Volume 17, No 1, 2016

Transcription

Volume 17,
No 1, 2016
Page
Drama without Drama: The Late Rise of Scripted TV Formats
Scenes from an Imaginary Country: Test Images and the American Color
Television Standard
Record/Film/Book/Interactive TV: EVR as a Threshold Format
Restarting Static: Television’s Digital Reboot
Regulating the Desire Machine: Custer’s Revenge and 8-Bit Atari Porn Video
Games
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3B
2B
1B
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Contents
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research-article2015
TVNXXX10.1177/1527476414561089Television & New MediaChalaby
Article
Drama without Drama:
The Late Rise of Scripted
TV Formats
Television & New Media
1–18
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1527476414561089
tvnm.sagepub.com
Jean K. Chalaby1
Abstract
This article revisits the history of television (TV) formats—concepts of TV shows that
are licensed for local adaptations—focusing on scripted entertainment. While the TV
format revolution of the 1990s bypassed scripted formats, they have been catching up
in recent years. This article analyzes both the reasons for this late rise and the factors
behind the recent growth. It argues that the adaptation of scripted formats is more
complex, and risks remain higher than for other genres. The underlying economics
of their production and distribution also differ from nonscripted formats. The stars
aligned when demand for drama increased worldwide, Hollywood studios began to
mine their catalogues, new exporters and scripted genres emerged, and knowledge
transfer techniques improved. Finally, this paper analyzes the significance of the rise
of scripted entertainment in the global TV format trading system.
Keywords
global television, Hollywood, scripted entertainment, transnational television, TV
formats, TV genres
Introduction
The history of television (TV) formats—concepts of TV shows that are licensed for
local adaptations—is now well documented. It has been established that the TV format
trade started in the early 1950s and trudged along in the ensuing decades. Formatting
remained a practice confined to the fringes of the TV industry and, with a few notable
exceptions, was restricted to a single genre: game shows. Most of them flew from the
United States to the rest of the world, and no more than a handful of firms were
1City
University London, UK
Corresponding Author:
Jean K. Chalaby, Department of Sociology, City University London, London EC1V 0HB, UK.
Email: [email protected]
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from http://www.elearnica.ir
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involved in this trade. In the late 1990s, the scheduling needs of fledgling TV channels
and broadcasters across the world, the emergence of an independent TV production
sector, and the global success of four “super formats” (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Survivor, Big Brother, and Idols) all combined to make the trade explode. The number
of formats in circulation grew exponentially, as did the number of countries they traveled to and the number of companies that distributed and produced them. The format
business became a multibillion-dollar industry, growing to an estimated €2.1 billion
per year between 2002 and 2004, and €3.1 billion between 2006 and 2008. A study for
the 2002–2004 period counted 259 formats leading to 1,310 adaptations and 31,397
hours of formatted programming, while 445 formats led to 1,262 adaptations and a
total of 54,383 hours in 2006–2008 (Chalaby 2012a; Bisson et al. 2005, 11; FRAPA
2009, 8–13; Moran 1998, 2006, 2013a).
This article revisits that history, focusing on TV formats in scripted entertainment.
Formats that travel with a script are distinguished from those for unscripted shows and
cover a broad range of serials (including soaps and telenovelas) and a wide spectrum
of TV genres, from drama and comedy to constructed reality programming. While the
post-2000 revolution bypassed scripted formats, their number has risen sharply lately;
this article identifies and analyzes both the causes behind their late rise and their recent
popularity. Among the factors that retarded the growth of scripted formats, it is argued
that their adaptation is more complex than for other genres. The knowledge transfer
cannot be as perfunctory as with formulaic formats, and with the reception of scripted
entertainment being always uncertain, the risk remains substantial. The underlying
economics of scripted formats also differ from those in nonscripted genres: scripted
shows are the most expensive to produce, and thus, the investment needs to be recouped
with finished tape sales before the format rights can be released. The final factor is
organizational in scope, as it took some time for drama and comedy departments to get
used to the idea of reproducing a recipe coming from abroad. The stars aligned for
scripted formats when the number of drama buyers increased (particularly in the
United States), Hollywood studios began to sell the remake rights of their global TV
series, new format exporters and scripted genres emerged, and knowledge transfer
techniques improved. This article aims to provide an analytical overview of the
scripted format trade, focusing both on the causes and consequences of its late and
sudden growth.
Scripted Formats before the TV Format Revolution
Although scripted adaptations were not uncommon in the era of sound broadcasting (see ‘New Formatted Genres: Telenovelas and Constructed Reality’), game
shows prevailed in the first five decades of the TV format trade. Most of these
shows were American, with titles such as The Price Is Right and The Wheel of
Fortune traveling widely (Cooper-Chen 1994; Moran 1998). Scripted formats,
which were few and far between, were of two sorts: sitcoms and soaps.
The United Kingdom emerged as an early source of traveling scripts. In the late
1950s, Associated London Scripts, probably the first British independent TV
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production company, was headed by Beryl Vertue. Representing her writers’ rights
when selling series to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), she began crossing
out the contract clauses on foreign sales, correctly predicting that the BBC was not
interested in selling them abroad (Vertue interview 2011). Not always being able to
sell her shows as finished programs, it later occurred to her that she could use these
international rights and get broadcasters to make their own productions. Vertue first
traveled to Germany, where she sold the remake rights of a Peter Yeldham play in
1960. The script of Hancock’s Half Hour (BBC Television, 1956–1960) was acquired
by a Finnish broadcaster the following year, and her first success came with a local
adaptation of Steptoe and Son (BBC 1, 1962–1974) in Holland in 1963 (Vertue interview 2011).
Other European deals followed, notably in Sweden, but Vertue had set her heart on
America. She had a pilot of Steptoe and Son made for NBC in the mid-1960s, which
she qualified as “quite dreadful” and subsequently was not picked by the U.S. network
(Vertue interview 2011). Her breakthrough American hit came with Till Death Us Do
Part. The BBC series (1965–1975) could not be sold as a finished program because of
the Cockney accent and the local nature of the bigotries and prejudices the protagonists displayed. She settled for an adaptation and sold a format license to CBS (Vertue
interview 2011). The sitcom was turned into All in the Family by Norman Lear and
premiered in January 1971. It stayed on air until April 1979 and, as is well documented, became one of the most successful and influential series in the history of U.S.
television (McNeil 1996, 26). Even the spin-off shows, Maude (CBS, 1972–1978) and
Good Times (CBS, 1974–1979), traveled back to the United Kingdom, where they
were adapted as Nobody’s Perfect (ITV, 1980) and The Fosters (ITV, 1976-7) respectively (Potter 2008, 51). On the back of Till Death, Vertue managed to sell the rights of
Steptoe and Son, and the adaptation Sanford and Son debuted in January 1972 on NBC
(Vertue interview 2011).
Allan McKeown, another British producer who worked for long stretches of his
career in the United States, recalled doing “a U.S. pilot or series of just about every
show [he] had done in the U.K.” (in Baker 1996, 25). McKeown’s U.S. remakes
include Birds of a Feather (BBC 1, 1989–1998), Stand By Your Man (Fox, 1992), and
Porridge (BBC 1, 1974–1997), as well as pilots of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (ITV, 1983–
1986), Fawlty Towers (BBC 2, 1975–1979), Girls on Top (ITV, 1985–1986), and
Nightingales (Channel 4, 1990–1993; Baker 1996, 25).
In addition to British independents, the second source of scripted formats was the
Sydney-based Grundy Organization. Grundy was a production company that initially
specialized in formatted game shows but took two Australian soaps to market, The
Restless Years and Sons and Daughters, in the late 1980s. The Restless Years led to
two long-standing adaptations that air to this day: Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden (Good
Times, Bad Times) started on RTL in the Netherlands in 1990, and a German version
(Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten), also on a local RTL channel, which followed two
years later. Attempts to sell adaptations in the United States and France were unsuccessful (Moran 1998, 56, 62). In all, six local versions of Sons and Daughters were
produced (Moran 1998, 109; 2013b, 189–93).
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TV Genres and the TV Format Revolution
During the TV format revolution, the fastest growing genre became reality programming (this being understood as a broad category that includes talent competitions and
factual entertainment shows such as makeover, coaching, life swaps, etc.). Indeed,
three of the four “super formats” (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Survivor, Big
Brother, and Idols) that helped bring about this revolution were reality programs
(Chalaby 2011; Bazalgette 2005; Esser 2013; Moran 2013a). In the early 2000s, game
shows still broadly constituted two-thirds of traded TV formats, reality less than a
third, and scripted only 6.6 percent (Rodrigue 2007). Later in the decade, the percentage of game shows dropped to less than a third, while reality programming continued
its inexorable march, with more than 50 percent of formatted episodes. It is at this
stage only that the proportion of scripted adaptations among TV formats doubled to
almost 15 percent, representing a total of 8,941 adapted episodes in 2008 (FRAPA
2009, 20).
This dataset is among the latest available, but evidence suggests that scripted formats have pursued their upward trend in recent years. The following section attempts
to explain why the format boom that arrived with the new millennium initially
bypassed scripted entertainment.
Understanding the Late Rise of Scripted Formats
Several reasons explain the delayed growth of scripted formats. First, scripted shows
are among the most difficult to adapt, not least because of the complexity of the knowledge transfer. Across all unscripted genres, format buyers have access to full consulting packages that teach them all they need to know to duplicate a show successfully.
This includes detailed production bibles that can run to hundreds of pages containing
information about run-throughs, budgets, scripts, set designs, graphics, casting procedures, host profile, the selection of contestants, and every other possible aspect associated with the show’s production (e.g., European Broadcasting Union 2005). Buyers
also have access to consultant producers that travel to oversee the production of the
early shows and remain accessible via e-mails or over the phone, once gone. Leading
brands such as Dancing with the Stars and The Bachelor even organize international
conferences for local licensees (Paice interview 2012). All in all, once an unscripted
show has crossed a few borders, the transfer of expertise is extensive: the concept has
been honed to perfection, every flaw has been ironed out, and every shortcut and saving has been squeezed out of the production process.
Although the knowledge transfer for scripted shows has improved in recent years
(see ‘Improved Knowledge Transfer’), the process cannot be as perfunctory as for
other genres. Scripted genres are the most culturally sensitive, and a comedy or drama
cannot be reproduced as mechanistically as a game show or talent competition. A
straight adaptation of the original, such as the mere translation of the script, will not
suffice to make a show palatable to local viewers. Any scripted adaptation must go
beyond copycat television and reactualize the script for a new audience. More than for
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any other genre, a scripted adaptation is a new performance that “interprets, actualizes,
and redefines the format” to make it work in a new cultural context (Navarro 2012,
25). It requires a great deal of talent—and a dose of good fortune—to capture the
essence of a comedy or drama and make it work in another culture. The local production team must combine knowledge of the principles of scriptwriting with an understanding of the show’s vision and core values. This complexity explains why TV
executives have long been hesitant about commissioning scripted formats, why success can remain elusive for scripted adaptations, why several attempts may be needed
to re-version a script,1 and why some comedies that are TV classics in their countries
of origin never travel (e.g., Fawlty Towers).
The entire premise of the TV format trade hinges on two benefits: cost effectiveness
and risk management. Formats enable broadcasters to bring down costs by taking out
the expenses involved with the development of a new show. This is realized by the
delivery of a ready-made script that in all likelihood has taken a few years to develop
and the delivery of a method of production through the transfer of expertise. Above all,
TV formats enable broadcasters to manage risk as they acquire them on the basis of
their ratings track record. Today’s leading unscripted formats effortlessly pass the
twenty mark of local adaptations, and potential buyers can browse ratings data that
detail the show’s performance in a large array of territories, scheduling scenarios,
channels, and audiences, before committing themselves. Although drama buyers turn
to foreign scripts because it remains easier and cheaper to remake something they can
see on tape, they take more risk than with any other genre. Whereas it can virtually be
guaranteed that a game show with decent ratings in twenty territories will do well in
the next ten, the reception of drama, even when formatted, is always difficult to predict. Not only does drama need to resonate more deeply than unscripted shows which
viewers may only engage with superficially, but success is more dependent on critical
reception. In addition, the international ratings history is of less relevance, as scripted
shows never travel as extensively and rarely acquire an unblemished ratings record.
Second, trade in scripted entertainment has traditionally been dominated by finished programming. It is a sizable business worth an estimated $8 billion per year and
dominated by six Hollywood heavyweights: Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Disney
Media Distribution, CBS Studios International, NBCUniversal, and Sony Pictures
Television (Guider 2013, 2). These companies have long feared that formats could
jeopardize their tape sales, and, with the exception of Sony, their interest in the trade
is recent (see ‘Hollywood Awakes’).
The final factor is organizational in scope. The TV format trade has traditionally
been dominated by game shows, a daytime genre long perceived—even within the TV
industry—as devoid of artistic merit and character. Game show producers have never
enjoyed much artistic independence and, thus, easily consented to reproducing preestablished formulas coming from abroad. Scripted entertainment entails authorship,
and drama/comedy producers and writers enjoy more autonomy and creative freedom
(Nohr interview 2013). So, the idea of importing a foreign concept remained incongruous in drama and comedy departments longer than elsewhere. American broadcasters,
which, as seen above, have long adapted British scripts, are an exception to the rule.
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This is probably due to the fact that U.S. scripts are developed by tables of writers,
who, therefore, have long been used to working on ideas that are not their own.
However, as the success of a scripted adaptation strongly depends on the local production team, broadcasters everywhere have no choice but to rely on a crew that purchase
into a project and believe in it (Taffner Jr. interview 2013).
Out of the Woods at Last: The Scripted Format Boom
Data presented above and forthcoming evidence suggest that, since the mid-2000s,
scripted adaptations are on the rise, both in absolute number and in terms of percentage of trade formats. This section analyzes the causes and consequences of this growth.
Growth of U.S. Demand
The premier factor is the sizable expansion of the U.S. market for drama. The overall
demand for scripts has sharply increased in America because new players have developed an interest in scripted genres, joining the traditional purveyors of drama, the U.S.
networks. Following in the footsteps of HBO, fledgling cable channels such as AMC,
Bravo, FX, Pivot, Showtime, and TLC have been commissioning series to get hold of
exclusive content (see White 2013). In addition, subscription-based video-on-demand
(SVoD) platforms such as Lovefilm.com and Netflix have also begun to order their
own series.
