the gallery.

Again, we see these muscular semi-clothed figures. Most of their backs are towards us because they're heading into a red alien landscape. Some of the people are on mechanical platforms and vehicles, and some of them are riding on top of giant alien creatures that walk on the land or soar in the sky. It's unlike any of the other paintings. This group of people moving in unison. There's a sense of togetherness, going back to sensuousness, the naked bodies, hanging out in what looks like on the bottom of corner,

this floating conversation pit. I think there's more than conversation going on in that pit. And then there's these giant wheels too that are moving. That's really cool. People are like inside a moving wheel. Yeah, definitely some new transportation that we're seeing in this work here. All empty gravitational,

and I guess the wheel could be turning, but I'm seeing another one flying or levitating above. And they're going somewhere beyond, and we can't see that place. He was invited by the Yerba Puena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 1996 to do a one-man show. The show was entitled Bright Red Mysteries and was on display there, and this was the original work

that he did in effect for the city of San Francisco in 1996. And that's actually for that specific purpose. But the moment that we understood the context that this was in effect a gift to San Francisco. And if you understand the context of what the city and specifically the gay community was going through at that time, it suddenly takes on a far, far greater resonance. We have a massive community on a pilgrimage, on a journey to some Elysian pathway in the distance.

And I like to point out that this just as much could be a statement to a community, reminding them of their own resilience and survival, as much as it could be a portrayal of those they'd lost at the time on their way toward Elysium. Of course, he's not talking about the movie Elysium, but the concept of a blissful afterlife. And he thinks it's no coincidence

that a lot of characters in Sid's work are on a pilgrimage. His father was a preacher. For years we understood that his father was a Baptist preacher. That's all we understood, only to come and realize later that Ken Mead was an apocalyptic preacher, was a fire and brimstone preacher. When I heard that, I assumed that Sid must have been rebelling against his father's beliefs. But their relationship was more complicated. First of all, his parents were very welcoming to Roger, although nobody could say for certain whether they understood that Roger and Sid were more than friends.

And Roger says, Sid's father had always been a bit of a renegade in the church. He had a knack for getting fired from the the community is that he was servicing. It was usually because the the people that contributed to the church were wealthy people in that community. And he would give sermons that didn't take into account any of their, maybe, proclivities. He used to say, when you throw a stone into a flock of chickens, the only one that squawks is the one you hit.

And he might piss off some of those people, and he'd find himself fired and moving on to another parish someplace. So Sid moved around a lot as a young man. Elon showed me these visual aids that Ken Mead liked to use when he was preaching. The charts were designed by a Baptist minister named Clarence Larkin in the early 20th century. They're very intricate, detailed illustrations and charts about history and theology. And

all of a sudden gives us a little bit of clarity of oh this is the home he grew up in a in a home of massive pasts and futures. And one thing that's really important so we see this one chart here this chart number five says seven thousand years of human history. The key thing that's important for people to understand and you know there's the stereotype of people thinking apocalyptic hell hellfire brimstone whatever that's not actually at the end of the store of this narrative arc with them in all cases it is about the new earth it's about heaven on earth it's not about yeah there's all these trials and tribulations and hellfires and this and that

but each chart actually ends with the age of ages, an age of righteousness and holiness. And it was Ken who was the one that brought science fiction to Sid. Sid would actually be like, my father for some reason really thought it was important for us to be reading science fiction together and they would read.

His father was the one who introduced him to science fiction. Yeah, his father banned films in the house. None of the kids could watch movies, but made sure he was a drawing teacher, so made sure he had crayons and art materials that were very poor, and then also would go to the newsstand

and buy Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, and they would read it together as their special thing. This is, oh, that's so interesting. The father also saw Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers as being consistent with his view of a better, distant tomorrow. Yes. Roger saw reflections of that in Sid's adulthood.

He lived in his drawings. He didn't live in the real world all the time. It was better for him just to spend time drawing and coloring and working out the ideas of a world that he wished he could live in and that other people began to appreciate and join him. They wanted to live in his alternate world too. He always thought the future was going to be better. He just wished that he could take part in the future more. If he had any regrets in life, it's that he felt like he was born too early. He would have liked to have been in the future.

Wanting to live in a world of your own creation? I totally get that. But Roger says Sid never became disillusioned with the real world. He used to mention in his presentations that if you wanted to have an optimistic idea of the future, understanding of the future, just stand in front of the Empire State Building and look at your hands and remind yourself that it was your hands, human hands, that built this thing. And he felt like there was no problem that,

especially no problem that mankind could create that they couldn't solve if they use their intelligence and if we work together. That's where the solutions lie. I think that's where his paintings can have the most powerful effect. Looking at them made me feel hopeful. It made me feel like his future isn't out of our reach.

Sid Mead Future Pastime is open in New York until May 21. I have a link with the address in the show notes. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Roger Cervick, William Corman, and Elon Solo. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that is only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. Stephanie and I recently talked about time travel stories and what happens when black characters go back in time. You have to look at time travel stories that are told from non-white perspectives.

I think those are the ones that actually have some meat to them. You know, they've experienced racism, so they know what they personally know. So they would know what would happen to them if they went back in time. Like, I wouldn't want to go back to the 70s. I probably wouldn't even want to go back to the 80s, and that's my childhood. to the 70s. I wouldn't probably even want to go back to the 80s and that's my childhood. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. If you support the show on Patreon, at different levels, you also get either free Imaginary World stickers, a mug or a t-shirt,

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