Surveying the Gen X landscape and the origins of geek
From the brilliant War Games, which I watched again recently:
Jennifer: Can’t you write to him or call him somehow?
David: Nah, he’s dead.
Jennifer: He’s dead?
David: Yeah. Here, look: here’s his obituary.
Jennifer: He wasn’t very old.
David: No, he was pretty old. He was 41.
Jennifer: Oh yeah? Oh, that’s old.
My only consolation is that Jennifer and David are turning 50.
Space Battle and Sea Battle were my favorites, but Skiing was way up there too. Does anyone happen to know who did the art for these boxes?
Wow. Look at what one of these poor kids had to take home. The Chariots of Fire soundtrack? Swing 2? Country Rainbow?
Not only did this thing not double the size of your TV, the quality of the magnified image sucked. This doesn’t come as a great surprise. But hey, it’s better than those crappy records…
Image via 8bitrocket.com
Great ads via Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobberin’ Time! Uh-oh, super fans. Lando and Hoth Han are SOLD OUT!
Scanned from Vampirella Magazine (Warren Publishing/1981). Page 1 of 5.
Scanned from Vampirella Magazine (Warren Publishing/1981). Page 2 of 5.
Scanned from Vampirella Magazine (Warren Publishing/1981). Page 3 of 5.
Scanned from Vampirella Magazine (Warren Publishing/1981). Page 4 of 5.
Scanned from Vampirella Magazine (Warren Publishing/1981). Page 5 of 5.
The RB5X, which is apparently still being manufactured today, was the grand prize on quite a few Starcade episodes, though I’ve yet to see anyone win it. Originally retailing for around $3500, it goes for at least $2000 today (the arm will cost you another thousand or two). The kick-ass ad below is from a kick-ass site called Vintage Computing and Gaming (Scorched Earth, anyone? Yes, please).
The following clip is a news story from 1984 summarizing the state of robotics at the time. You’ll see the Topo robot and the RB5X in action, and you’ll hear the same kinds of pronouncements we hear from the A.I. crowd today—that robots will soon learn to think, provide security, do our household chores, become like part of the family, etc., etc.
I’m fascinated by these old mall images. Why are they so comforting? Why do I want to roam around these spaces while they’re empty, peering into the gated, now extinct shops, the faint splashing of the fountain my only company? I’m like one of those poor zombies in the original Dawn of the Dead.
Francine: What are they doing? Why do they come here?
Stephen: Some kind of instinct, memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.
And it was. Because the mall was designed to be a second home. The shops were the bedrooms and the dens, the kitchens were the food courts, the marbled open spaces were the living rooms. You smoked there, ate there, crapped there, read your paper there, checked your watch by the big clock. Plants were everywhere, and you didn’t have to water them. The brown-orange carpeting stretched from J.C. Penney to The Broadway, and you didn’t have to vacuum it. The kids watched the adults, and knew that the mall was good. The adults dropped the kids off in front of Sears. The kids spent their lunch money at the arcade, looked at toys, raised hell, spilled potato chips and Skittles (someone else would clean it up). The adults picked the kids up in front of Sears.
There was nowhere else to go in the suburbs. We learned to associate home and comfort with spending money. Spending money was what we were supposed to be doing. And if we couldn’t afford anything at the moment, that was okay: one day we’d be all grown up, we’d get that paycheck, and we’d remember how good it felt to be at the mall, how good it feels to finally be able to shop.
Malls today aren’t designed to keep people in; they’re made to keep people moving. The idea is to get you to buy the shit you don’t really need before you realize that there’s no reason to go to the mall anymore: they no longer feel like home, nobody “hangs out” there, and you can buy the shit you don’t really need on the internet.
I’ll be posting more of these shots as I find them.
(Images via Christian Montone/Flickr and The Hungry Pilgrims)
“Prepare for the game grid of Tron.”
The only reason to get on the Peoplemover, really. Pertinent audio starts at 6:28, but the rest is pretty cool, too.
And shouldn’t it be Master Control Program?
I found this great shot at a Muscatine High School Class of ’88 reunion site. That’s a Dragonlance module on the right. We played one of those at camp in junior high. My mother dragged me to see Cats a year or two later, and I remember bringing Dragons of Spring Dawning with me. I was much distressed when the lights in the auditorium went down and I was no longer able to read my book. My distress sharpened when people dressed up like cats danced onto the stage and started to sing.
Absolutely killer, and maybe the weirdest, scariest shit that’s ever been marketed to kids. Just listen to the first 2 or 3 minutes. This would never fly today. Some limp, quivering runt would start to cry and his manic, helicopter parents would sue everyone involved with the enterprise. End of fun for the rest of us.
I thought Peter’s voice sounded familiar. That’s Rene Auberjonois, a great character actor best known to geeks as Odo on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
(Image source: The Howard Hallis Dr. Strange Collection)
(Video source: Baroque Pop Radio)
Thom McAn? Awesome.
2 Warps to Neptune 