For all these new players, scripted content is crucially important, because only TV
series and movies have enough pulling power to help them build their brand and make
them distinctive, even more so if this content is exclusive. In the case of the SVoD
platforms, only scripted content can justify the monthly subscription fees, and the
original series they commission act as marketing tools (see Kanter et al. 2014). Faced
with this renewed competition, the U.S. networks themselves have been forced to
increase their investment in scripted genres. Overseas scripted shows come in handy
for U.S. buyers who need not only more scripts but also stronger ones. Indeed, while
new content aggregators have boosted demand, they have also intensified the competition for viewers. In such circumstances, all have turned to foreign scripts to get hold
of solid concepts likely to sustain the interest of fickle audiences.2
In 2013 alone, Netflix commissioned its own version of House of Cards, originally
a BBC 1 political thriller (1990–1995); AMC produced Low Winter Sun, also a BBC 1
drama (2006); HBO opted for yet another BBC 1 drama, Criminal Justice (2008–
2009); and ABC Family looked further afield for Chasing Life, a Mexican series about
terminal illness (Terminales, Channel 5–Televisa, 2008; Waller 2013).
The five U.S. networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and The CW) are showing mounting interest in scripted formats (Table 1). Every year, they pilot scripted shows, out of
which they pick about a third for the first season. A total of 88 pilots were ordered for
the 2011–2012 season, 91 for 2012–2013, 104 for 2013–2014, and 100 for 2014–2015,
12 more than three seasons ago, despite the recent tendency of bypassing pilot production (Berman 2013; Waller 2012, 2014; White 2014). Table 1 shows that formats—
both in absolute numbers and in proportion to the overall number of pilots and pilots
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Table 1. Scripted Formats Ordered by U.S. Networks, Titles and Origin, 2012–2015.
2012–2013 season
ABC
CBS
FOX
NBC
The CW
U.S. remake: Mistresses
Original: Mistresses
U.K./BBC 1/2008–2010
U.S. remake: Family Tools
Original: White Van Man
U.K./BBC 3/2011–2012
U.S. remake: Red Widow
Original: Penoza
Holland/KRO/2010–2012
2013–2014 season
2014–2015 season
U.S. remake: Killer Women
Original: Mujeres Asesinas
Argentina/Canal 13/2005–
2008
U.S. remake: Lucky 7
Original: The Syndicate
U.K./BBC 1/2012–present
U.S. remake: Secrets and Lies
Original: Secrets and Lies
Australia/Network Ten/2014–
present U.S. remake: Hostages
Original: Hostages
Israel/Channel 10/2013
U.S. remake: Us & Them
Original: Gavin & Stacey
U.K./BBC 3/2007–2010
U.S. remake: Red Band Society
Original: Polseres Vermelles
Spain/TV 3/2011-13
U.S. remake: Gracepoint
Original: Broadchurch
U.K./ITV 1/2013–present
U.S. remake: The Mysteries of Laura
Original: Los Misterios de Laura
Spain/TVE/2009–2014
U.S. remake : Allegiance
Original : The Gordin Cell
Israel/Yes!/2012
U.S. remake: Jane the Virgin
U.S. remake: The Tomorrow
People
Original: The Tomorrow People
U.K./ITV/1973–1979
Original: Juana la Virgen
Venezuela/RCTV/2002
commissioned into first season—are steadily growing. Formats went from three
among thirty-seven new series in the 2012–2013 season (8.8 percent), to five for fortyfive series in the following season (11.1 percent), to six for fifty-one new series in the
2014–2015 season (11.8 percent).
Ever since Vertue’s foray into the American market, U.S. broadcasters have aired
119 scripted format adaptations, most of them originating from the United Kingdom
(Waller 2014). British sitcoms that crossed the Atlantic include Thames TV’s George
and Mildred (ITV, 1976–1979) (The Ropers, ABC, 1979–1980), Miss Jones and Son
(ITV, 1977–1978) (Miss Winslow and Son, CBS, 1979), Keep It in the Family (ITV,
1980–1983) (Too Close for Comfort, ABC, 1980–1983), and Tripper’s Day (ITV,
1984) (Check it Out!, USA Network, 1988); LWT’s Two’s Company (ITV, 1975–1979)
(The Two of Us, CBS, 1981–1982) and Mind Your Language (ITV, 1977–1986) (What
A Country!, syndicated, 1986–1987); and BBC’s Dear John (1986–1987) (Dear John,
NBC, 1988–1992) (Baker 1996; Potter 2008, 52; Taffner Jr. interview 2013). Some
recent adaptations, in addition to those in Table 1, include Shameless (Channel 4,
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2004–2013) picked up by Showtime in January 2011, and Skins (E4, 2007–2013) and
The Inbetweeners (E4, 2008–2010), both airing on MTV in 2011 and 2012
respectively.
In half-a-century of British imports, three adaptations became undisputed hits: All
in the Family, Thames TV’s Man About the House (ITV, 1973–1976), which was
turned into Three’s Company for ABC (1977–1988), and The Office (2005–2013),
whose nine seasons on NBC far exceeded those shown on BBC 2 (2001–2003).
Illustrious casualties, however, count Ab Fab, Fawlty Towers, Life on Mars, and The
Vicar of Dibley (Jackson interview 2012; Potter 2008, 52; Taffner Jr. interview 2013;
Waller 2007).
The contrasting fortunes of these adaptations demonstrate that scripted formats do
not afford risk management levels comparable with those offered by unscripted ones.
In fact, U.S. networks’ worst performing series in autumn 2013 was a remake of The
Syndicate on ABC, experiencing a 55 percent ratings drop between Lucky 7 and the
show it replaced (Andreeva 2013).3 Competition, though, forces broadcasters to accept
these risks, and the rewards for getting scripted content right are higher than in any
other genre.
Inevitably, however, U.S. content aggregators began to diversify their sources and
adapt scripts from other territories. Two noted adaptations announced this trend and
encouraged U.S. broadcasters to mine new territories for intellectual property. Yo Soy
Betty, la fea, Fernando Gaitán’s telenovela (RCN TV, 1991–2001) was adapted into
Ugly Betty for ABC in 2006. The U.S. version stayed on air for four years (eighty-five
episodes), sold in multiple territories and inspired its own local adaptations. In 2008,
HBO aired In Treatment, a remake of BeTipul, an Israeli psychological drama, which
won critical acclaim, and was recommissioned for three seasons and re-versioned in
other HBO territories. In addition to an increasing number of scripted formats from
Israel, Latin America, and Scandinavia (see ‘Emerging Territories’), U.S. broadcasters
are ordering remakes from countries that have never sold them a scripted format,
including Austria (ORF’s Fast Forward, for CBS), Croatia (Rest in Peace, for
Lionsgate), Spain (The Mysteries of Laura, for NBC), Norway (Mammon, a conspiracy thriller, for 20th Century Fox Television and Chernin Entertainment), and Turkey
(The End, for Fox).
Conversely, British series are locally produced in an increasing number of markets.
The Office (BBC 2, 2001–2003) has been made in nine countries so far, and Doc
Martin, the ITV series (2004–present), has reached its sixth adaptation in 2012
(Jackson interview 2012). Yes Minister, a BBC comedy about political life (BBC 2,
1980–1988), has been re-versioned in India, Turkey, the Netherlands, and the Ukraine.
Hollywood Awakes
While the United States is adapting scripts in growing numbers, it has also emerged as
the world’s second largest supplier of scripted formats (Waller 2014). This evolution
was caused by a change of heart from the Hollywood studios, which, as Paul Torre
notes, have had to respond to trends that threaten their business model (Torre 2012,
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181). Chief among these threats is the rise in local TV production and the emergence
of strong regional production centers (Australia, Turkey, etc.), which have combined
to slow down the global demand for U.S. finished series. Although the big studios
were reluctant at first to exploit their format rights, the inexorable rise in the demand
for local programming has led them to revise their assumptions and start mining their
vast catalogues.
Sony Pictures Television was the only studio to anticipate the demand for local
production and has been selling scripted formats since the turn of the century. Its most
widely adapted title is the sitcom The Nanny (CBS, 1993–1999), which has been reversioned in ten territories. More recently, Everybody Loves Raymond (CBS, 1996–
2005) was adapted in Holland, Israel, Russia, and the Middle East (Pickard 2011).
Other adaptations include Married with Children (Israel), King of Queens (Russia),
and Rules of Engagement (Poland; see also Torre 2012, 189–90).
The other studios have followed suit. Within a few years, NBCUniversal has cleared
the format rights of series such as Kojak, Magnum PI, and Emergency Room, and
allowed adaptations of Queer Eye and Meet My Folks. It is, however, the franchise
Law & Order that has proven most popular with TV buyers. One of the longestrunning U.S. crime series (it reached twenty seasons in its final year on NBC in 2010)
has seen adaptations in Russia (NTV, 2007), France (Paris enquêtes criminelles, TF1,
2007–2008) and the United Kingdom (Law & Order: UK, ITV, 2009–present) (Waller
2006).
CBS Studios International has put up for sale the format rights of more than twenty
titles, including four sitcoms that span half-a-century: I Love Lucy (1950s), The
Honeymooners (1950s), The Odd Couple (1970s), and Caroline in the City (1990s).
Recent deals include Cheers, sold to Spain (Brzoznowski 2012).
U.S. production house 20th Century Fox Television’s Prison Break (Fox, 2005–
2009) was adapted by Channel One in Russia, and 24 (Fox, 2001–2010) was remade
in India on a big budget. Fox sold four titles to Russian broadcasters in 2012 alone: It’s
Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX, 2005–present), Bones (Fox, 2005–present), Tru
Calling (Fox, 2003–2005), and Malcolm in the Middle (Fox, 2000–2006; Brzoznowski
2012).
Walt Disney was equally slow to enter the scripted format market but immediately
struck gold with Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004–2012). Echoing some of the narrative techniques and themes of telenovelas, Desperate Housewives resonated particularly strongly with Latin American audiences, for which three adaptations were made
(Argentina, Colombia/Ecuador, and Brazil). In 2008, Univision, the Spanish-language
U.S. network, produced its own version, and three years later, a Turkish series was
made (Brzoznowski 2012). A sixth local version, Desperate Housewives Africa was
announced in Nigeria in summer 2013. Other Disney series that were adapted include
Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005–present) in Mexico, and Revenge (ABC, 2011–present)
in Turkey.
Warner Bros. International Television Production was only established in 2009.
The London-based division has tried to make up for lost time since by acquiring large
European TV production companies. In the scripted space, Nip/Tuck (FX, 2003–2010)
10
was turned into a telenovela in Colombia, Gossip Girl (The CW, 2007–2012) became
Gossip Girl Acapulco in Latin America, and The O.C. (Fox, 2003–2007) was adapted
in Turkey (Zein 2014).
Hollywood studios entered the scripted format market belatedly and almost reluctantly, anxious as they were of hurting their finished programming sales. Although
they have not thrown caution to the wind the size of their catalogue, combined with
their international footprint and annual output, guarantees them a strong presence in
the market for years to come.
Emerging Territories
The trade in scripted formats is booming because new suppliers are emerging and have
begun to make their mark on the trade. As South Korea remakes Japanese dramas and
Latin American telenovelas are adapted in China or Russia, the scripted format business has expanded but also become more multifaceted and diverse. From New Zealand
came Outrageous Fortune, a comedy that was remade in the United Kingdom for ITV
(Honest, 2008) and the United States for ABC (Scoundrels, 2010). A version of RadioCanada’s Les Invincibles (2005) was made in France for Arte in 2008. From Holland
came Penoza, which, as seen above, aired as Red Widow on ABC in 2013. A few
scripted formats have also emerged from Italy, with Mediaset selling format packages
for about forty titles. Recent deals include adaptations of the sitcom Casa Vianello
[Young Enough] (Canale 5, 1988–2006) in Serbia, Portugal, Croatia, and Turkey; and
local remakes of the soap opera Vivere [ Living] (Canale 5, 1999–present) in Greece,
Portugal, and Poland (Fry 2013; Mediaset 2014).
Although the United Kingdom remains the leading supplier of scripted formats
(Waller 2014), two new export territories have attracted attention: Scandinavia and
Israel. Following success as finished programs, many series of the Scandi-wave are
being re-versioned. Wallander (TV4, 2005–present), a Swedish crime series, was
remade for the BBC (BBC 1, 2008–2010), and Danish broadcaster DR’s Forbrydelsen
[The Killing] (DR1, 2007) was adapted by Fox Television Studios and Fuse
Entertainment for AMC in 2011 (Koranteng 2012). Bron [The Bridge] (SVT1, DR1,
2011–present), originally from Sweden and Denmark, has been adapted in the United
States by Shine America and FX (FX, 2013–present) and in the United Kingdom and
France as The Tunnel (Sky Atlantic and Canal Plus, 2013). Finally, a U.S. version of
Danish drama series Park Road (TV2, 2009) was being produced for the U.S. network
NBC in 2013.
Israeli production houses have also developed a strong presence in this market. It
began with BeTipul [In Treatment], which has been re-versioned in fourteen territories
since HBO aired the U.S. remake. Following a few other adaptations and U.S. projects
that never came to fruition,4 the next big hit was Keshet’s drama Hatufim [Prisoners
of War], which is being adapted in four territories and whose U.S. version, Homeland,
which aired on Showtime, sold around the world.
Both Scandinavia and Israel have found a space in the scripted format trade, yet
their approaches differ. As the Israeli market is too small to enable production
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companies to scale up, the Israelis are investing in an industry whose job is to tell
stories that sell worldwide. So far, Scandi-dramas were primarily aimed at a local
audience before they hit the road. The sole ambition of Lars Blomgren, The Bridge’s
Swedish producer, was to create a coproduction that would also work in Denmark
(while Swedish broadcasters bought Danish series and put them on prime time, the
Danish never bought anything from Sweden). The first Bridge told a story about two
local police forces working across their borders, and it was only later discovered that
this could work in all countries that share interesting borders (Blomgren interview
2014).
Israeli producers appear adept at stacking up the odds in their favour. Their initial
budgets being low, their series can be remade on a small budget, ensuring a record
number of adaptations for BeTipul. Israeli producers tend to be flexible and allow buyers any change they like as long as they understand the essence of the show. Keshet,
for instance, let the U.S. producers transform a family drama (Hatufim) into an action
series (Homeland).
While Scandinavian producers might prove equally accommodating, it is far from
being the case across the industry, with the Hollywood studios being the least flexible.
Andrew Zein, a senior executive at Warner Bros. International Television Production
(WBITVP), recently stated that “The overall design concept of a scripted format is
something that WBITVP takes very seriously. Our clients have to embrace the original
design elements, including costumes, makeup, locations, and studio set” (in Stephens
2014, 298).
