Little Jamie, bucktoothed in a hooded beach towel, sits on the sand with his glamorous mother. Together, under the dramatic seaside bluffs of Southern California, they are building a sandcastle replica of the family home. The year, his mother scrawls in the sand, is 1999 AD. The house is modular and fortress-like: a “honeycomb structure” with a school center, a pool room, and a television. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, and the room “where the computer lives”. The pair sculpts the “health center” in sand. “How does the computer know everything”, Jamie lisps, “I mean, like, how many times to exercise and all?”

This is how the new millenium looked in 1967; or, at least, how it was imagined by the appliance manufacturer Philco-Ford and director Lee Madden (of Hell's Angels ’69). 1999 A.D. is an upper-middle class, space-age dream of the future. Astrophysicist dad (played by American radio host Wink Martindale) works just a few days a week. That leaves plenty of time for golf and for tinkering with a new exotic plant hybrid in his home laboratory: “Hopefully, his experiments will produce a giant peach, with a thick protective skin much like that of a tangerine”. Liberated from household drudgery by the home computer, Mom (the soap opera actress and onetime Star Trek alien cameo Marj Dusay) practices pottery. Most days, Jamie learns from home, where “teaching machines” administer “audio-visual lessons”.

The conveniences of the future are prescient. There’s video chat, on-demand weather forecasts, and a chess simulator. Mother and son play duets on a living room synthesizer. Mom rules from a sort of kitchen command center, with “fingertip shopping” and disposable dishware. Dad banks online, with electronic transactions and a home printer. He scrawls on a digital “home post office” machine for “instant written communication between individuals anywhere in the world”. Work is part-time, the week filled with parties and video entertainment and scuba-suited spearfishing in an ocean stocked with “an increasing variety of hydro-cultured fresh foodstuffs”. Chores are streamlined, “clothing of the non-disposable variety . . . stored in cleaning closets”. But even in this domestic utopia there are trade-offs.

Mom colludes with the mainframe to keep dad trim. She feeds his lunch request into the kitchen monitor: when it’s deemed over his daily caloric allotment, the idea of cheeseburgers is summarily tabled in favor of cold roast beef. In two minutes flat, the refrigerator feeds pre-prepared frozen portions into the microwave oven.

In the exercise center, dad lounges on a “medical couch” to record his vitals. He groans at the computer’s prescription of cycling and calisthenics: “oh that’s ridiculous, this thing can make a mistake you know”. But between his old lady and the instantaneous transmission of his fitness data to the “community medical center” for further analysis, there’s not much of a choice. “All pertinent information about this family, its records, its tastes, and reference materials” is stored behind the blinking lights of the central home computer. “If the computerized life occasionally extracts its pound of flesh”, the narrator chuckles, “it holds out some interesting rewards”.

Glamorous, yes, but is there not something a little sinister in the opening music, in Philco-Ford’s domestic bliss of sanitized data surveillance? Is there not something a little isolated, even survivalist about the home energy center — with its standalone fuel cell, which “furnishes absolutely pure water, burns waste”, and controls the temperature? It has the trappings of a space colony on the cliffs of gorgeous California. “Too computerized? Too cold? The world of tomorrow”, intones the narrator, “will be as cold as sunlight tuned through photochromic windows”.