I would have liked that more if not for all the sound effects, which I unfortunately found unbearable. Very distracting for me.
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- SAME SHIT DIFFERENT DAY
- DIFFERENT SHIT DIFFERENT DAY
- SAME SHIT THE WHOLE TIME
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voters
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I seem to remember that Whistle Clearer and commercials very vaguely. Maybe my mother bought some …
There were a few jokes that landed quite well. The one about having sex 2 and 8/10 times was a personal favorite.
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Wow, quite the time capsule of 70’s talent. Albert Brooks as a writer! Hamilton Camp in the cast with Chuck McCann. And I think that was Stan Freeberg’s ad and voice over for VOTE toothpaste.
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What, so many civilizations formalized systems of communication founded on [checks notes] farty squishing noises, all the same. Oops, wrong system.
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I have talked about this rather extensively elsewhere, but the show is fine. The jokes don’t really land for me. The computer concept, like most man posing as computer concepts, is really half baked. And while I love Laugh In for what it was, it was the 60s version of pathologically centrist comedy wise.
Turn On’s computer graphics thing has to do with its early use of Scanimate. It has been alleged that they were going to have a kind of computer dancer which would track to the movements of a real dancer. A proto-motion capture effect. But when the dancer danced, the prepared graphic never quite moved correctly and was scrapped from the show completely. There are some early proof-of-concept Scanimates that make it seem like the effect could have been possible, but trying to have a real-time dancing effect was probably not going to pan out as it were.
Had real-time animation been a real possibility, Sesame Street would have probably used it in more of their skits and segments. The only animation they did in Scanimate were fly-in and fly-out effects on text and numbers. Everything else was puppetry.
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Weird that the first guest star was the subversive comedian who went on to make Dorf on Golf
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It is very fast paced and interesting stylistically but many of the jokes are very corny. “We have to fight one huge organization to fight monolithization.” “Are you a hawk or a dove? I’m an elk.”
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Just watched the first 2 minutes, got bored to tears and I can easily tell it was that easy to LSD back then.
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Isn’t this Scanimate? (Or is it subject to the same limitations you’re talking about?)
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The Scanimate is doing some kind of transitioning animation on the letters and the video. Imagine this Scooby-Doo demo where they create a character in parts for the Scanimate then they film someone and the character parts move in a synchronization with that person. It is like a proto motion capture or at least a proto Web conference skin… But much much much much less capable of accomplishing the giving task.
I have only heard about the concept, I have never had the pleasure of seeing it in action. It was a proof of concept that didn’t come to fruition
Edit I found an article that references the animated character concept with photograph. Lost Media Wiki Article on Turn-On
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In that demo, that numerical keypad sort of reminds me of the system we used in college to sync video (SVHS I think) with 2-track reel-to-reel. (The class was “Audio Sweetening” i.e.for video & film.) That was more than 30 years ago (but ~20 years newer than the Scooby Doo episode), and even then it seemed a clunky way to do things (I figured out enough for the sake of doong the class work, but man…)
ETA: when I took that class there were certainly other ways of doing this, e.g. on a Mac, but we didn’t have that kind of hardware, yet. DAT was still new to us, but not of much use in that class.
Again ETA: I dig it!
& I had forgotten about Bufferin (which apparently still exists)
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… dunno about all that but I suspect Mark meant these spirograph things, which could plausibly be ’60s computer graphics
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I was also around 13 when I saw it. I didn’t understand what was the big deal then. Looking back now, it seems like the problem was politics, not porn. I think the joke about the government of South Vietnam being in a swiss back account may have hit a little bit too close to home.
As an aside, the only thing I really remembered was the joke about not taking home the pornography because he didn’t have a pornograph. That was my level of humor.
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Bufferin is big in Japan.
I can confirm it still works because of its placebo effects
-Wanna take some of this pornographic literature home with you tonight?
-I don’t even have a pornograph!
(Okay, I lol’d at that)
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Laugh-In, centrist? Wow. The first two jokes in the first “dance party” skit were about birth control and androgyny, and the skit went on to make jokes about the moral hypocrisy of the WW2 generation, the Vietnam War (which most Americans still supported at the time), pot smoking, pre-marital sex. They tackled interracial marriage and race relations on a regular basis, and even had a skit criticizing South African apartheid. I’m not sure how you get “centrist,” by the standards of the time.
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Laugh-In was created to help take the piss out of the political energy created by protests and competing comedy variety TV shows like The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The show was produced to avoid the political controversy that Tom and Dick were drawing on CBS. Let’s stop talking about sit-ins and have a Laugh-In.
Referencing political issues is not necessarily spreading awareness or helping the cause. Is the show funny? Sure. Does it sometimes rub up against controversial topics? Yeah. There are several episodes where the jokes are repeatedly about college students being violent and college campuses being places that rival Vietnam on terms of dangerousness. There is even one episode where they do “college campuses are dangerous” skits three times in a row. Politically liberal shows don’t have Richard Nixon on as a favor for one of the Republican writers on the show.
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Well, I mean that and the fact that Bufferin is mostly a blend of aspirin and non-asprin.
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