I figured a great thread would just be NeXT sightings in media, new and old!
I'll start things off with a classic Madonna Rain video to the right time stamp:
https://youtu.be/15kWlTrpt5k?si=zp5LXAQFz_FauBx8&t=104
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
My (now-lost) first-ever forum thread was about this extremely obscure chance find: screenshots of a NeXT-based 3D DICOM image viewer on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (season 3, episode 9.) This is almost blink-and-you'll-miss-it stuff. In the episode, the perpetrator is being tested for brain activity differences that would mark him as a congenital psychopath, and is being subject to an fMRI scan.
Law & Order Special Victims Unit (1999) - S09E03 - Impulsive 1.jpg
Law & Order Special Victims Unit (1999) - S09E03 - Impulsive 2.jpg
The screenshots are clearly doctored—the scale is inconsistent and there is an abundance of Windows 9x titlebars mixed in with NS/OS widgets and panels. Unfortunately aside from an app named "3D" there is nothing specific enough to identify the origin of the material shown—since there's no close or radio buttons we can't even guess whether it's compiled against OPENSTEP AppKit or traditional NeXT APIs. However the usage of bordered control groups rather than bold/italic/large text to indicate sections of panels suggests it was a later UI, probably refreshed sometime after NS 3.0, and may not have been peculiar to black hardware.
At the time I first posted this, I speculated that it could be an undoctored screenshot of OPENSTEP Enterprise for Windows, but even disregarding the inconsistent UI scale, OSE applications tend to look more consistently like native Windows programs (with a few telltale exceptions, such as a custom widget being used for drop-down menus.)
Madonna – Rain
Rather better-known is the usage of NeXT machines on the set of Madonna Ciccone's Rain music video, which shows a close-up of the UI around the 1:45 mark.
madonna-rain-slabs.png
madonna-rain-keyboard.png
madonna-rain-gui.png
The image above seems to depict the receipt window of a financial package, with a large, perhaps nonsensical value in the total field at the bottom (something like 1.8 billion yen?)—maybe @jeffberg can translate some of it. The dock contains 3View.app, Recycler, Sound.app, an unidentified Japanese financial app (likely the open program—no ... indicator), Edit.app, Mail.app, Preferences.app, and of course WM.app.
The inclusions of Sound.app and 3View.app seem non-obvious (and certainly non-default); perhaps they were used in cut shots as eye candy, as the framing of the video suggests the three NeXT slabs are being used to to facilitate the recording of Madonna's performance.
What other references to NeXT in media do you know of, and why are they all from title cards in Serial Experiments: Lain?
So cool! マドンナ
Here's what Google translate can recover from it:
madonna-rain-autotranslate.png
Madonna
Madonna
font
save
Undo q
Madonna
Madonna
Madonna
Production Department Videography Labor Cost Budget
Company Name
satellite film
artist
Madonna
project number
16:23
date
staff
Assist supervision
Matsushita Electric
Special electric line 2
Sachiko Nakagawa
makeup
stylist
time keeper
interpretation
part-time job
part-time job
Subtotal
Kumiko Miyazaki
Sei Midori
The Four Mountains
Mikako Kodama
Nobuhiro Ito
5-455-45
45-45-45-4
¥793171330
720
24
total amount
24547788
¥
Actual performance
Amount paid
So, looks like it's a semi-real easter egg containing staff information on a UI that was thrown together for the video, perhaps from a localized InterfaceBuilder example app.
Jeez, somehow I made a duplicate of this thread! I've merged it in here.
I spotted at least three slabs in Userlandia's VCF Midwest 2025 video:
One mono, one color, and one for sale.