New Formatted Genres: Telenovelas and Constructed Reality
Adaptations in telenovelas and constructed reality programming are bolstering the
volume of scripted formats in circulation. Not taking telenovelas into account would
leave unexplained the fact that Argentina has become the world’s third largest supplier
of scripted formats (Waller 2014). Novelas were among the very first programs to be
translated in the sound broadcasting era, and several Cuban scripts for radionovelas
traveled across Latin America in the 1940s and 1950s. The trade was initiated by U.S.
advertising agencies interested in generating audiences for their clients, and, as Joseph
Straubhaar argues, the telenovela genre is in itself a transnational proto-format that
was engineered through a process of hybridization that blended a “base genre” (the
U.S. soap) with local “traditions of serial fiction” (Rivero 2009; Straubhaar 2012,
150–51).
In the television era, the telenovela industry developed in Argentina, Brazil,
Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, and soon these serials dominated the primetime schedules of broadcasters across Latin America. It was in the late 1980s that
telenovelas began to be exported to other world regions (Mato 2005, 426). Albeit
sparsely appearing on broadcasters’ schedules in developed markets, telenovelas have
found viewers in great numbers in developing countries, particularly in Central and
Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central and Southeast Asia (Biltereyst and
Meers 2000; Mato 2005). Until the early 2000s, telenovelas exports consisted entirely
12
of finished tapes, but scripts have progressively become popular with local broadcasters eager to develop their local production capabilities and respond to viewers’ preference for local content.
The game changer was Yo soy Betty, la fea [Ugly Betty] (McCabe and Akass 2013).
Written by Fernando Gaitán, Betty aired on Canal RCN in Colombia between 1999
and 2001. It was an immediate hit, and the series was picked up and adapted by neighboring broadcasters. In 2006, ABC broadcast a U.S.-made version produced by
Reveille and Touchstone TV, confirming the soap’s status as a global phenomenon. By
2013, Ugly Betty had aired in more than ninety countries, and at least twenty versions
had been made (Miller 2010).
Latin American media firms have since adapted their business model, adding formats units to complement their ready-made sales. Early movers include Caracol of
Colombia, Telefe of Argentina, Televisa of Mexico, and Venevisión of Venezuela,
while TV Globo started its format business in 2009. These units’ involvement varied
from contract to contract, from simple script sales with experienced broadcasters to the
full consulting package for those new to the genre. In a few instances, telenovela producers moved further along the value chain by coproducing the series with broadcasters (Wasserman interview 2012).
Caracol Internacional’s titles have been adapted thirty times so far, including the
popular Sin tetas no hay paraíso [Without Breasts There Is No Paradise] (Caracol TV,
Colombia, 2006) and Vecinos [Neighbors] (Caracol TV, 2008–2009). Telefe
International’s scripts have passed a hundred adaptations, with Los Roldán [The
Roldans] (Telefe, Argentina, 2004–2005), Hermanos y Detectives [Brothers and
Detectives] (Telefe, Argentina, 2006), and Montecristo (Telefe, 2006) exceeding ten
versions each. Outside Latin America, the key markets for telenovela remakes are
Central and Eastern Europe (particularly Poland and Russia), Asia, and Spanishspeaking United States (Franks 2013; Waller 2010).
Telenovelas have begun to be adapted for the English-speaking U.S. market, the
latest example being The CW’s Jane the Virgin (Table 1). As demand is expected to
grow, Televisa has opened a studio in Los Angeles, California, and NBCUniversal is
developing English-language versions of shows that first aired on its local Spanish
networks (Middleton 2014).
Constructed reality is an emerging genre that borrows storytelling techniques from
soap opera and documentary, and broadly consists of shooting “real” people in managed situations and structured scenarios. Not all the genre’s exponents use scripts. In
the Anglo-American variant, producers construct settings but dialogues and storylines
remain driven by “real” characters. Genre highlights include MTV’s Jersey Shore
(2009–2012), The Only Way Is Essex (ITV 2, 2010–present), and Made in Chelsea
(E4, 2011–present; Woods 2014).
The second variant was pioneered by German TV production companies and
involves the loose reconstruction of real-life events, including distressing family incidents, crimes, murders, or court cases. These shows are based on scenarios played out
by “ordinary” people (who may not necessarily have been involved in these cases) and
who follow a script to deliver the story. For instance, Das Strafgericht [Criminal
13
Chalaby
Court] (RTL, 2002–present) and Betrugsfälle [Wham Bam Scam] (RTL, 2010–present), two constructed reality formats sold by Global Screen, a German distributor,
have been picked by broadcasters in a variety of European countries (Smitherman
2013). The most widely distributed formats are those of Filmpool, an MME Moviement
company, itself part of All3Media. A total of 2,600 episodes of constructed reality
shows such as Zwei bei Kallwass [Two with Kallwass] (Sat.1, 2001–13), Verdachtsfälle
[Cases of Doubt] (RTL, 2009–present), and Familien im Brennpunkt [Families at the
Crossroads] (RTL, 2009–present) have been produced in Europe so far (All3Media
2014; Brzoznowski 2013).
Telenovelas and constructed reality programs may not be the most prominent
genres but they matter in terms of volume, and their transnational adaptations play a
big part in the growth of the scripted format trade.
Improved Knowledge Transfer
As noted above, scripted formats cannot be reproduced as mechanistically as concepts
from other genres. Dramas and comedies are culturally sensitive and do not rely on
format points and structures that can be duplicated in a routine fashion. There are
always cases of game show rules having to be amended to fit a particular culture and
scripts that are translated word-for-word, but as a general rule, scripts need more adaptation than unscripted entertainment. While only the structures of unscripted shows
travel, every word and scene of a drama needs to sound right to a local audience. Even
if, in the best of cases, these modifications are cosmetic, the full package needs adaptation, including shoot locations, casting, costumes, and so on. As local versions of
scripted shows tend to differ more from one another than in other genres, lessons
learned in one territory may not apply elsewhere.
Furthermore, in contrast to game shows for which knowledge transfer mechanisms
(production bibles and flying producers) were routinized as early as the 1970s, until
recently, support practices were not as set for script buyers. Once in possession of the
script, the latter could be left to their own devices. Without guidelines about what
made the format work, many scripts ended up being dismembered by local broadcasters. Vertue remembers how U.S. producers tried to do Fawlty Towers without malice
between Sybil and Basil, and Ab Fab without the drugs and the drinking (Vertue interview 2011). She recollects her first attempt to adapt Steptoe and Son:
They hadn’t understood what made Steptoe and Son work in the first place; what was the
core of it? This love/hate relationship between the father, and son, who the son who
wanted to break away, but somehow couldn’t and the father who stopped him, and they
didn’t really understand that, and so this pilot they were in really a lovely place they lived
in and they didn’t have a horse and cart, they had a van, which is fine, but I said to them
I don’t know why he wants to leave, it’s lovely here, you know, where they lived and
everything. And so it didn’t get picked for series, but it made me myself think I must not
do this again, I must only sell it when I can find the person who I think can see what
makes it work, and so I put it in a drawer and I thought one day I’ll do it, I’ll get it out
again (Vertue interview 2011).
14
The knowledge transfer has improved over recent years and has been catching up
with practices common in other genres. Buyers receive more support from consultant
producers, and production bibles have expanded; they receive both a storyline and a
method of production. Today’s bibles can detail the series’ premise and showrunner’s
vision of the original series (what is the story about), and include information about
key characters, story drivers, and dynamics, down to the shooting schedule. It is also
increasingly common to see the original creative team included in the consulting package, enabling the adaptation team to hold conversations with the writer and/or producer of the original series (Jackson interview 2012; Nohr interview 2013; Stephens
2014).
Although knowledge transfer mechanisms have been improved by large distributors with a reputation to protect, scripted formats are even better handled when kept
in-house by international production companies with facilities in multiple territories.
Over recent years, Hollywood studios, including Warner Bros., NBCUniversal, and
Sony, and TV production supergroups such as FremantleMedia, ITV Studios, Red
Arrow Entertainment, or Shine, have acquired numerous local companies to internationalize their production capacity (Chalaby 2012b). Wherever possible, these rights
holders opt to adapt and produce their scripted shows themselves, a strategy that
enables them to stay longer in the TV format value chain, protect their brands, and
control their intellectual property (IP).
The Bridge, for instance, was coproduced by Filmlance, a Swedish TV production
company that became part of Metronome Film & Television, which itself was acquired
by the Shine Group in 2009. Both the Franco-British and the American remakes were
handled by Shine companies, and Blomgren acted as executive producer for both
adaptations. He read the new scripts and made some comments before becoming “a fly
on the wall” on the production set (Blomgren interview 2014). He ensured, however,
that the changes went in the right direction. For instance, while the Swedes and Danes
understand each other in the original series, linguistic and cultural tensions were introduced in the Franco-British show. In the U.S. adaption, the script highlights cultural
differences between police forces from an affluent society versus a developing country
(Mexico). The U.S. production team initially planned to reproduce the melancholic
Nordic landscapes and planted the story between Canada and the United States. Once
they realized where the essence of the drama lay, they transferred the story to the border between Mexico and the United States. The narco-trafficking between the two
countries made the story more current and gave it darker undertones (Blomgren interview 2014).
All in all, the TV industry has a better understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that dictate successful scripted format translation. Any scripted show has a kernel wherein lies the engine of its success. While everything else can be touched, the
essence of the story must remain across cultures, else the story crumbles.
Conclusion: A Revolution Comes Full Circle
For several decades, the TV format trade essentially revolved around game shows.
Since the post-Millennium format revolution, it became the turn of reality and factual
15
Chalaby
entertainment programs to be adapted in great numbers. Scripted formats have become
booming business in recent years only. The stars aligned when demand for drama
increased worldwide—and in the United States, in particular, Hollywood studios
began to mine their catalogues, new exporters emerged, scripted genres developed,
and knowledge transfer techniques improved.
Scripted formats have come to age but remain different from those in nonscripted
genres. They require fuller cultural translation, and the risk of failure remains substantially higher than in other genres. In addition, the underlying economics of their production and distribution differs. Nonscripted genres travel almost exclusively
formatted, and distributors strive to make them as ubiquitous as quickly as possible.
Not so with scripted shows, for which finished tapes remain essential. These programs
are far more expensive to produce than nonscripted fare, and many are deficit-funded
(requiring distributors to complete the investment from commissioning broadcasters).
As a large part of the funding comes from future potential sales, everything is done to
protect the earnings from the completed tape. In consequence, the format rights of
scripted shows are often released only once the original version has played out, and the
initial investment recouped. If and when adaptations are produced, they are distributed
in carefully choreographed sequences of holdbacks and releases (Jackson interview
2012; Nohr interview 2013). Hollywood studios remain equally careful and avoid
releasing the format rights of series that are too recent, unless these have been cleared
by the distribution team.
Finally, the issue of brand purity is particularly acute with scripted shows, as too
many adaptations risk diluting a brand, and a single poor one can kill a series. The
rights holders of series such as The Bridge, CSI, or Sherlock receive many more
requests for local adaptations than will ever be produced (Blomgren interview 2014;
Gilbert 2014; Nohr interview 2013; Vertue interview 2011).
Nonetheless, the late entry of scripted formats in the global TV format trading system is significant. It completes the TV format revolution and the trade, now spanning
all genres, is no longer confined to the (lower) fringes of the TV industry. Scripted
formats not only add volume and diversity to the TV format business but give it its
lettres de noblesse. It also establishes that the TV industry has progressed and learned
to adapt any program, from the most mundane and formulaic daytime game show to
award-winning, prime-time, globe-trotting series.
Scripted formats demonstrate, better than those in nonscripted genres, that all TV
formats are “ultimately contained in local and national meanings” (Waisbord 2004,
380). They may be international to the industry but they need to be local to viewers.
The only formats that cross borders are those that resonate in each and every territory
in which they air. Formatting is a mechanism for structuring narrative, and the best
formats are those that are invisible platforms that disappear behind the drama they
generate. Scripted entertainment displays TV formats at their best: not as the Trojan
horses of global culture, as some fear, but as platforms for local storytelling.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to express his deep gratitude to all the interviewees for their time and
cooperation, and thanks the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
16
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1. For instance, three pilots of Three’s Company were shot before ABC picked up the show,
and more recently CBS piloted The Ran Quadruplets twice without commissioning the
Israeli series.
2. The 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike, however, does not seem to have had an
impact on demand for scripted formats (Esser 2010, 280).
3. The same season (2014–2015) the networks commissioned fifty-one new series, they also
recommissioned sixteen unscripted shows, all of them trusted and tested international formats, including ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and Shark Tank; CBS’s Survivor and The
Amazing Race; Fox’s American Idol, Hell’s Kitchen, and MasterChef; NBC’s The Voice
and The Biggest Loser; and the CW’s Whose Line Is It Anyway?
4.Including The Ran Quadruplets (Yes! 2008–2009), Shkufim [False Flag] (Channel 2,
2008–present), and Haverot [Little Mom] (Yes! 2012).
List of Interviews
Company names and job titles at time of interview
Blomgren, Lars. 2014. “Managing Director, Filmlance International.” Phone Interview by
Author. Tape Recording. January 24. London.
Gaitán, Fernando. 2010. Interviewed by WorldScreen. WorldScreen, October, 136.
Jackson, Andrea. 2012. “Managing Director, Acquisitions & Formats, DRG.” Interview by
Author. Tape Recording. May 24. London.
Nohr, Nadine. 2013. “Chief Executive Officer, Shine International.” Interview by Author. Tape
Recording. December 12. London.
Paice, Matt. 2012. “Executive Vice President, International Production, BBC Worldwide.”
Interview by Author. Tape Recording. May 16. London.
Taffner, Donald, Jr. 2013. “President, DLT Entertainment.” Interview by Author. Tape
Recording. November 4. London.
Vertue, Beryl OBE. 2011. “Producer and Chairman, Hartswood Films.” Interview by Author.
Tape Recording. December 6. London.
Wasserman, Michelle. 2012. “Head of International Business—Programming, Formats &
Production Services, Telefe.” Interview by Author. Tape Recording. July 24. London.
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Author Biography
Jean K. Chalaby is a professor of international communication and head of sociology at City
University London. He is the author of The Invention of Journalism (1998), The de Gaulle
Presidency and the Media (2002), and Transnational Television in Europe: Reconfiguring
Global Communications Networks (2009). He is the editor of Transnational Television
Worldwide (2005) and has published extensively in leading journals on a wide range of mediarelated topics
577211
TVNXXX10.1177/1527476415577211Television & New MediaMulvin and Sterne
Special Section: Sociotechnical Perspectives
Scenes from an Imaginary
Country: Test Images and the
American Color Television
Standard
2016, Vol. 17(1) 21–43
DOI: 10.1177/1527476415577211
tvn.sagepub.com
Dylan Mulvin1 and Jonathan Sterne1
Abstract
American analog color television—so-called NTSC color—is likely the most
pervasive image standard of the twentieth century, yet it is infamous for its technical
shortcomings. Through a history and analysis of the National Television System
Committee (NTSC) standard, this article argues that the political presuppositions of
engineers shaped the representational capacities of television for nearly sixty years.
