Pills for dinner? Again?

In these examples, dinner goes de stijl when corned beef, toast, chocolate ice cream and pate de fois gras are abstracted into purified geometric form. In Conquest of Space, the pills are part of the storyline; they distinguish ordinary spacemen from those being prepared for a flight to the moon. In the Jetsons episode Test Pilot, Jane cooks by "dialing" George's meal into pill form. In Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, pill consumption reveals the advanced nature of Martian society as if eating pills is an evolutionary inevitability. Twenty two years after Conquest of Space, spacemen are still eating pills in the spaghetti space opera Cosmos: War of the Planets. Like the other examples, the film exhibits a fascination with the discrepancy between the original food and its representation in pill form.

Conquest of Space, 1955 [view 1.3 MB Quicktime video]
Jetsons Episode 14, 1962 [view 811k Quicktime video]
Santa Claus Conquers..., 1964 [view 1.9 MB Quicktime video]
Cosmos: War of the Planets, 1977 [view 138k Quicktime video]