It could provide you with pause, a minimum of when you’re previous a sure age, to contemplate the disappearance of the phrase computerized. Like transportable, it has fallen out of use as a result of sheer commonness of the idea to which it refers: in an age once we all carry transportable computer systems in our pockets, neither portability nor computerization are any longer notable in themselves. However there was a time when to name one thing computerized lent it a futuristic, even attractive air. Again in 1969, only a few months earlier than the US’ decisive victory within the Area Race, ABC aired “the First Computerized TV Present,” a half-hour sketch-comedy sequence referred to as Flip-On. Or relatively, it will’ve been a sequence, had it lasted previous its first broadcast.
Flip-On was created by Ed Pleasant and George Schlatter, the producers of Rowan & Martin’s Snicker-In on NBC. With that sketch comedy present having shortly develop into a significant cultural phenomenon, Pleasant and Schlatter used their new venture to purify and drastically intensify its idea: the sketches turned shorter, a few of them lasting mere seconds; the fabric turned extra topical and risqué; the humor turned extra absurd, at instances verging on nonsensical.
However Flip-On‘s most placing break from conference was the elimination of the function of the host, changing them with a formidable-looking pc console that was ostensibly producing the present based on the directions of its nameless programmers.
Although its central pc was a fiction, Flip-On actually did use know-how in methods by no means earlier than seen or heard on tv. As a substitute of amusing monitor, it was saturated with the novel sounds of the Moog synthesizer (whose capabilities had been popularly demonstrated the earlier yr by Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach). As a substitute of correct units, its troupe carried out in opposition to the form of white void later related to Hole commercials; typically, that area would separate into comic-strip panels proper onscreen. Its dance sequences even made use of an early motion-capture system. Alas, none of those improvements saved the present from being pulled off the air simply fifteen minutes into its debut by Cleveland’s WEWS. That decisive rejection set off a cascade, and several other stations on the west coast subsequently elected to not broadcast it in any respect.
Schlatter stays a defender of Flip-On, blaming its rejection on a vindictive fan of the present whose time slot it took, the declining prime-time rural cleaning soap opera Peyton Place. Now that each the first and never-aired second episodes have surfaced on Youtube, you possibly can watch and choose them for your self, assuming you possibly can deal with a frenzied disjointedness that makes TikTok movies really feel stately by comparability. The objects of those often-absurd salvos — campus protests, anti-communism, “the brand new math,” nuclear annihilation, the capsule, Richard Nixon — could also be dated, however at this historic distance, we will higher admire what Ernie Smith at Tedium calls a “sharp commentary on an more and more direct and impersonal tradition.” And if we additionally take Flip-On as a press release on the character of leisure generated by synthetic intelligence, we will credit score it with a sure prescience as effectively.
through Boing Boing
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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His tasks embrace the Substack e-newsletter Books on Cities, the ebook The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Observe him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.