In particular, the test images used to develop a perceptually satisfying image evince
assumptions of a leisurely and white United States as the “normal” subject matter of
television. In this way, test materials coalesce abstract assumptions about the normal
and the exceptional at the level of both form and content. This article concludes that
NTSC color served as a model for how normed cultural sensibilities about image
quality, perceptual ability, and the representational imaginary have been built into
subsequent technical standards. A Scalar version of this paper, with more pictures, is
available at http://colortvstandards.net
Keywords
visual culture, perception, test images, media standards, whiteness, norms, the United
States, television, technology, media infrastructure
. . . Colour television systems do not directly register the world; a whole technology
intervenes.
—Brian Winston (1996, 41)
1McGill
University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Dylan Mulvin, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, 853
Sherbrooke St. W., Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 0G5.
from tvn.sagepub.com at SHIH HSIN UNIV LIBRARY on December 18, 2015
Downloaded Downloaded
22
Television & New Media 17(1)
Figure 1. NTSC color television test slides (Fink and NTSC 1955).
A young woman clutches a kitten, two others play table tennis, some boys canoe, and
some play tug-of-war. There are pumpkins, fishing tackle, a lampshade, a tulip garden,
a houseplant, and a southern manse. These are just a few excerpts from the imaginary
America that color television engineers and the Eastman Kodak Company compiled in
1951. These excerpts are all taken from the twenty-seven test slides (Figure 1) that
were an integral part of the testing regime established by the National Television
System Committee (NTSC) for its 1953 color standard—which became the most ubiquitous moving image standard of the twentieth century, when it was chosen as the
standard for American color television.
Considering the relatively short half-life of communication standards, the NTSC
standard enjoyed considerable longevity, lasting for fifty-six years in the United States,
until June 12, 2009, when full digital conversion took place. NTSC is still used in
some countries and remains a color calibration option in many computer operating
systems. Although it was chosen on the basis of a series of local concerns and peculiar
aesthetic criteria, the NTSC standard has tuned the hue of a great deal of televisual
culture over the last half-century, and through a host of remediations—video tape,
CRT screens, YouTube, JPEG, MPEG—a great deal of media culture besides.
Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at SHIH HSIN UNIV LIBRARY on December 18, 2015
Mulvin and Sterne
23
In this article, we consider the test slides used to develop the NTSC color standard
as well as the contexts in which they operated: the testing scenario itself, the technical
infrastructure of monochrome television into which color television was to be inserted,
the cultural values circulating in the tests and through the images themselves, and their
subsequent media legacy. Test objects are a necessary part of a media standardization
process. Test images, as a kind of test object, act as prototypical proxies for how a
viable visual medium will handle its materials of transmission. Although standards
strive to hide the traces of their testing regimes, the many shortcomings of the NTSC
standard point us back to these documentary artifacts for clues about the affordances
and failures of the imaginations that brought it into existence. We argue that the NTSC
predicted how its standard would work by projecting two components of the future of
American color television onto its testing regime. In the form of its test subjects it
imagined the future viewers of TV; in the form of its test materials—its test slides and
a single filmstrip—it imagined both the future subject matter and the formal characteristics of American color TV content. The content of the test materials, however,
evinces a concern for the system’s capacity to reproduce formally complex images
and, at the same time, give primacy to a circumscribed vision of American television
as a domain of whiteness, leisure, and pastoral ease. Together, the test subjects and test
materials negotiated the gaps between the universal and the particular. By making a
choice about what, in particular, could be reproduced and tested (creating a fixed set
of materials and testers), the engineers speculated about the realm of all possible TV
images. As we conclude, the NTSC testing regime is illustrative of the ways all media
aesthetics work and the ways all media formats contain wagers on their own representational potential. We thus follow a tradition of understanding the very form of technologies as crystallizing representations and social relations at the moments they come
into existence (Spigel 1992; Williams 1974).
We read our history through the few artifacts that remain. We only have remediated
versions of the test images themselves: four in color, twenty-three in grayscale, printed
in a book from 1955, scanned, digitized, and compressed again—their original color
characteristics lost to history. We also have detailed accounts of the testing process,
gleaned from meeting minutes, the edited collection of papers provided by the committee, and a handful of articles. We offer this history as a complement to existing histories
of color TV’s reception and governance (Abramson 2003; Boddy 1990; Fickers 2010;
Kane 2014; Murray, forthcoming; Spigel 1992) and as a contribution to the project of
understanding the cultural practices that go into making media standards (though our
empirical material is limited to the United States). Existing accounts of the early years
of television describe the trials and provisional successes of early color television demonstrations and the adoption of TV in the home. But little attention is paid to the cultural
dimensions of the standards and infrastructures that subtended the television system.
Within the practical domains of television engineering lay a politics of how television
would work and what it would show. We argue that these engineering decisions shaped
the look and feel of television for over half a century. Hence, our focus is on how the
NTSC’s test images and testing regime enfolded the representational prospects of a new
color broadcast technology as well as the perceptual capacities of potential viewers. As
24
we argue in the conclusion, much of the epistemology behind the NTSC tests continues to shape new image standards. Although analog color television recedes into memory in many parts of the world, its legacy lives on in digital image and video standards
still in wide use.
Media standards sometimes show their seams. When we adjust our television to a
set of color bars or a projector to an image of a diagonal axis, we calibrate our communication media to the specifications of a standard. When we do this, we also conform to an aesthetic based on the extensive testing and research that went into creating
that standard. Sometimes the seams appear elsewhere, as in the unforeseen byproducts
and failures of representation endemic in compressed media standards. These moments
of “infrastructural inversion” can uncover the epistemic and aesthetic politics of the
engineering imaginary (Bowker and Star 1999). In this way, the NTSC color standard
is a very fruitful subject. Not only is it the most ubiquitous moving image standard of
the twentieth century, but it is also infamous for its failure to faithfully reproduce skin
tone: No True Skin Color and Never The Same Color were some of the system’s more
common nicknames. This is especially striking because earlier color TV systems were
rejected because the “inability to accurately reproduce skin tones is a particularly serious handicap” (Fink and NTSC 1955, 17). The NTSC standard held a functional aesthetic desire—represent white skin tone—in dynamic tension with the technical limits
of an infrastructure. At the same time, it was an ongoing monument to the failures of
its designers to fully predict its use and reception (Murray, forthcoming).
Although color reproduction was a goal for television from its very beginnings in
the nineteenth century and color standardization was always part of TV standards
(Kane 2014, 56–57), American industry histories often frame color as an afterthought,
because the color standard came after the monochrome standard. The usual story goes
like this: the first NTSC negotiated a set of industrial compromises to produce an
acceptable monochrome standard for American television, which the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) adopted in 1941 (Boddy 1990, 34; Seldes 1956).
A second NTSC convened in 1950 to develop a color standard that would work within
the parameters of the existing standard—meaning that existing set owners would still
receive the monochrome signal, and new color set owners could receive both signals.
Therefore, the second NTSC had to figure out a way to cram a new tricolor signal into
the bandwidth that had previously just transmitted a monochrome signal (Fink and
NTSC 1955). Standardization implies “the necessity of relations” among institutions,
technical protocols, practices, and people (Fuller 2005, 96). If the relations between
technical protocols and institutions had to be relatively undisturbed, the relation to
people would have to change.
The lever for that change was applied psychophysics. The NTSC built the limits of
color perception (as they were then understood) into its color TV standard, rendering
them economically useful by treating the presumed perceptual limits of the normal
human eye as an exploitable efficiency in the system. In today’s language of bandwidth, the NTSC system could transmit less information if it knew which information
was less likely to be seen by audiences (Sterne and Mulvin 2014). But the committee’s
perceptual judgments were made in the artificial context of testing and built around
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25
specific aesthetic materials: Eastman Kodak’s twenty-seven color images. Andreas
Fickers (2010, 99) has described the psychophysical research behind the European
color standard as rooted in “the habitus of the engineers and technicians, who believed
in the rationality of their profession and neutrality of their behavior as men of science
and technology.” We take Fickers’s provocation seriously for the American context:
what values and worldviews were bound up in the habitus of the NTSC engineers?
We should also note that the core value that subtends the psychophysical work—the
separation of transmission from content—is drawn from information theory, a specific
conceptualization of communication (Fink 1951; Shannon and Weaver 1949). This
split is as much a political choice as an aesthetic or practical one. It is also immensely
powerful as an engineering practice. Even while we challenge the separation of content and medium, we find ourselves forced into using the distinction because it pervades the NTSC engineers’ own thinking. With a plea to read us at least a little
ironically, we retain the distinction for the sake of legibility and a good story. When
looking at the NTSC’s test slides and their strictly limited representation of the United
States, in addition to the homogeneous makeup of the test subjects, we see that contextual biases around whiteness and around the commercial purposes of television are
baked into its media standards. The standard’s technical shortcomings are clearly connected not only to the committee’s inability to produce a truly functional representational norm but also to the broader dimensions of the tests.
The Greening of America
When the first gathering of the NTSC met to create an American television standard
for monochrome broadcasting, their work took nine months. The color standard, by
comparison, took thirty-two (Fink and NTSC 1955). The undertaking involved in
developing a color standard was larger because the engineers knew they needed a
system that was compatible with the existing monochrome standard. By the early
1950s, Americans already owned thirty million television sets and (in a move that
might seem counterintuitive now) not forcing Americans to buy a new television or an
adaptor was a requirement of any potential standard (Seldes 1956). The majority of the
testing for color work took place between 1951 and 1953 across laboratories in the
United States.
The NTSC engineers completed preliminary, subjective tests on themselves by the
summer of 1951. For these initial tests, they used a suite of existing test images and
test patterns to estimate the likely point of diminishing returns of bandwidth use: that
is, they roughly determined the minimum amount of bandwidth that was necessary to
produce a pleasing image by testing their own responses to basic shapes and colors.
Test patterns are basic and elementary images. To know whether a visual technology
is working, engineers use them to reduce the signal to a series of color blocks and
gradients, the building blocks of more complex depictions. Test patterns, like the
Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers’ familiar color bars (Figure 2), are
usually used as calibration tools for downstream technologies; once a television signal
is honed and broadcast and once a television is manufactured, sold, and setup in a
26
Figure 2. SMPTE Color Bars.
home, test patterns are the final level of quality control, as they can be used to verify
that the saturation, hue, and contrast are (subjectively) accurate and/or pleasing. While
the simple test patterns served to estimate the general parameters of a pleasing television signal in their initial tests, the NTSC needed more versatile and varied testing
materials to more precisely determine the aesthetic requirements of a national television signal. As actual TV shows are rarely composed of stationary blocks of color, the
NTSC agreed in August 1951 that Eastman Kodak would produce images for the tests
and distribute them to the member firms: “some being ‘average’ pictures and some
being ‘exceptional’ pictures” (NTSC 1951–1953a, 3). In total, Eastman Kodak produced 68 sets of the slides for the various firms involved, and for the FCC’s records
(Fink and NTSC 1955, 65).
Test images can portray anything, but once they portray something, that something
becomes a shared set of fixed points across all testing environments. Because of the
longevity of color TV, the choice of using new, unique images, and the peculiarity of
the images themselves, the process of picking these fixed points becomes a rich subject for inquiry. Aside from their reproduction in a compiled set of the committee’s
reports—and their re-reproduction here—these slides are lost to time. However, we do
know a few things about them. We know that Eastman Kodak produced the slides for
free—one of the company’s managers served on the NTSC testing committee—and
that the committee’s chairman, Alfred Goldsmith from RCA, “laid before the Eastman
Kodak Company suggestions as to the general nature of the subject matter which
should be included in a set of color-television test slides” (NTSC 1951–1953b, 6). And
we know that partway into the testing regime, “three additional slides stressing subject
matter predominantly green were added” (NTSC 1951–1953b, 6). As a new monochrome signal would be based off of the level of green in every frame of the color
signal, testing green images was of primary significance.
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Test images are the crash test dummies of a visual media standard. Like other forensic media, they are used to bring a new technology’s failures into relief. They test the
formal limits, potential catastrophes, and likely outcomes of compression, transmission, and perception (Siegel 2014). The NTSC engineers used the Eastman Kodak
slides in two ways: to portray and test the “general subject matter” of color television
and to test the boundaries of the “average” and “exceptional” colorimetric and formal
information of the signal. These technical and representational layers were balanced
against other concerns like perceptual clarity for the viewer, the economics of bandwidth use, and the feasibility of reproducing dynamic images. The NTSC tested its
possible standards in dark rooms, with dozens of test subjects, trying to determine the
lowest amount of information required to produce a pleasurable image. For each of
these experiments, the Eastman Kodak test slides were the common denominator,
serving as the yardstick for judging all the other variables.
Conspicuously, however, the test images for the most ubiquitous moving image
standard of the twentieth century didn’t move. The NTSC tests predated videotape
recording by several years (Remley 1999), and the test film that Eastman Kodak produced and screened a single time cost more than $150,000. This meant that color slides
were the only practical, affordable, and reliable means of testing the television signal
with anything approaching consistency across lab settings. The NTSC clearly realized
the paradox of basing their image standard on still images, and in an aside, the committee describes how actors performing live scenes would have been ideal, though
impractical: “Manifestly, live-talent performances would in general be too elaborate,
costly, and difficult of exact duplication to be suitable for routine laboratory or field
tests . . .” (Fink and NTSC 1955, 64). Other than the use of rudimentary kinescope
recordings to time-shift programming from the east coast, television in the early 1950s
was a live medium. Although the idea of actors reenacting the same scenes thousands
of times for the duration of the committee’s tests may sound nightmarish, it is a nightmare that would have actually reflected the production methods of television at the
time. But because live action was not feasible, and videotape still a few years away, the
NTSC’s standard for the moving television image is based almost entirely on twentyseven slides.
These images confront us with one of the truisms of media studies: that the content
of a new medium is an old medium (McLuhan 1964). The standardization of one
media format was explicitly calibrated to a set of decisions made for a previous media
format. By referring back to Kodak’s color process, the NTSC engineers put their
work in direct dialogue with a history of media aesthetics that was more about the very
possibilities of representation—which colors could and could not appear and under
what conditions. Their referent was not color in nature but color in other media.
