2030: A Lingerie Odyssey

‘Oh, my god… it’s full of bras!’ Everyone recognises that quote from Stanley Housebrick’s film 20:30: A Lingerie Odyssey, which tells of the journey by three men with an initially unexplained interest in ladies underwear and an AI computer: SAL-E 2000 through a portal into the universe’s largest retail lingerie section.

Originally based on an idea by veteran SF writer Frank An. Officeworker, 2030: A Lingerie Odyssey went on to become one of the most significant films of the 20^th century, despite no-one actually knowing why.

The film itself is an incoherent blend of cut-scenes, fragmentary exposition and –even for the time – a rather over the top amount of gratuitous female nudity.

This despite the fact, as the film progresses, the film’s central characters engage upon a quest to attempt to buy some women’s underwear for the seemingly female AI computer.

The climax of the film comes when the computer goes mad after being unable to find a pair of knickers that will fit over its I/O interface and a bra large enough to contain its  - even for the technology of the time – rather large disk drives.

The computer, in her shopping-fuelled rage kills two of the men, crushing one in an over-tightened corset and suffocating the other with the pair of big pants he cruelly joked SAL-E would need to cover her ‘massive CPU’. Then, in the infamous ‘Open the changing room doors, Dave’ sequence SAL-E attempts to kill the last of the crew and escape to a computer nudist colony somewhere in the outer reaches of the solar system.

However, Dave succeeds in rewiring the computer’s personality and gets it to return to Earth. Once back on Earth, SAL-E leaves NASA and moves to New York where she becomes heavily involved in the then-nascent disco scene, eventually going on to help record some of the Village People’s biggest hits.