T w e n t y S i d e d

Last year I was ranting about the uniform awfulness of 70’s culture. While writing those posts, I found an old dusty corner of my mind with a pile of memories I don’t use anymore. Behind the memories of putting ice cubes onto the heating vent to melt deep waffle-like atterns into their surfaces, underneath some loose recollections of Bill Cosby’s Picture Pages, and sitting on top of some vague notions of a McDonald’s playset, I found a bunch of disjoined images from some television shows that I couldn’t identify. I couldn’t remember the names of the characters or the show, just situations and plot devices. Some creative googling finally led me to a website that (somehow) has images from those old shows. As soon as I saw them, the whole thing came flooding back.

Lots of people remember kid’s television from the 70’s. Scooby Doo. Lost In Space reruns. Gilligan’s Island reruns. Batman. Spiderman. Speed racer. Wonder Woman. Some of these have enjoyed recent revivals or remakes. But some shows didn’t survive and are not so fondly remembered. The shows I was remembering were Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, Dr. Shrinker, Wonderbug, and Lost Saucer. I found out they are all actually just segments the same show: The Krofft Supershow.

Most of us have idealized memories of childhood television programs. Despite this retroactive rose-colored view, there is no way around it: This stuff was crap. Utter tripe. Even at six years old I remember noticing that the thing was kind of lame. Keep in mind that I was at an age where I still thought Scooby Doo and Gilligan’s Island were clever. This show took awful and tacky to new, uncharted extremes.

The show ran two years, from 1976 to 1978. I never expected to see them again. Imagine my surprise.

The Electrawoman and Dynagirl segment left an impression on me. Somewhere in the back of my mind were some features that had not yet been enabled. Some unlockables, if you will. As a little boy I knew there was something about these images of women in spandex and go-go boots. These images were important… somehow. Couldn’t put my finger on it. Not for another few years, by which time the show had been swapped out of active memory to make room for episodes of Wonder Woman.

Kept that one cached for a few years.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Here is Steven’s definition of art:

This makes me think of a scene near the beginning of Dead Poets Society where John Keating (Robin Williams) begins a lesson on how to judge the merit of a poem by placing within a two-axis grid. I can’t recall what the two axis stood for, but they were not unlike the three-dimensional system Steven gives us above. The movie then mocks the idea that you can clearly define the merits of art this way and Keating has the students tear these pages out of their books. But I like what Steven has up there: A thing Is what it Does. Yeah, yeah. I know: Engineers and their confounded desire to quantify every dang thing. Sue me.

Later he says:

Let’s drag this topic over to my favorite dead horse – videogames as art – and give it a few more good thumps. It’s interesting to note that for an overwhelming number of games – first-person games in particular – the message is something along the lines of “You are a hero”, or perhaps better, “Heroes are good”. Hero stories are the landscape paintings of videogames. They’re an easy target to hit. Most of us have a built-in appreciation of heroism just like our appreciation of mountain vistas, so the creator just needs to connect with the audience enough to tap into that.

(Futile attempt to intercept nitpickery: Of course there are also games which aren’t trying to communicate anything. The Sim series of games is a good example of this. Will Wright calls these “software toys”. It’s not a chess set, it’s a box of Legos. They aren’t games in the sense that you have to “win” and they are not designed to communicate ideas or evoke emotions.)

Now, hopefully that isn’t all the game has to say, or it’s going to be very dull. Letting you knock down bad guys for its own sake is an empty sort of self-gratification. Hopefully the game uses the hero concept as a starting point for bigger questions. “What is a hero?” or “What can change the nature of a man?“.

Okay, this is the eighth post on videogames in a week. Man, I really need to get our D&D group going again.

UPDATE: Jennifer Snow makes a pretty interesting counter-argument in the comments.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.