Kodachrome film stock was both an industry standard and a commercial touchstone
for Americans in the 1950s, and its undergirding of television’s moving images was
chromatically consistent with a vision of the world already processed through it. Color
photographs that appeared in National Geographic used Kodachrome, which was
originally sold to Americans through the uncredited advertising photographs of Ansel
Adams (Garner 2007).
28
The slides the NTSC initially used appear to reflect a LIFE Magazine or National
Geographic photographer’s vision of American life (Garner 2007). But there is a reason for this. Although we were unable to clarify the origins of the images themselves
(for instance, if they were specifically made for the test or selected from an image bank
at Kodak based on their suitability for testing), we do know that the images had an
afterlife, appearing as test images in visual perception tests in the 1950s (Sziklai 1956).
Therefore, we can read the test images anachronistically as examples of “stock photography,” though that industry did not really cohere until the 1970s (Frosh 2003, 35,
38). Paul Frosh outlines several characteristics of stock photography that these images
clearly share. They are conservative in what they depict, which is to say they work
within stylistic idioms already believed to be commercially viable (Frosh 2003, 59).
The images are selected based on their “apparent social significance” to advertisers
and consumers “as interpreted by professional cultural intermediaries” (Frosh 2003,
69)—in this case, Kodak employees and television engineers. Their meaning is polysemic and generic, contextually determined both in relation to other images and without enough specificity to connote a particular brand, story, or set of objects or people
without other contextual information (Frosh 2003, 72, 77). In other words, the images’
relatively free floating status made them ideal test subjects for television: not too heavily invested with a particular set of meanings or interpretive communities, using
widely available visual rhetoric, and not depicting anything in particular, as determined by a set of professional cultural intermediaries. They were meant to call attention to color capacities of television, not to themselves.
Watching the Future Watchers
The test scenario itself was fluid and subject to reconsideration. A year into the color
television testing, the NTSC requested information from Eastman Kodak on optimal
viewing conditions for the slides. In response, Eastman Kodak recommended a completely dark room and a matte screen: “Ambient light of the same color temperature as
the projector light is usually not disconcerting, but daylight would certainly change
one’s opinion of the color quality on the screen” (NTSC 1951–1953b, 2). These conditions were meant to reflect an ideal laboratory site. But as the rejection of daylight
suggests, an ideal laboratory situation was not the same thing as real-world viewing
conditions.
As Trevor Pinch (1993, 25–26) writes, “test data are usually thought of as providing
access to the pure technological realm, a means by which the immanent logic of a
technology can be revealed.” This is clearly a rhetorical situation of the test, but it also
helps us understand the conditions under which engineers can cordon off a realm as
“purely technological” or “immanent” to the technology, beyond human intervention.
For us, the testing scenario is an epistemic scenario. By studying testing, we better
understand how knowledge—of vision, of the televisual apparatus, and of the viewer
and context of viewing television—was produced and managed in the early days of
color TV technology. The history of the NTSC’s color tests is at least in part an epistemic history. Of course, the test scenario is also an impossible situation, a context that
Mulvin and Sterne
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attempts to transcend all contexts (Sterne 2012, 152). It has a Kantian dimension in
that the test seeks to overcome the interestedness of the participants to reach a technically mediated, disinterested conclusion about the “best” system for color reproduction, a system that can work for any image or any user. Yet the definition of what works
and the criteria to measure success are the stakes of constructing a test scenario.
There were three nodes in the NTSC’s constellation of test materials and subjects:
the test viewers, the equipment being tested, and the slides. Each combination of two
factors tested the third: images and equipment tested the viewers, viewers and images
tested the equipment, and so on. “Because the testing context is carefully circumscribed, it is not always clear whether it tests the technology or the user” (Sterne 2012,
153—the following discussion draws heavily from Sterne 2012, 153–60). For instance,
in early tests of the color TV apparatus before they had the Eastman Kodak slides, the
NTSC measured subjective responses to different color slides with names like “watering can,” “triangle thins,” “basso,” and “tea cups” As the engineers adjusted a filter,
more and more viewers found the image satisfactory. Given that the goal of the color
tests was to create an acceptable color standard that would work within the limited
bandwidth available for television transmission, a test like this reveals two factors for
consideration: (1) the point at which a certain measure of image quality becomes
acceptable to a given number of viewers and (2) the proportion of viewers who at any
given point rate an image as acceptable. These two factors were weighed against the
available bandwidth in a cost-benefit analysis: how many viewers could be satisfied
(or at least not annoyed) within the constraints of the infrastructure? The test scenario
thus reproduces the conditions of infrastructural limitations and aesthetic compromise
that animated the development of American color television. Not only did it test for the
point at which image quality became acceptable to a majority of viewers, but it also
presented gradations of the viewing population, offering choices for what proportion
of the viewing population to try to please.
There is also a story about expertise here. The tests’ viewing subjects in the tests
stood in for all possible future viewing publics of color television. They were chosen
from the ranks of professions concerned with television, and the list is revealing for its
repetitive nature: engineers who designed TV receivers, broadcast engineers, engineers in “communications equipment design,” television research engineers, television transmitter design engineers, and editorial writers for technical journals. The tests
also had observers: teachers (what kind is unclear), television service engineers, and
consulting engineers (DeCola, Shelby, and McIlwain 1954). On one level, the list is
highly exclusive, consisting primarily of different kinds of engineers and the people
who write for them or teach them; on the other, the sheer proliferation of types of
engineers in the list shows that they hoped to approach the problem from all angles
within the engineering profession. That panoply of engineers was the basis of the test
group’s claim to universality. Although we do not have demographic information on
the participants beyond their last names, the list of professions combined with the
roster suggests a group biased toward the white and male (Fink and NTSC 1955, 101).
The expert viewers in the tests are therefore some distance from the population for
whom they stand in. While they may be more discerning around image quality, they
30
also differed from the eventual audience in many ways, for instance, in their gender,
ethnic, and class makeup, as well as their understandings of the inner workings of
television technology. At the same time, the “normality” of the test group should be
less of a foregone conclusion than we might at first assume. As Mara Mills (2010) has
shown, a great deal of telephone research was conducted with the help of D/deaf and
hard of hearing organizations. Without knowing how many of the NTSC’s engineers
required corrective eyewear, or had some kind of color blindness, it is difficult to claim
that they were automatically normal, able-bodied users. The NTSC did give cursory
attention to the affordances of the television system but were equally quick to dismiss
them. In a questionnaire circulated to the committee’s members, they asked and
answered:
Question: Taking into account the various possible deficiencies of normal vision, what
types of color distortion or change may be anticipated as a result of each of these
deficiencies?
Answer: It was considered that the effect of color anomalies in vision would be confined
to a small group, and that in any event there was little that could be done, in the design
and operation of the system, to accommodate such anomalies. (Fink and NTSC 1955,
100, emphasis in original.)
Given this acknowledgment and dismissal of “anomalous” kinds of vision, the engineers’ definitions of “normal” and “exceptional” images (discussed below) say more
about their own cultural biases and the way those biases would get built into the aesthetics of a durable television format. This is a moment when a media-related disability is actually being created. Whereas color blindness may or may not have affected
viewers of black and white TV, the NTSC engineers are writing off this population.
Although they aim to exploit the gaps and absences in normal human vision (as they
understand it), other gaps and absences simply go too far.
In creating a constant testing scenario, the engineers were asking a familiar question. “All else being equal,” what is the most efficient way to satisfy a viewer with a
pleasurable television image? Or more accurately, at what point does diminishing
image quality actively annoy viewers? “Marginal” and “unacceptable” were shorthand
for points at which the image quality might interfere with enjoyment of the program.
Of course, “all else” can never truly be equal. But a testing scenario would be impossible without reducing the number of traceable variables. The constant, reproducible
testing scenario creates the illusion that the contrast of two images can be reduced to a
pure comparison. In describing the necessity of test images, the NTSC wrote,
In carrying out tests in the field of color television, it is always convenient and sometimes
essential that substantially identical subject matter be used by various laboratories and
that ready comparisons be made between the original material transmitted and the
received and reproduced image secured over a color television system. (Fink and NTSC
1955, 64)
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When the slides are modeled through different compression standards, they are compared both to the original and to other compressed images to find the point of just
noticeable difference. Once the results are consistent across enough testing scenarios,
the engineers can wager that they have found the effective sweet spot for transmitting
a satisfactory image.
When the Committee decided that it needed a standard that could fit both the color
image and the monochrome image in one signal and that it would use knowledge of
the human eye’s low acuity for blue to do so, it was clear they needed a testing regime
that could pinpoint the moment of just noticeable difference. By establishing the
threshold between satisfactory and marginal television viewing, engineers could
determine the bare minimum quantity of information required for inclusion in the
signal. This measure, in turn, gave them a way to conserve bandwidth, to figure out
how to shoehorn a color signal into the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum allocated to monochrome television. The testing scenario gave them the epistemic authority to make that call.
The NTSC in the Garden
Once the NTSC decided that still slides would constitute their test materials and that
engineers would be their test subjects, they needed to decide how the slides would
simulate the future of American broadcasting. In other words, what would they look
like? The slides needed to simulate the television signal in two ways: at the level of
form (their color, their shapes, their constitution) and the level of content.
At the level of form, the images are rather plain. They feature many people, a range
of levels and types of shot, and a variety of shapes, textures, and contours. Only four
of the images remain in color, and from this small sample, we can see that the test
image featured large swaths of basic colors. As the committee requested both average
and exceptional images, we can speculate as to which images are meant to be
exceptional.
One clearly exceptional image was a picture of two boys in swimming trunks, one
pulling the other by the hand. The image is titled “Motion” (Figure 3) and was apparently meant to stand in for the lack of moving pictures. The image’s title points us back
toward the futility of the exercise and the impossibility of capturing motion in a still
slide. As with the discussion of the preference for live performers as test materials,
“Motion” marks a fissure in the tests of a medium that, in the early 1950s, was defined
by claims to liveness (Spigel 1992, 137–38). The presence of “Motion” reveals a faith
that motion can be separated from action and represented through photography, and
the remaining task is making sure that action is intelligible. The entire test was predicated on this impossible but necessary separation—a moving image screen technology
that could only be calibrated through still images.
A number of other test images also evince visual exceptionality. And, like “Motion,”
the exceptional images are those that would be difficult for the television system to
reproduce. Thus, like many communication engineers of their time, the NTSC enforced
a rigid distinction between the content of a transmission and its potential meaning. For
32
Figure 3. Motion. (Fink and NTSC 1955).
Figure 4. Meshes. (Fink and NTSC 1955).
instance, a woman shown behind a net (Figure 4) is a mundane close-up of a tennis
player, but it is a challenge for a compression standard, because the net could easily
introduce blurring and distortion. The same holds true for an image of dark plants
against a dark backdrop (Figure 5)—the challenge here was picking up the image with
such low contrast. Similarly, difficult images include jewelry (Figure 6) hanging over
folds of glossy fabric—an image that indicates both an engineering challenge in how
to pick out the fine detail of the jewels against a variegated background and a preoccupation with advertising imagery. The system’s capacity to reproduce these images
without encumbering the viewer was a measure of its capacity to manage unpredictable television programming.
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Figure 5. Plants—dark background. (Fink and NTSC 1955).
Figure 6. Jewelry. (Fink and NTSC 1955).
Here, we see the separation of content and medium most clearly in the testing
regime. In “Meshes” for instance, the image is meant to be read not as a woman behind
a tennis net but rather as a contrast problem. The issue, of course, is that it is also a
picture of a white woman behind a net. This is how racialized, gendered, and normed
cultural sensibilities get built into technical standards. Not only are they not named,
but the testing process demands that they not be named. Not surprisingly, each new
imaging technology replays these gendered and raced norms, for instance, in the
Microsoft Kinekt’s initial problems in detecting black skin.
For the NTSC, exceptional images tested the limits of the system’s ability to make
people and things formally legible. They also tested the system’s ability to differentiate people from things or animals and humans from nonhumans. This distinction was
34
essential both for the narrative and representational conventions of television—regardless of genre—and also for television’s advertising function, which required the isolation and presentation of objects as desirable commodities. After Friedrich Kittler
(1999), we are used to the idea that media apparatuses decompose materials of representation into signals that do not “care” about their content. In test images like those
in Figures 4, 5, and 6, we see documents of engineers fighting to manage this technical
tendency, to calibrate the machinic to the human, and to encode a humanist and consumerist aesthetic in a technical protocol.
If the test images were meant to include examples of both average and exceptional
formal properties, it is safe to say that no such concern was extended to their content.
Instead, the portrayal of American life on display suggests that the content was meant
to be as normative as possible. “Normal” content, we are left to conclude, would allow
the engineers to focus their efforts on abnormal forms. The images, in other words,
could not accommodate both formal differences and cultural differences, as this would
introduce one-too-many variables in testing the television signal. If this is the case,
then an analysis of the content of the images reveals what was considered normal subject matter for the future of TV.
In general, the NTSC slides portray a narrow band of WASP leisure: children row;
teenagers sail; adults also sail, though sometimes they go for a sleigh ride. Just as one
woman can stare deeply into the eyes of a goose (“Goose girl”), another can grasp a
kitten in a pile of hay (“Kitten girl”), or another can finish off a large crescent of watermelon (“Watermelon girl”). Only two images (“Aviator” and “Boat-ashore pair”) feature a direct address to the camera, while nearly all the images of people are
medium-to-long shots. Labor is almost entirely effaced: in two separate images, we
see a pair of women picking flowers (“Tulip garden”) and a chauffeur waiting with his
horse-drawn carriage (“Southern manse”). Labor might in fact be difficult to portray
in these images because electricity is also absent: except for the protruding arm of a
propeller (“Aviator”), a lampshade without a lamp (“Lamp shade”), and four isolated
dials (“Instruments”), you could confuse the world represented for a pre-electric
United States. As such, the images are exemplary of what Michael Schudson once
called “the aesthetic of capitalist realism” which, “without a masterplan of purposes—
glorifies the pleasures and freedoms of consumer choice in defense of the virtues of
private life and material ambitions” (Schudson 1984, 218).
