Tonight I watched an old Tales from the Darkside where Justine Bateman has a twin brother who dies. He was a huge computer nerd when he was alive, which is sort of tied into the unnamed degenerative illness that killed him. Anyway, he leaves behind this big programming project for her which turns out to be bringing him back as...software I guess? Their parents are skeptical at first, dad especially, but they come around.
Mainly it's weird watching this now because the computer is so clunky and limited. In communicating, the dead brother is limited to glowing blue words on the screen, a primitive voice synthesizer, and a dot matrix printer. If he'd held on a few more years he could at least put a decent picture of himself on the monitor.
2 comments:
That was a very funny conclusion you came to at the end of this review. Perhaps the episode was a precursor to the edgy satire of Max Headroom. At least Max got to have a somewhat better video image of himself when he hit the screens. It's a good thing you can still find episodes of Tales from the Darkside.
Speaking of satire, though, there are a couple of guys Jer found recently who's essays you might find as entertaining as we do. Whereas they are both definitely curmudgeons each of them is unique. Wm. Briggs, Statistician to the Stars, is an American grump not unlike Ed Anger if Ed had been an intellectual while Alastair Cavendish could best be compared to a modern day P.G. Wodehouse or Saki.
The funny thing is that Max Headroom would debut just a few months to a year after this. I remember that the character first showed up in the US a little after that, thanks to commercials and an Art of Noise video. I think a lot of people thought he really was a computer generated character at first.
Tales from the Darkside is another one of those shows that you can find (at least in the US) on Dailymotion. No one's sent their lawyers after it yet. You do have to put up with commercials jammed in at random times, though. It's an entertaining show, if obviously low-budget. When characters are supposed to be wealthy you see a lot of "how homeless people think rich people live."
You linked to Briggs once before, on the "midwit" phenomenon, which I liked. Cavendish is new to me. I like what I've seen of his wit, as in "My latest close encounter of the infuriating kind occurred when I attempted to look up what requirements I would have to fulfil to leave this benighted country and spend some time in a more liberal environment, like Burma or North Korea."
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