I know this is how people in the 80s and 90 imagined the future and a lot of concepts were probably too far fetched for them.
BUT... why arent they using drones to explore planets? why are there not more drone-spaceships? why does enterprise need a crew to begin with? Why is there so little automation? Why so few uses of AI in general?
I am saying this as a star trek the next generation person. I'd also expect them to have full video and sensory streams of any surface mission teams.
Ask me how I know you're not into foreign and independent film of that time period, nor from the several decades preceding it.
Well I think it's fair to say I've not been exposed to much pre 1960s foreign and independent film, although I do feel there might have been a nicer way to broach the topic what would you recommend to get me familiar with it?
Specifically anything that would prepare my imaginary 1959 brain for the horrors of Rick and Morty would be most appreciated.
The obvious answer would be any Buñuel film, Un Chien Andalou was released in 1929 and is appreciably more viscerally intense than pretty much anything on TV today. Far from the only example. Don't fall into the trap of thinking our modern ideas are new, they aren't, everything new you will ever see was previously thought of, tried out, and discarded by past people whose culture didn't have a use for it at the time. Everything. It's incredibly misguided to think a modern cartoon would be overwhelmingly intense to a supposed primitive of the 1960s, only perceived as colors and motion. It's a form of teleological presentism that perpetuates the fiction that we're somehow more intellectually developed than people who came before us. That happens a lot. It makes us uncomfortable to admit that a paleolithic man could function as well in a modern office as any of us, so we invent feel-good myths about how we're more intellectually sophisticated than every past generation, but we aren't. Not socially, not biologically, not at all. It isn't surprising that people still believe in pop-pseudohistory like the so-called Dark Ages, a Renaissance fiction.