Retrofuturist media based on what folks in the 1930s or the 1950s thought the year 2000 would look like is fun, but you know what I’d like to see a major media franchise take a shot at? Retrofuturism based on what people in the 1890s thought the year 2000 would look like.
I’m fairly certain that’s what steampunk is based on.
Not so much. Steampunk often gestures in the direction of late 1800s futurism, but functionally, steampunk and retrofutursim are exact opposites. Steampunk is based on playing around with projecting modern ideas about what a high-tech society ought to look like onto a particular historical era, while retrofuturism is based on playing around with what folks who actually lived in a particular historical era imagined future societies might look like. The two occasionally intersect, but more often they’re very different propositions!