The suburban and pastoral sensibility represented in the images fits nicely with
clichés we hear about 1950s American culture and television, and they seem to advance
arguments that the content of 1950s television was doing a particular kind of ideologically conservative work that promoted both consumerism and the containment of
women (Brunsdon, D’Acci, and Spigel 2007). Certainly, it seems that the ideological
content of mainstream American television reached back, beneath its programming,
into the very test slides and psychophysical studies that were used to form its technical
standards. But this form of capitalist realism did not simply reflect a cultural consensus of the time. As Carol Stabile (2011) has argued, the landscape of 1950s television,
with all its faux-wholesomeness, was a product of the broadcast blacklist, where writers who had any social vision remotely challenging to a McCarthyite mainstream were
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35
systematically shut out. The quaint ideological tinge of the NTSC images—while not
necessarily themselves shaped by a blacklist—certainly were of the same moment. As
Stabile notes (2011, 267), Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio
and Television was released in 1950 (see also Doherty 2003), a year before the second
NTSC got to work and right in the middle of the McCarthyite era.
In total, the slides portray thirty-three people (twenty adults and teenagers, thirteen
children), along with three kinds of animal (a goose, a kitten, and two horses), and a
range of household objects, framed to reflect commercial presentations. Among these
objects are close-ups of coasters, jewelry, fishing tackle, a fruit bowl, an advertisement
for a lighter, and a pile of pumpkins. There are no radios, or televisions, or paintings;
in fact, there are no media artifacts of any kind. Although the work of capitalism is
effectively effaced, Eastman Kodak and the NTSC were clearly concerned with guaranteeing the faithful reproduction of ads.
Pointing out these aspects of the slides does not imply a call for more representations of toasters and factory workers, or to argue that a picture of a TV ought to be
included in the imaginary future of the medium. Rather, it is to argue that technical
tests are also modes of representation and that they have political dimensions even
when their content may not be the first concern of engineers. During the years of the
Second World War and the period immediately after, broadcasters worked to convince
advertisers that television could fulfill the same advertising potential of radio (Schwoch
1990; Sewell 2014). In this period, television’s technical capacities were inherently
tied to its capacities to represent products and carry advertisers’ messages. In other
words, representational concerns were forefront in the minds of television’s
architects.
This brings us to the most obvious problem: despite being chosen for their demonstration of color, the images are thoroughly, monochromatically white. Not only are
these images startlingly alabaster but they also shine conspicuously with the acknowledged burden that they were specifically employed to guarantee the faithful reproduction of white skin tone. This was, at one level, an impossible goal as the number of skin
tones covered by the racial fiction of “white” was quite broad even in the 1950s. At the
same time, the idea of skin being white was well established in other media and cultural industries, from Crayola’s “flesh” crayon that was in use until 1962 to the composition of film stock (Dyer 1997; Winston 1996). Earlier, monochromatic television
productions of the 1930s used special makeup techniques to “keep white men from
looking like ‘Uncle Tom’” (Sewell 2014, 133). Standard Hollywood practice at the
time involved bouncing additional, reflected light onto African American performers
because color film did not easily render black skin. As Brian Winston points out, this
was the result of a set of conscious aesthetic decisions that came up with color film and
yet again in tests of Kodachrome film that were coterminous with the NTSC. In those
tests, color tones for skin were selected for their pleasing character rather than their
realism: “Caucasian skin tones are not to be rendered as they are, but rather as they are
preferred—a whiter shade of white” (Winston 1996, 41, 43, quote at 56; see also Dyer
1997). As Lorna Roth has shown, both American and European color TV relied on
“Shirley” cards that were used for calibration of white skin tone—to the exclusion of
36
Figure 7. Southern Manse. (Fink and NTSC 1955).
all others. Over time, the various “Shirleys” used for white-skin-tone calibration
reflected changing standards of skin beauty (Roth 2009, 112–15).
The exclusive use of white models in the slides means that interpretations of white
skin tone were directly encoded in the color standard—or rather, that the NTSC
attempted to write them in. Aside from one slide titled “Southern Manse” (Figure 7),
in which the two figures are not legible, the images are staunchly white. This may not
be surprising given the era, but decades later, we know that black skin is not well
reproduced by NTSC color or by traditional film stock, a theme that has been taken up
by both television and film producers in recent years (Hornaday 2013). This simple,
“practical” decision had tremendous repercussions on the ability of color television to
represent large segments of the population of the United States. Unspoken but clearly
central was the articulation of flesh color and the politics of race in the United States
in the early 1950s. That the NTSC was calibrating “skin” to aesthetics of whiteness
just as the civil rights movement was about to take off in the United States only underscores the political ramifications of this decision. Regardless of the intentions behind
them, the design decisions in the NTSC’s test images effectively biased the format
toward rendering white people as more lifelike than other races, at least within the
codes of televisual realism.
The Universal and the Peculiar
Often test images are examples of natural phenomena or objects that are meant to
stand in for a whole group. The NTSC slides, however, could not be based on “natural
phenomena.” Instead, they had to be based on the potential world of American television. Test images constitute a standard set of data—a known quantity—and when
Mulvin and Sterne
37
testing a new image compression and transmission standard, engineers are interested
in how that data will be transformed through various kinds of mathematical and physical manipulation. Combined with the criteria of judgment based on whether test subjects find the images pleasurable or annoying, bright or dark, clear or fuzzy, too red or
green, test images form a shared toolkit for detecting and registering qualitative differences between different image standards.
Test images are an example of what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison call “working objects.” The business of making scientific investigation commensurable and
exchangeable—the work, in other words, of “collective empiricism”—requires a cordoning-off of the “too plentiful and too various” world of “natural objects” (Daston
and Galison 2007, 19). Instead, a limited selection of common objects stands in for the
larger, unmanageable set, and forms the communal working objects of scientific
research. These proxies may be typical specimens, average examples, or exceptional
instances. Working objects are an indispensable part of making scientific knowledge
sensible and comparable.
The NTSC images move between the universal and the particular twice. When the
engineers choose and use twenty-seven images as proxies for all of American TV, they
imagine a universal set through a defined set of particulars. When the standard is finalized and becomes the basis of a massive communication infrastructure, television
engineering reverses the process, universalizing from a small but manageable set of
data. The act of sampling from the universe of all possible images requires choices
about who or what to represent. The practical politics of standards are divided between
two processes: “arriving at categories and standards, and, along the way, deciding
what will be visible or invisible within the system” (Bowker and Star 1999, 44). For
the NTSC engineers, their categories were limited to the “general subject matter of
television” and formally “average” and “exceptional” images. The engineers were
quick to request more green images when they needed them. But they exercised a
limited view of the cultural context of American life in the 1950s. This process of
rendering some things—and people—less visible exemplifies the cultural stakes
behind technical standards.
Compare this with recent standards for energy consumption in new televisions, for
which engineers compiled a ten-minute DVD of the average content of 200 hours of
five countries’ viewing habits.1 The montage of “typical broadcast content” was the
product of intense negotiation over the test materials. Manufacturers knew that the
choice of content would bear greatly on how much energy the TVs used. LCD manufacturers wanted a signal with more white, while plasma TV manufacturers preferred
more black: “Neither group of manufacturers wanted to lose the power battle due to a
measurement specification that favored one technology over another” (Fairhurst 2009,
474). The DVD was a compromise that resorted to an “average” of current content as
its reference point. The contemporary TV engineers were therefore aware of the relationship between the technical and the representational and heavily invested in shaping representational proxies to produce specific technical results.
The NTSC exemplifies a prehistory of late-twentieth century attempts by industrial
actors—content producers and technology manufacturers—to control standardization
38
processes. In the case of the NTSC, and the engineering arms of NBC, CBS, and
DuMont, the manufacturers and content-makers were frequently one-and-the-same.
Because the color NTSC formed against the wishes of the FCC as a private, industrial
consortium, and because of the vertical integration of these firms, its choices about
how to simulate American television—its presumptions, in other words, of how the
audience sees, and what the audience sees—deserve close scrutiny.
American color television is a special case in the history of standards. Not only did
its standard operate for an inordinately long time—depending on where you live, at
least fifty-six years—but it also resulted (albeit acrimoniously) from a coordinated
industry effort to gain government approval, a process that was bloodless compared
with the format wars of subsequent decades. Despite its extreme dimensions—still
pictures for a moving image standard, impossible (for the time) bandwidth restrictions,
pastoral content, the outright collapse of content and service provision—the NTSC’s
task is in many ways exemplary of the kinds of politics that lie behind the establishment of standards for our most common media formats. When RCA set out to create
its 45 rpm single, it settled on the three-minute length through a survey of its back
catalogue of songs; Columbia performed a similar calculation with its classical music
holdings when deciding on the length of the LP record (Papenburg 2012). Standardized
fonts and layouts for print are selected for their reproducibility and with assumptions
about the reader and the act of reading (Barnhurst and Nerone 2001). The NTSC’s
work has also had an illustrious afterlife. Beyond its own format’s longevity, its basic
working assumptions and approach to bandwidth are common for digital images, most
of which are also compressed. For instance, a widely cited paper from 1956 (“Some
Studies in the Speed of Visual Perception”) by George C. Sziklai used “Southern
Manse” as one of its test images. Moreover, the approaches to image compression in
formats like JPEG and MPEG directly reference the NTSC’s earlier work, from the
application of psychophysics to the composition of test personnel and images (Cubitt
2011; Mackenzie 2008; Sziklai 1956).
Beyond the NTSC’s media historical legacy, we can see many of the same issues
cropping up in test images today. Test images, along with calibration images, are part
of any new image technology and shape new image standards and their capacity for
reproduction. Some test images have even formed something of a canon. Below, we
see five examples. At least one of these five images is likely to be found in any image
processing textbook of the past forty years: the mandrill, Lena, the fishing boat, peppers, and a fingerprint (Figure 8). By far, the most popular picture in image compression, however, is Lena. Lena is torn out of the Playboy centerfold from November
1972, and by some accounts, it was one of the first images digitized for network transmission (Pennebaker and Mitchell 1993; Salomon 2007).2
In the end, it turns out that the politics of test images share some important features
with the broader cultural politics of images. The NTSC test images vanished from the
history of television because like other test materials and technical images they are
dismissed as trifling instruments of a larger technical practice. As such, they appear
neither technical enough to merit mention in a history of technology nor conspicuous
enough to catch the gaze of visual culture studies. If nothing else, we offer in this
Mulvin and Sterne
39
Figure 8. Five standard test images (clockwise from top-left): Mandrill, Lena, Fishing Boat,
Peppers, Fingerprint.
article a third option: an investigation of the visual culture of technical practices. Test
images become commonplaces that engineers use to compare tests over space and
time. Unlike the NTSC, no one mandates the use of most test images, though convention leads to the use of some images more than others, since canonical images can
work as a kind of lingua franca. Their canonization in textbooks reinforces engineers’
more informal choices of certain images as touchstones. These images, as well as their
placement and framing in technical manuals, carry with them cultural understandings
of the purpose of imaging technologies and the content they are meant—or not
meant—to convey. Universal aspirations are rooted in particular examples meant to be
stand-ins for future content, where the images function as working objects in Daston
and Galison’s (2007) terms. Although current engineering practice demands this kind
of selection, the subject of the images is political. As a product of the testing situation,
the subject of test materials is never neutral.
We have offered a prehistory of American color television through the documentary
vestiges of the NTSC. Using the Kodak test slides, some in color, some in monochrome, and the advantage of historical perspective, we know that something happened in the development of the color television standard that meant that it failed to
consistently reproduce the range of human skin tones—white and nonwhite alike. This
failure is a byproduct of the testing regime, combined with the workings of the
40
technology, the bandwidth allotted for broadcast, and the limitations of both standards
bodies and audiences. When we ask how the NTSC could have failed so severely in
guaranteeing the faithful reproduction of skin tone—white skin, its goal, and many
other skin tones besides—we may want to start with their test materials and test subjects, and work our way up. The engineers were attuned to the shortcomings of the first
batch of images with regard to colorimetric values, that is, the need for more green.
But in our survey of the NTSC’s remaining documents, we did not find anyone who
expressed a concern about the monochromatic skin tones of television’s subjects or
offered commentary on the portrayal of a pastoral, consumerist lifestyle in 1951. “No
true skin color” might be an amusing and accurate critique of the NTSC’s format. But
as a statement about the politics of race, it also signals the inescapable political contradictions faced by all image standards, past and future: there is no true skin color.
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank Vicki Mayer, Sue Murray, Carolyn Kane, Andreas Fickers,
Carrie Rentschler, Nancy Baym, Kate Crawford, Tarleton Gillespie, Jessa Lingel, Kate Miltner,
Microsoft Research New England, our audience at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies,
and two anonymous reviews for support, conversation, and advice as we wrote and revised this
article. We would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada for its financial support.
Authors’ Note
The full, official version of this article can be found at http://colortvstandards.net. There, we
have constructed a version in scalar (http://scalar.usc./edu) that includes a complete set of
images discussed in this article and additional comments on them. It is searchable and printable.
We have also maintained the pagination for easy citation of the digital version. We consider the
scalar version the official version of the article, and this pdf as a placeholder in the journal’s
system.
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada and Microsoft New England.
Notes
1.
“The project members measured at least forty hours of typical broadcast content, including
a variety of genres from a variety of broadcast stations in Australia, Japan, the Netherlands,
the United Kingdom, and the United States” (Commonwealth of Australia 2008, 30).
2. These are two key volumes: one the JPEG handbook and the other a data compression
textbook. However, a search of almost any image processing volume will find at least one
of these images.
Mulvin and Sterne
41
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Author Biographies
Dylan Mulvin is a PhD candidate at McGill University. His dissertation is titled Reference
Materials: The People, Places, and Things of Making Measurements. He has published on the
histories of video and television.
Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at
McGill University. He is author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format, The Audible Past, and over
fifty articles. His website can be visited at http://sterneworks.org.
566285
TVNXXX10.1177/1527476414566285Television & New MediaHughes
Record/Film/Book/
Interactive TV: EVR as a
Threshold Format
2016, Vol. 17(1) 44–61
DOI: 10.1177/1527476414566285
tvn.sagepub.com
Kit Hughes1
Abstract
Although home video scholars often position the EVR (CBS’s Electronic Video
Recording) as a failure, I argue that it is best understood as a threshold format that
articulated new possibilities for television by linking it to existing but divergent
technologies and practices: the phonograph, film cartridges, print, and interactivity.
As developed through original document research built from the Motorola archives,
newspapers, biographies, promotional materials, and a range of trade journals, I show
how the EVR contributed to ongoing negotiations over the meaning of television and
demonstrate the value of threshold format as an analytic lens attuned to formats that
boast little or no material existence but which occupy pivotal positions within ongoing
experiments into how “old” technologies can be refigured to offer new possibilities
and opportunities. Whereas successfully standardized formats tend to obscure the
possibilities that came before them, attending to threshold formats redirects our
attention to forgotten ambitions and potentials.
