… as everyone knows, passenger windows face sideways, and air turbulence is invisible anyway
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Optimus I’ll grant you, but the prefix “cyber” predates Transformers by decades, and “Beast Mode” is much more closely linked to Marshawn Lynch.
Edit to add: Still not creative, but saying he specifically goes to the Transformers well is a pretty big stretch.
I doubt he cares about black football players though, and it still seems suspicious when they all show up in the same place. Like how this whole new presentation was all just I, Robot looking stuff. Or how one of the most famous self-driving cabs was from a movie with a Mars colony, neural implants, boring machines, and a main character trying to decide how much of reality was a simulation. Musk really seems to be recycling ideas from a very few places.
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My point is, “beast mode” as a term describing unrelenting speed and strength entered public consciousness as a result of Lynch. You don’t have to know who he is to be familiar with the term, but it wasn’t popularized by Transformers. Similarly, “cyber” became common terminology in the 80s/90s with the popularization of the internet and digital technology in general, and was adopted by Transformers drinking from the same well as the rest of American culture.
Absolutely no argument that he’s only drinking from a few wells. He’s in love with the aesthetics of 80s/90s sci-fi/cyberpunk and is super happy that he thinks he “made a car that Bladerunner would drive.”
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Used in combination those three terms still scream “1980s kid who never matured beyond his ‘space robots are the epitome of cool’ phase.”
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Like I said, no argument that he dips into the 80’s/90’s scifi/cyberpunk well for basically everything (see also getting “plaid” mode from Spaceballs), but trying to say he’s using “Beast Mode” because of Beast Wars ignores cultural ubiquity for the obscure. It’s technically possible, but unlikely in the extreme, and replaces the extremely strong argument that he’s stuck in turn of the century sci-fi in favor of a much weaker argument that he specifically rips off one franchise despite several examples to the contrary.
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The modern usage of the word cybernetics dates to 1947.
(It sounds like Dianetics for Cybermen. [Yes, I know Hubbard coined his tripe to sound like cybernetics.])
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Merriam-Webster gives the prefix cyber- as not showing up until the 90s though (the actual Greek root would have included the n). Meanwhile the word optimus dates to the early Iron Age, but somehow we all understand where Musk got that from.
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The first appearance of the Cybermen on Doctor Who was October 1966
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Control Data Corporation might have had a trademark on Cyber in the 70s-80s, until the company shriveled late 80s.
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There was also this gloriously whackadoodle project in Chile (before the fascists shut it down).
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https://tfwiki.net/mediawiki/index.php/Cybertron_(planet)
Onebox no-workee
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Not sure if it counts (i.e. no -er), but Cyborg turns up at 1960
… of course the whole cybernetics thing would have been very much in the air at that time with the Macy Conferences following the publishing of Norbert Wieners book (shame Musk didn’t read more of that source material as a lad, instead of ripping off the aesthetics of dystopian sci-fi responses to its warnings).
… not to be confused with -
(which for a confusing second I did)
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just as a very nice and fairly recent (january) take on teslas “fsd” I stumbled upon. as mentioned by ben jordan its actually not more than level 2 and is 10x deadlier than human driving;
(most of the times it stops in front of a child but after some thought “fsd” just drives over the child(dummy) anyway.)
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Your mother designs taxis in Hell, Karras, you faithless slime!
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