I was reading this Howard Waldrop story this week called "Mr.Goober’s Show." As appears to be the formula for much of Mr.Waldrop’s work, it’s a showcase for a neat, meticulously researched tidbit of history. In this case it centered around mechanical television, ironically shortened to MTV. This is an early, pre-war format for broadcasting and displaying moving images that uses the spinning of a perforated plate to convert the image into a sequence of about 30 scan lines. The resulting image would be analog, not pixelized (actually it would be striped), and about two or three inches square.
Like any red-blooded American male, my first impulse was to make one. After all, the electrical concepts are breathtakingly simple. All you need is a photoreceptor, some transistors, a drill, and a motor. But like any hobby that can be obsessed over, there’s already a bunch of dudes escaping from their wives and making complex, archaic televisions. The organization is called the Narrow-bandwidth Television Association.
Daniel Pinkwater has started a podcast reading of his book Lizard Music which is probably my favorite most book in the whole world. It’s all about a kid who’s left alone in the house when his parent’s go on vacation and his older sister runs off. Of course he spends a lot of time watching TV. Now this is back in the days when TV was something magical, when Walter Kronkite was a respected icon, and when there was a strange midnight no-man’s land of television, when the screen actually went to a static fuzz. It’s during this magic period of forbidden late-night television that the lizards make their transmissions.
So is that writer’s strike still going on or what? With no new television coming on, now might be a good time to look over the online television viewers offered by the networks. It’s like tivo, but without all the tedious forethought.
NBC videohas very crisp image quality that takes an ethernet broadband connection to maintain without stalling. It only has about six-weeks of Heroes or Chuck or My Name is Earl or Scrubs, so you have to keep up. There are some commerial interuptions which generally take the form of ear-splitting promos for 30 Rock.
ABC’s Full Episode Player. Medium-quality picture, with limited back episodes and short commercial breaks. Um, I guess you can watch back-episodes of Cavemen or something.
If CBS has any programming other than Jericho, you should let me know. Their are commercial interuptions for actual products, but usually only one commercial per break. The resolution is sub-youtube cruddy, but it appears to have the entirety of the Jericho series, right there for catching up whenever it strikes your fancy.
Fox isn’t what it used to be, but good golly they have a fancy video player selector. The actual viewer though doesn’t seem to get to fullscreen size. The resolution is perfectly adequate for the three cartoon series that you’re going to bother watching. It only keeps in stock the last four (or so) episodes.
CW video. Huh. There’s a network called CW. You learn something new every day.
The jerks at Comedy Central don’t appear to have any full episodes available. Just because they have shows that people would actually want to buy on DVD. It’s not fair!
The main thing you need to know about the Cartoon Network is that it’s not actually —
Adult Swim. This has a particularly awkward indexing system that leads to a particularly awkward viewer, but once I found out that typing "Robot Chicken" in the search line would give me the entire series in reverse order, commercial free, I ended up loosing about four days of my life to 30-second clips of action-figure hilarity. Seth Green, I salute you.