Keywords
Electronic Video Recording (EVR), failure, video, useful media, new media history,
history of technology, format theory
Designed by President of CBS Laboratories Peter Goldmark in 1960 as “a visual counterpart of sound reproduction from a long-playing record,” the EVR (Electronic Video
Recording) used a cartridge to play sound and image embedded on a thin strip of film
on “any home television set” (CBS Electronic Video Recording c1970; Goldmark
1University
of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
Kit Hughes, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Department of Communication Arts, 821 University Ave.,
Madison, WI 53706, USA.
from tvn.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on December 18, 2015
Downloaded Downloaded
45
Hughes
1970, 22).1 Or, it was supposed to. After eleven years of lurching development, two
CBS funding rejections, the dissolution of four potential funding and manufacturing
partnerships, a cartridge duplication plant beset with mechanical and staffing difficulties, two years of release date push-backs, and only eleven months on the market, CBS
abandoned the EVR and its stake in the rapidly intensifying race to invent a smallformat video player for home and institutional use in 1971. Promised longer than it
was produced, the EVR had the staying power of a corpse flower bloom.
Despite the EVR’s premature obsolescence, it offers valuable insight into the utility
of what Jonathan Sterne terms format theory—his call to “focus on the stuff beneath,
beyond, and behind the boxes our media come in” and “ask after the changing formations of media, the contexts of their reception, the conjunctures that shaped their sensual characteristics, and the institutional politics in which they were enmeshed”
(Sterne 2012, 11). As Sterne suggests, “if they have enough depth, breadth and reach,
some formats may offer completely different inroads into media history and may well
show us subterranean connections among media that we previously thought separate”
(Sterne 2012, 17). I argue that the EVR is one such format.
Most significantly, the EVR demonstrates the importance of examining what I call
threshold formats: those formats that never reached saturation or even standardization
but which occupy pivotal positions within (material and discursive) experiments into
how “old” technologies can be refigured to offer new possibilities and opportunities.
Drawing from original document research built from the Motorola archives, newspapers, biographies, EVR promotional materials, and a wide range of trade journals in the
fields of electronics, engineering, industrial media production, education, medicine,
computing, and journalism, I show how, as a threshold format, the EVR contributed to
negotiations over the meaning of television by linking it to existing but divergent technologies and practices: the phonograph, film cartridges, print, and interactivity.
For the purposes of this article, I consider a format to be a particular technological
iteration of a medium described both by its material form and the protocols by which
it operates, with “protocols” referring to the “vast clutter of normative rules and default
conditions” that shape the operation of a technology and, in doing so, “express a huge
variety of social, economic, and material relationships” (Gitelman 2006, 7; Sterne
2012, 8). Via their protocols and material form, formats preserve social relations and
organize new ones. PDFs, for example, maintained printed documents’ distinctions
between author and reader by prohibiting textual alteration while simultaneously shifting office paperwork responsibilities (reproduction and distribution) from clerical
workers to document producers (Gitelman 2014, 117, 127, 130). Furthermore, and as
we will see in the case of the EVR, in their difference and multitude prior to standardization, formats attest to the contingent relationships between media form (telephony)
and technology (telephone). Whereas successfully standardized formats tend to
obscure the possibilities that came before them, attending to threshold formats redirects our attention to forgotten ambitions and potentials.
Like the thin sill of a doorway, threshold formats are connective (between old/now/
new), and they are passed over quickly in the movement from one set of technological
possibilities (and different social, cultural, political, and economic arrangements) to
Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on December 18, 2015
46
another. Although we might hesitate in a doorway, we do not dwell there. Furthermore,
thresholds boast scant physical existence, gesturing more toward possibility than
materiality; forever occupying the status of “just-about-to-be-ness,” threshold formats
also contribute to discourses surrounding permanently promised, never realized technologies that powerfully shape cultural understandings of possible (and desired)
futures. Threshold formats are both transitory and transitional. Thinking through
threshold formats in this way activates concerns in social construction of technology
(SCOT) and new media studies regarding the complexities of technological emergence and persistence.
Transitory formats guide researcher attention to short-lived, low visibility, and easily
forgotten formats that may live most—or all—of their lives exclusively in a “paper
world” where their material reality is confined to the prognostications and publications
of (potential) users (Latour 1987, 253). Transitory formats never reach dominance, moving instead from a period of emergence to residuality. Although they may continue to
manifest as “an effective element of the present” open for oppositional appropriation
(Williams 1977, 122), these opportunities are limited by the emergent reach of a given
format; the intensely short-lived EVR, for example, entertains little hope for such resurrection. Persisting, when at all, in scattered traces and stubborn residue, transitional formats demand we ask after the flickering lifespan of newness, the exigencies of forgetting,
and the methodological difficulties and utility of renewing these disappearing acts.
Understanding a format as transitional means pushing beyond the acknowledgment that technologies are always in transition to determine how new technologies
make their newness legible at the same time they build continuities with older technologies. Scholarly attention to change has charted transitional logics via complementary and occasionally overlapping media “cycles” defined by the diffusion of
innovations within a social system (Rogers 2003), shifting understandings and uses of
particular media as they move through different cultural strata (Williams 1977), the
transformation of media systems from open to closed (Wu 2010), and technologies’
passage through a series of phases from invention and innovation to regulation and
mainstreaming (Peters 2009). The threshold lens elongates moments toward the beginning or even prior to the start of these cycles when a format’s status as “new” is still in
flux. As the newness of a medium is not automatic, but socially and culturally established through comparisons with existing media (Sterne 2007, 18), focusing on these
moments provides an opportunity to trace the continuities just as much as the ruptures
that enable “new” to emerge from “old plus” (Peters 2009, 18). The terminology of
transitional also builds on notions of “interpretive flexibility” to emphasize the mobility of threshold formats as they become appropriated by different user groups embedded within different spaces and acknowledge the varying levels of access and
intervening power held by a range of intermediaries for a technology that permanently
resists “closure” (Pinch and Bijker 1984).
In the case of the EVR, convergent thinking defines this particular moment as varied
groups experimented with the EVR’s capabilities as a multi-function appendage to the
home set while working to establish the EVR’s newness through its difference from “television.” Although remediation is certainly a characteristic of this process of becoming
47
Hughes
new while acknowledging previous forms, the broad sweep of remediation—“all mediation” (Bolter and Gruisin 2000, 55)—dulls the concept’s usefulness. As a subset of remediation (Canavilhas 2012, 9), convergence is far more useful for tracing continuities amid
newness due to its emphasis on hybridity and its processorial nature (Jenkins 2006).
Dreams of multiply hybrid television—in terms of its technology, economics, social and
cultural practices, regulation, and texts—structured discourses both promoting and
domesticating the novelty of the EVR; hybridity provides the tension that throws “now/
old” technologies in relief and makes newness legible. This emphasis on continuity as a
key principle of newness works against what Charles Acland (2007, xix) calls “the reigning myth of new media,” which obscures varied technological temporalities and historical
experience in its focus on the radically disruptive potential of the new.
Given the EVR’s inability to achieve standardization, this study is sympathetic to
work on “failures and false starts” that has invigorated our histories by turning attention to understudied and wholly forgotten machines, practices, and user groups
(Douglas 2010, 294). Estimates put the final tally of EVR cassettes produced in the
hundreds—an impressive inadequacy for a system that “in essence” was developed for
“the production of copies in reasonable or large quantities” (Lardner 1987, 78; McLean
and Rogers 1971, 249). However, leaning too much on the language of failure given
the EVR’s inability to manifest machines or money obscures its productivity in other
cultural and ideological spheres and reinforces a conventional success/failure binary.
This critical stance toward “failure,” taken up fruitfully in SCOT and new media studies, reveals new understandings about the processes by which technologies come to be
meaningful, works against historical progress tropes, and showcases how attending to
failed technologies’ “inseparable relations to surviving systems” elucidates the power
embedded in persisting forms (Gitelman and Pingree 2003). Research has shown how
failure—like success—is the highly contingent result of struggles among varied actors
negotiating complex social, economic, material, ideological, and political conditions
(Lipartito 2003, 54–58) and how negotiations over and discourses surrounding failed
technologies close avenues of investigation and exert pressure on ongoing processes
of technological development (Lipartito 2003; McCray 2001, 291). Failure thus opens
new avenues of research into the margins of media history while deepening our understanding of history at the center. Threshold formats allows us to follow this trajectory
set out by scholars of failure while firmly insisting on the unique productivity of transitory and transitional formats.
Although Goldmark began development of the EVR in 1960, it was only in 1967
that CBS intimated serious plans to market the machine to the public with the formation of the EVR partnership, an international consortium that included British chemistry powerhouse Imperial Chemical Industries, Swiss pharmaceutical firm CIBA, and
their shared subsidiary Ilford Ltd., which made a silver halide film suited to EVR
cartridges. Motorola signed on as the exclusive U.S. manufacturer of the machine in
1968 and after a host of difficulties and two years of delays, the EVR was made selectively available to industrial and educational users in February 1971 for $795 (roughly
$4,675 in 2014), a cost almost three times CBS’s early estimates (Business Screen
1967a).2 That December, following heavy losses for the year, CBS announced it would
48
be pulling out of the partnership and relinquishing all stakes in the EVR with the
exception of patent royalties and limited content production (The Wall Street Journal
1971). Although Motorola pursued its stake in the machine and its software through
1972 and the EVR partnership managed the manufacture and distribution of the device
for several more years, particularly in Europe and Japan, CBS’s withdraw signaled
death for the EVR as a viable international format.
As the first video player to market, the EVR traded on a host of affordances articulated to the potential of video players—watching on the home set, collecting and
exchanging media commodities, and the programmability of television. While others
used tape, lasers, and holograms, the EVR cartridge contained a 750-foot spool of
miniaturized 8.75-millimeter black and white film split down the middle into two
separate tracks. In color cartridges, one track held the black and white image while the
second held information that translated the monochrome image to color, leading to a
run time of twenty-five minutes. For black and white cartridges, both tracks could be
used for content, resulting in a fifty-minute run time. Although its film base meant that
it had no recording capabilities, it provided the EVR with two unique features. First,
each of the 180,000 frames per reel could be programmed independently with still
images or text, giving the EVR an unparalleled storage capacity for non-moving image
content. Second, the dual tracks of the EVR film could be programmed together, and
users could switch between the two as desired, allowing for rudimentary interactivity.
These capabilities have been routinely ignored by histories of home video interested
only in the affordances of the victors, yet they are central to understanding continuities
in the EVR’s emergence.
The following sections are arranged to highlight four major avenues of development open to television amid discussions of the potential of the EVR. To emphasize
the value of threshold formats, each section traces the material forms and protocols
that mark the EVR’s continuities with a given technology, setting these in relation to
divergences resulting from the combination of these “not yet televisual” affordances
and practices with television as it was popularly constructed between 1960 and 1972.
Given media and video studies’ emphasis on entertainment, only one of these paths—
the use of the EVR in the home as a corollary to the long-playing record (LP)—has
been treated with serious scholarly attention. Even then, the EVR and its early smallformat video cartridge brethren function narratively as mere foreshadowing for the
successful penetration of video cassettes in the home (Lardner 1987; Newman 2014;
Wasser 2002). In contrast, tracing the EVR’s properties as a threshold format replete
with its own particular meanings and possibilities—rather than a failed version of
something that persisted longer—reveals a diversity of ideas and practices articulated
to television that become overshadowed by such teleological historiographies.
EVR as a Phonograph
The most readily available technology used to domesticate the newness of the EVR
was the LP. Suggested by Goldmark, CBS, and Motorola in promotional materials, the
construction of the EVR as a “video phonograph” is also taken up in early popular and
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trade press. In addition to describing the system’s form and basic mechanics—a thin,
disc-shaped cartridge pierced in the middle that slips onto a spindle for playback—
correspondences drawn between records and EVR cartridges invoked notions of ondemand programming curated by the individual viewer, media commodity collecting,
and user friendliness (Business Screen 1969a; Galton 1970; Goldmark 1970, 22;
Gould 1968, 1970a; Rohrbach 1967; C. Smith 1970; Time 1970; MSLAC–Promotional
and Advertising Materials [MSLAC-PA]).3 Not coincidently, the invention of the LP
was one of Goldmark’s signal achievements during his tenure with CBS; the association of the EVR with a technology that already won a costly format war enabled CBS
to make implicit claims about its power to win standardization for its products. The
most significant implications of the convergence between the EVR and phonograph,
however, emerged from how the association imagined the EVR’s ideal users: home
audiences.
One of the primary groups to exploit this relationship was an assemblage of cultural critics who acted as powerful intermediaries in shaping the meaning of early
video technologies in the home (Dawson 2007). Rallying against what they perceived as the “TV problem”—low-quality content harming children, benumbing
adults, and ruining tastes—critics for outlets such as the New York Times and the
Saturday Review hailed home video as a solution to broadcast television’s “vast
wasteland” (Dawson 2007, 526, 531, 542). By emphasizing users’ abilities to make
software choices that shored up middle and upper class tastes, critics suggested that
video could improve television’s (and broadcasting’s) programming shortcomings—insofar as they were understood by self-styled cultural authorities and “elite”
consumers (Dawson 2007, 524, 526). Promotional and trade publications pursued a
wider range of potential home uses and users. In particular, “home study”—as direct
skilling (teaching a child to read, cooking with Julia Child, bettering a golf swing,
and employee training)—invoked enterprising women and workers as significant
users of the machine (Brockway 1971; Business Screen 1969a; Hall 1970; O’Dwyer
1970; Time 1970; MSLAC-PA). In addition to the high degree of selectivity offered
by cartridges compared with broadcasts, the ability to play a program at one’s convenience meant users, from homemakers to third-shift workers, could fit their learning and entertainment into their work–leisure patterns. Building on the established
flexibility of the LP as a domestic technology, these negotiations over the EVR suggest that its users could watch “whatever whenever” years before Sony made this a
cornerstone of its Betamax promotion.
While cultural critics and content producers concerned themselves with what people would watch on the EVR, others were interested in how they would pay for it—and
what this meant for other home entertainment. Again, the LP discursively structured
the possibilities open to the EVR. Building on CBS’s activities in the music industry,
one reviewer suggested that the company could “create, produce and distribute video
cassettes the way it now turns out phonograph records and audio cassettes.” Likewise,
the public could purchase and collect cartridges just as they do other media commodities—from houseware stores, supermarkets, and music shops (Field 1970). Associations
with the LP also influenced how different parties promoted the sale and exchange of
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cassettes. While critic Jack Gould included the EVR’s lack of commercials in his list
of its advantageous LP-like qualities—emphasizing the value of purchasing media
outright—he and others also used the LP as a theoretical case study to test the waters
for EVR rental (Gould 1970a, 75, 1970b; Isenberg 1970). These possibilities, however, existed in tension with CBS’s promotions of the EVR as a “multi-million dollar
advertising medium” that situated the device within more traditional U.S. television
funding models (Field 1970; O’Dwyer 1970; Brockway quoted in O’Dwyer 1970).
