Before the campy SF TV show came this feature film (with a killer opening theme song by Frankie Avalon!), in which the super-advanced sub The Seaview is used to extinguish (!?) the Van Allen radiation belt, which has ignited (!?) and is burning up the Earth. Despite the totally whacked-out premise of the movie and the goofy legacy of the TV show, the flick features some scary depictions of global catastrophe due to global warming, including the rapid destruction of arctic ice sheets and some disturbing shots of the sky on fire over New York. The Seaview is, of course, the only ship that can make it to exactly the right coordinates through soup-hot seas at exactly the right time to launch exactly the right kind of MacGuffin missile into exactly the right spot on the radiation belt, and it's the coolest oceangoing ride this side of Nemo's Nautilus.
2. The Valley Forge from Silent Running (1972)
In this, one of the most iconic SF movies of the 1970s, The Valley Forge is part of a fleet of spaceships orbiting near Saturn. The ships hold, in geodesic domes, mini-ecosystems in which the last stores of Earth's plant life are preserved. The poetic image of forests and other ecosystems saved out in the vacuum of space and the mega-coolness of the ship (which is so cool it can stand up to some bad Joan Baez music on the soundtrack) overcome the innate absurdity of the premise. If you can build those self-contained domes, why launch 'em out into space? And why near Saturn, where there'd be so little natural sunlight? Still, the Valley Forge is a bitchin' ride, and iterations of it and its eco-domes were later seen on the TV show The Starlost (with effects by Silent Running FX supervisor and director Douglas Trumbull) and on both incarnations of Battlestar Galactica.
3. The Landmaster from Damnation Alley (1977)
In this totally botched and compost-conceived adaptation of Roger Zelazny's existential, bleak SF novel, nuclear war has woggified the Earth's axis, effectively turning the environment into a topsy-turvy Hieronymus Bosch crapscape, with Katrina-sized electromagnetic storms an almost daily occurrence. While the movie sucks giant radioactive cockroaches (there's the infamous line barked over CB by a pre-A-Team George Peppard: "This whole town is infested with killer cockroaches. I repeat: KILLER COCKROACHES!"), there's no denying that the flick's Landmaster, a tanklike thing designed to rumble across the blasted, irradiated deserts of North America, is one of the coolest rides in SF. With 12 wheels, six on each axle that rotate in unison, armor plating, missile launchers and a steering mechanism that uses hydraulic rams, this fan favorite, designed by Dean Jefferies, can probably muscle its way through any ecological implosion.
4. The Ark II, from the TV show Ark II (1976)
A kinder, gentler, but still pretty cool take on the same idea as Damnation Alley's Landmaster, the Ark II is more than just a souped-up Winnebago. In a future in which pollution and radiation have thrown Earth into a new Dark Age, a crew of scientists and their intelligent, talking chimp (no, not Lancelot Link) travel the poisoned landscape in a sort of mobile Irish monastery/library/lab, in which man's knowledge from previous centuries is preserved. Now, why you'd want all that precious knowledge and lab equipment mobile in an easily lootable vehicle out in a land reverted to savagery is a little beyond me, but it's a nice idea. The Ark II has a certain coolness to it, in an only-in-the-1970s fiberglass kind of way. Among the gear of the Ark II is your basic jetpack, which is truly one of the coolest rides in SF (from Thunderball to the Lost in Space pilot), even though they exist in the here and now.
5. Water taxis from Hardware (1990)
In an ugly, brutal, ruined future in which most of the world has been turned into a desert and the skies are full of poison dust, one of the few ways to get around one of the few trash-choked cities still standing is via taxis that travel the global-warming-flooded waterways. To be perfectly honest, the water taxis aren't that cool compared to the other vehicles on this list, except that ... the water taxi in this flick is driven by Lemmy, the frontman of the heaviest of heavy metal bands, Motorhead! Lemmy has a great scene as the taxi driver, chugging through a city that's an exaggeration of everything wrong with Thatcher's Britain, complaining about how in the good old days you could get by with brass knuckles or a knife, but now you need a gun. Yeah, there are water taxis in Holland and Venice today, but only in an SF setting can you get a water taxi driver as cool as Lemmy.
