How Loki built a different reality with retro material

For me to watch Loki meant a break from every episode to admire the devices that keep the Time Variance Authority running – all the curved figures and comically tiny screens and hazy orange readings. When I asked Loki Production Manager Kasra Farahani on the series prop design inspirations, I had convinced myself that the TemPad had to be based on a Nintendo DS. That’s all I can think of whenever Mobius (Owen Wilson) opens the small oblong compact.

“In fact, the main research we were looking at is that there’s this crazy image I found of a calculator watch on my wrist,” Farahani says, when I ask him about the aesthetic origins of the TemPad. “But the calculator watch is huge, it’s like the size of an iPhone, almost … it’s basically a scientific calculator attached to [someone’s] wrist.”

Like his brother Disney Plus WandaVision, Loki takes a slight detour into the wilderness of the Marvel comics that doesn’t just involve beating the shit out of the bossy villains. While the series is largely a Marvel product, from MCU jokes to one-line zingers, its production take tells a more nuanced story about the multi-dimensional world that TVA agents Mobius and Ravonna Renslayer live in – a world built. on old technology that evokes a romantic past when machines were still curious and funny and even a little magical.

“Basically all the computers were custom builds, with a combination of retro TVs and retro computers combined with other disparate and haphazard tech pieces all tied together,” says Farahani, who plans to post more detailed photos and close to Loki toys after the last episode aired on July 14. According to the series’ style guide, the almighty TVA was able to choose different technologies in different timelines as he pleased. “The idea behind the technology at TVA as we imagined it was that… digital technology never existed and that analog technology has continued to become more and more sophisticated,” he says.

And yet, with the power to use any kind of technology, the TVA still gravitates towards CRT-style screens, which continue to be major sentimental and historical touchpoints in conversations about nostalgia. and the preservation of technology, especially in games. EurogamerRichard Leadbetter has written about the beauty and importance of playing modern games on CRT screens, not just because of their low latency and low input lag. It seems that even in Earth-199999 – the version of Earth in the MCU – those same feelings prevail, even though the material is in the service of a monolithic bureaucracy.

According to Farahani, the Loki The design team were very keen on the primitive aesthetic of the CRT readout, which was predominantly green (“there are amber-colored versions of them,” he adds). In the first episode, the TVA paper clerk can be seen playing solitaire on his little orange monitor, and you get the feeling he’s not the only office jockey running games on their work computer. . One might wonder what kind of games can be played on the TemPad by annoyed VAT agents.

“We decided that there should never be any color on the screens, really, that they should be monochrome … and it’s like an 8-bit look, almost like a first-gen Game Boy,” explains Farahani. “So even when you watch ‘video footage’ on the TemPad it has been digitized in that 8-bit monochrome look.” (Loki director Kate Herron previously said The edge that the TemPad’s display “was definitely inspired by SNES games and also the old Game Boy camera.”) Even at a quick glance at the TVA devices in the early episodes, it’s easy to get Fall The Pip-Boy vibrations of some of the computer interfaces of yesteryear; the orange hue of the TVA is also a neat reminder of the 1970s Burroughs SELF-SCAN analog displays, which ushered in a memorable era of CRT monitors.

By creating this vast faceless bureaucratic machine, the Loki The design team had to procure enough old equipment to furnish entire offices. “It was largely our set designer Claudia Bonfe and her team [who] found an incredible range of retro televisions, ”says Farahani. “Some of these things, they’re old and brittle, so by the time you get them, the amount of changes we wanted to make to them, they just wouldn’t hold up. So it was easier in many cases to just craft them or build them from scratch. (There is, however, a prominent Lear Siegler ADM-3A sitting at the front desk when we first see VAT, which could be the real deal.)

The team built custom props like the Chronomonitor – the 7-foot-wide screen in the Time Theater – which weighed hundreds of pounds and was built from the ground up. (Unfortunately, it is not functional; the reading was made in post). Another bespoke creation is the eye-catching red bubble monitor. It is basically a remote control for the holoprojector, which works with analog 70mm film reels. To preserve the idea that TVA is an old-fashioned WiFi-free zone, the two are connected with a huge cable running through the set. The team also built the hanging monitors that play Miss Minutes animation and the yellow TVA computers in quantum surveillance, inspired by retro technological form language.

Naturally, the old-school elements extended to the visuals of the show as well, from the cartoon Miss Minutes to the holographic projections of the Time Theater. “We’ve gone to great lengths to keep … almost photographic quality in terms of aberrations, blurry edges and film grain … and that the glitches are analog glitches, not digital glitch types, which is a very different aspect, ”explains Farahani. “These are small details, but they are very important to both of us in the design of the material… because it all ultimately contributes to the global construction of VAT. “

But what was the kind of world that produced this now obsolete technology to begin with? Farahani says that, from an industrial design perspective, the Loki the crew took inspiration from the imaginative and eerie window of time that encompasses the postwar and cold war era. “In our fiction, [the TVA is] a bureaucratic organization that was probably very well funded or designed, or that had been renovated in the post-war era, ”he explains. “Imagine a bureaucracy or an organization that receives this massive infusion of resources at one point and then doesn’t do it for decades, then it just uses the same technology, and it slowly degrades. “

The idea that a near-omniscient galactic surveillance agency is using outdated technology is probably striking a little too close to home for people who have struggled with simple government administrative processes these days. But it’s a proven approach to visual storytelling that takes a page from Terry Gilliam Brazil (and even, to some extent, his latest film Twelve monkeys). Even though all those old machines highlight the inefficiencies and archaic qualities of a bloated bureaucracy, there is still something so inherently romantic about watching a TVA employee – our cat-owner friend who plays solitaire and sits on it. ‘Take care of the paperwork – print reams of dot matrix printing paper with the iconic perforated sides.

A somewhat bittersweet effect of watching Loki thought about the technologies – especially gaming hardware – that we’ve lost over time. Seeing the 8-bit TemPad even reminded me of my old 4-bit Game & Watch collection – small tablet-style LCD handhelds popular in the 1980s, which were available in a dual-screen version for specific games ( to know Donkey kong). A little part of me is hoping that Loki has, perhaps unintentionally, prompted viewers to consider the importance of archiving and preserving old things, which is somewhat ironic given the tendency of VAT to prune anything that doesn’t quite fit .

Loki is not so much a story about a fantastic possible future, but a reality that could have been. “I think anachronism is … an important archetype for suggesting a parallel reality,” says Farahani. “It helps to suggest an alternate evolution of the settings, that things just turned out in a slightly different way in this place.” There might not be magic in TVA, but for some of us, the idea of ​​a universe where beautiful old machines still have a place and a purpose is the most supernatural thing of all. .