The new movie Moon is a sci-fi throwback—a simple, hermetic story of isolation, identity, and (in)sanity.

In a matter of minutes, the 2001-indebted scene is set: It’s the near future, and a guy named Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is toiling alone in a mining station on the moon, where he harvests a clean-energy substance called Helium-3 to power a depleted Earth. His only company is a HAL-like robot called GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). His only goal is to play out the last two weeks of his three-year contract.

Even though the film is set in the future, some things about the space station look familiar to children of the television age. When Sam gets a haircut, GERTY uses a gadget that looks a lot like a Flowbee.

When Sam wants to turn his TV off, he strikes his hands together. Could he be using the Clapper?

Yes, he could. Turns out the film’s director is Duncan Jones, whose background is in advertising. In an interview, he revealed that he and Rockwell are both students of TV infomercials. “These are devices and technologies that Sam and I remember when we were younger being advertised on TV as, like, the wave of the future,” he said. “‘You don’t need to go get your hair cut. You do it yourself with a vacuum cleaner.’ ‘You don’t need to switch the light off. Just clap on, clap off.'"

He added: “[I was] trying to go back a few years and make their idea of what the future is.”

In Moon, “back a few years” means to the 1980s. The Flowbee was invented in the late part of that decade by a San Diego carpenter named Rick Hunts, who marveled at his shop vacuum’s ability to remove sawdust from hair. The logical next step was to add a razor that, as the Flowbee’s website boasts, “cuts your hair evenly … and trims it precisely. The results are a refreshing vacuum haircut.” Hunts priced each unit at $70, bought some wee-hour TV ad time, and voila—a fixture was born. The Flowbee now rakes in more than $700,000 a year, according to Manta, an online profiler of small businesses.

As for the Clapper, that sound-activated electrical switch was patented in 1985 by Joseph Enterprises, a San Francisco–based gadget company run by Joseph Pedott, who also invented the Chia Pet. It was first sold a year later, retails for $25 a pop today, and still does a brisk business. “I can’t give you an exact figure,” a company spokesman tells us, “because that information is propriety. I can just tell you that we sell hundreds of thousands each year.”

Far out. Any chance those goofy gizmos have actually been used in space?

Nope, says Roger Launius, historian and curator at the National Air and Space Museum. Astronauts and cosmonauts, he explains, “simply haven’t had to do those sorts of things, because they’ve never been up there long enough. I mean, I’d be surprised if someone didn’t cut their hair at some point, but that was probably the Russians, and they probably used scissors.”

What about the Clapper?

No again, says Launius. “There are light switches at the ends of the [International] Space Station that turn on all the lights, or whole panels at a time. They’re very basic, though they are in the process of changing the bulbs from fluorescent to LED. But the fact is, from a rational perspective, there’s just no reason” to do otherwise.

So the interstellar future won’t look like the infomercial past?

“Probably not,” says Launius, because the rule in space is to keep things as simple—and replaceable—as possible. “The Space Shuttle astronauts are still using 286 computers.”

Wait, the Intel 80286, introduced in 1982? That hasn’t been used much on Earth since, oh, 1992. Can Ginsu knives and ThighMasters be far behind?

—Jeremy Berlin

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