Given the high (and rising) price of cartridges for purchase, rental and ad subsidy
models became grounds for negotiating the EVR’s identity as a media commodity in
relation to the LP. CBS used this same relationship to temper the EVR’s threat to its
broadcast operations by situating the EVR as an “additive” to broadcast that could
function “just as record players complemented radio” (Time 1968).
While the EVR shared some material features with the LP, the way different users
developed the continuities between the two devices made the EVR legible as a new
domestic technology that could support critics’ legitimation efforts, reshape audiences,
lead to new commodity forms, and accommodate broadcasting. These same efforts
considered the ideal form of EVR programming and exhibition, including its place in
the home. However, the development of the EVR as a domestic entertainment technology was not uncontroversial within CBS. According to Goldmark, Paley issued directives to leave “home” alone and focus instead entirely on industrial and educational
applications (Goldmark 1973, 181). Furthermore, Motorola believed that the consumer market would not develop until the late 1970s and understood the primary market for the EVR as “definitely non-consumer”—precisely along the lines of its current
operations (hospital, public safety, hotels, schools, business, and government). These
users—quite possibly the only groups to ever purchase, program, and use the device—
became critical to its development and financing. However, as scholars discuss the
EVR as a failed version of the home VHS (Video Home System), they have been
ignored. Turning to these other sectors opens a broader range of technological, practical, and discursive continuities than has henceforth been identified in histories of
video or the EVR.
EVR as a Film Cartridge
Despite the public association of the EVR with the LP, CBS’s machine bore an even
closer resemblance to 8 mm and Super 8 film cartridges in use a decade before the
EVR hit the market. Introduced by Technicolor in 1961, film cartridges stored about
five minutes of silent film—increasing to thirty minutes of sound film by 1970—that
played back on a specialized rear-projection screen machine the size of a television. In
addition to the film cartridge’s uncanny ability to deliver what the EVR promised—
self-contained, portable software played on a televisual device—the two systems both
used film. A late Kodak model drew even closer to the already-defunct EVR by playing Super 8 cartridges on television (Business Screen 1973). Despite their mechanical
similarities, however, the most important continuities between the technologies lie in
the institutions that used them.
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Unlike the LP, film cartridges never found success as a domestic technology.
Instead, their biggest users were business, industry, and education—the same groups
that sustained EVR sales. The EVR’s institutional appeal was strategically bolstered
by CBS’s partnership with Motorola, whose activities in the hospital, hotel, public
safety, and educational fields, as well as consumer television, enabled it to straddle
both markets (Business Screen 1969b). CBS and Motorola offered institutions a highpriced “industrial-educational unit of ‘ruggedized’ design” to recoup research and
development costs until mass production halved the cost for consumers (Business
Screen 1969b). This also provided CBS with valuable “test cases” in user evaluation
and marketing while transforming institutional users into important intermediaries
shaping the EVR’s potential. While critics fashioned the EVR as an audiovisual LP,
their counterparts in schools and workplaces fit the EVR to the established media
practices within those spaces. For these users, the 8 mm film cartridge helped set the
conditions by which the EVR could be imagined as a communications technology.
A forgotten technology, small-gauge film cartridges supported the development of
new content production and pedagogical strategies, flexible exhibition practices, and
the ongoing refinement of media audiences. Introduced to users primarily working
with 16 mm film, marketers distinguished the newness of film cartridges through their
portability (fits in a briefcase!), ease of use (no threading; so simple a child can use it!),
and specialized audiences (even individual users!; Business Screen 1962a, 1962b,
1967b, 1972). Of course, these same arguments supported earlier and ongoing constructions of 16 mm as a flexible, modular technology suited to a range of audiences,
locations, and communication needs (Waller 2011; Wasson 2013). Film cartridges,
however, intensified these discourses and contributed new protocols and material
forms to cinema’s heterogeneous technologies and practices. The small size of the
screen and its ability to display in lit conditions meant film could be projected anywhere immediately without extensive set-up—atop a prospect’s desk, in a classroom
corner, or on a department store shelf—wherever its messages would be most effective
according to sales and pedagogical theories (Palmer 1971, 26). The short length of the
cartridge was hailed for offering greater freedom in scheduling audiovisual programs,
as it could be easily tucked into larger presentations or shown at precise moments of
the school or work day. Manufacturers and users imbricated this cluster of anytimeanywhere-anyone affordances in two larger promises of the film cartridge’s capabilities: expansion and efficiency. The EVR built directly on these promises and
concerns.
The EVR’s claims to enabling institutional expansion by facilitating the management of geographically dispersed people built on three elements of access: cost, user
friendliness, and exhibition outlets. CBS both ignored film cartridges and plagiarized
their argument regarding price by comparing its device with more expensive 16 mm
and video formats, positioning the EVR as the “economical” solution to mass duplication needs (Brockway 1971, 28; Business Screen 1971). CBS also emphasized its
machine’s simple interface, automatic threading, and easy installation to appeal to
educators facing another novel technology and a corporate communications sector
increasingly transferring employee training responsibilities to workers. Likewise,
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CBS promoted the expansive reach of the EVR by emphasizing its portability through
features such as the player’s size, built-in handle, and—importantly, the affordance
film cartridges lacked—its ubiquitous exhibition outlets (“any conventional television
receiver, regardless of its location”; Brockway 1971; Business Screen 1969a, 1971;
Palmer 1971). This emphasis on convenience and ubiquity built on film cartridge practices that established the value of expansive communication and information programs
using an “almost always accessible” model—or as a Motorola brochure explains,
“whatever you want, whenever you want it”—wherein no space lacked access to corporate communication or educational content (MSLAC-PA).
Notions of efficiency based on temporal flexibility also tied the EVR to film cartridges. Both technologies emphasized quick setup, which freed users from time-consuming preparations prescribed by 16 mm film projection: extra screens, a darkened
room, a sizable audience, and an expert projector (CBS Electronic Video Recording
c1970; Palmer 1971). Media could thus be inserted more precisely and more often
within the rhythms of work and learning. In a passage that could have been lifted
wholesale from a film cartridge press release, a review of the EVR proclaims,
With EVR, the teacher might integrate educational films more effectively into the smooth
flow of his classwork. He could preview and choose. He could stop the program for
comment for general discussion. He could schedule lessons at his own discretion
(Business Screen 1969a).
Such flexibility also supported individualized use; cartridges were hailed as a new
pedagogical tool that allowed students—whether children studying music or workers
learning welding—to learn at their own pace, releasing the instructor to attend to other
responsibilities (Happé 1965, 7; Moore 1971, 58). This emphasis on maximizing efficiency returns in the discussion of the EVR’s potential for “home study,” allowing
workers to learn both at their own pace and on their own time (Business Screen 1969a;
Gale 1971; Gould 1970c). Combined, these affordances of efficiency and expansion
constructed the EVR to echo the film cartridge’s capabilities as a highly flexible,
adaptable technology that could well serve industrial and educational users’ shifting
understandings of their ideal audiences.
Although CBS and Motorola made only a handful of programming arrangements
over the course of the EVR’s short life, these agreements consistently targeted highly
specialized audiences familiar with film cartridges. The EVR’s marquee deal was an
agreement with the Equitable Life Assurance Society for 1,200 players and software for
in-house training and communications as well as home study and entertainment for
agents and their families. More targeted audiences followed, with content that included
diagnosis films for neurosurgery interns, IBM communiqués with minority groups, and
“Arresting TV,” recruitment, training, and community relations films for police
(Billboard 1971; Gould 1970a, 75; MSLAC–News Releases [MSLAC-NR]). In laying
out his plans for EVR programming development, EVR President Robert Brockway
drew from traditional broadcasting practices by taking up the language of connectivity—“special purpose networks on a vast scope”—to describe his vision
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for a communications system targeting geographically dispersed (but highly specific)
audiences. His imagined “networks” ranged from consumer service to government
communication and included others in between: travel, training, finances, and executive recruitment (Billboard 1970a). While the development of small, homogeneous, and
strategically important audiences was common to film cartridges before the EVR, the
practice also increasingly defined broadcasters’ attempts to capture the attention of
smaller, more lucrative elite audiences in the 1970s (Dawson 2007, 538). However,
although the EVR might claim relation with broadcasting vis-à-vis the scale of network
reach and connectivity, the machine’s claims to institutional efficiency and expansion
rested on far more expert narrowcasting enabled by cartridge technologies.
Although their kinship was not promoted like the EVR’s association with the LP—
doubtless to avoid giving their most direct competitor press—the film cartridge was
the EVR’s closest relative, passing on its genes via shared protocols and material
design. The EVR, however, established its newness and distinguished itself from film
cartridges through its televisuality. On the one hand, EVR ads suggest that the associations people hold with television as popular entertainment make it more effective as a
teaching and communications medium. “More personal than 16 mm film,” the EVR
“holds the attention and interest” of viewers by exploiting the “inherent fascination”
young people have in television; put otherwise, “people like to watch television . . .
your salesmen might bring in extra business if they spent more time watching TV”
(Business Screen 1970). On the other hand, when the EVR sought a leader position
amid an already messy format war between film cartridges and a similarly crowded
video market on the horizon, Brockway used CBS’s deal with 20th Century Fox for
1,500 feature films duplicated on the EVR for home rental as his trump card; the
EVR’s dual capacity as an industrial and consumer technology reinforced its potential
as an already omnipresent communications juggernaut. These twined facets of the
EVR, its ability to mimic film cartridges’ controlled management of content and audiences while remaining televisual in its intimacy and scale, proposed a point-to-point
version of television as a precise communications instrument for education, work, and
sales sustained by affective efficacy.
EVR as Print
One of the more radical capabilities of the EVR developed convergences with the oldest form of mediated communication. Although commenters likened the EVR to “published TV” and books “in the form of moving pictures” to make sense of the difference
between video’s re-record capabilities and the EVR’s software ambitions, the CBS
device also contained the unique capability to store traditional print information—a lot
of it (Canby 1970, 32; Knoll 1972, 10). Unlike existing video, which lacked pausing
capabilities, and traditional film stock, which burns if stuck in a projector gate, the
EVR’s still-frame capacity for microfilm-like storage allowed users to hold on any one
of its reel’s 180,000 frames as long as desired. Just as one might return to an earlier
chapter, skip a section, or use an index, users could use rapid reverse, fast forward, and
track switching controls to “seek out” information stored on any one of the cartridge’s
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numbered frames. A crawl mechanism allowed users to move frame by frame—or
page by page—through the entire cartridge. The content suggested to best exploit such
affordances included books, diagrams, equations, blackboard charts, and illustrations
that could either be interspersed with moving images or fill an entire cartridge (Gould
1968, 38; Wren-Lewis 1968, 46). Although the EVR’s ability to store diverse materials
impressed institutional onlookers, it was the “almost limitless” magnitude of these
capabilities—over five hundred books on a single 7-inch cartridge, for example—that
led to predictions that it would dramatically affect traditional print repositories and
filing systems (Canby 1970, 31; C. Smith 1970, 27).
The print-television hybrid mirrored CBS’s corporate strategies. During the EVR’s
development, the communications giant was strategically acquiring diverse holdings
in education and information fields. In 1967, CBS purchased Holt, Rinehart &
Winston, an educational firm that netted $70 million annually through its publication
of textbooks, novels, nonfiction, periodicals, and handbooks. By 1968, the conglomerate’s CBS/Holt group also included two film companies creating educational audiovisuals and the CBS Learning Center, which “researched methods for educational
application of CBS products and services” (Barron’s National Business and Financial
Weekly 1968). Combined with CBS’s Broadcasting, Film, and Columbia (music)
Groups, these holdings provided CBS with “deep resources” for EVR programming
(Rosenblatt 1971). Indeed, one of the earliest publishing deals for the EVR was signed
by the CBS-owned W.B. Saunders Company, a publisher of medical books, correspondence courses, and audiovisual aids (Canby 1970, 31; Goldmark 1973, 172).
CBS’s own holdings, however, comprised a fraction of the print materials destined
for the EVR. Other interests experimented with television’s “print” possibilities, most
regarding the EVR as a moving-image supplement to traditional titles. Popular Science
Publishing, for example, developed series based on content in Popular Science and
Outdoor Life (Billboard 1970b). The New York Times likewise envisioned programming for the EVR—beginning with a series for schoolchildren—as a means to expand
the reach of their “informational resources” to a variety of consumers, from librarians
to business professionals (New York Times 1968). Not all projects were based on preexisting properties; the Computer TeleJournal “magazine” planned to feature “articles” on data processing for closed-circuit television screenings at relevant plants.
Although little besides vocabulary ties the TeleJournal to print forms, its advertisingsupported revenue plan recalls the already hybrid magazine sponsorship model made
famous by NBC’s Today (The Wall Street Journal 1969).
While these intersections between the EVR and print played with the content, form,
and ideal audiences of television, others imagined more ambitious uses for text-based
cartridges. Goldmark’s promotion of the EVR as a content storage system crystallized
in his plans for a massive (but unexplained) video reference book called Knowledge
EVR (Goldmark 1973, 201). Others likewise pointed to the economy of a system that
could make the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica available on a single cartridge for less
than $15 or suggested the educational benefits of reading a book on the home TV
(DeMott 1971, 40; Gould 1968, 38). Pursuing the logical conclusion of the EVR’s
substantial and relatively inexpensive storage capacity, Goldmark predicted “great
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libraries of special film containing much of the world’s information . . . available
across the country” (Goldmark, quoted in Rubinstein 1976). The EVR—and by extension, television—was not only a new venue for traditional publishing interests, it was
an entirely new way of storing, distributing, and exhibiting printed materials.
When Goldmark proposes that the EVR is “the greatest communication revolution
since the book,” his enthusiasm of the novel nevertheless invokes continuities—on the
level of content, industrial organization, economic models, audiences, and affective
meanings—with domestic entertainment television and broader information, publication, and content storage systems used across leisure and labor contexts (Goldmark
quoted in DeMott 1971, 40). The publishing industry made a logical ally for an increasingly non-discriminatory outlet for content boasting significant storage capacity that
desperately needed content (that did not compete with broadcast holdings). Furthermore,
the target markets already developed within the print world translated nicely to CBS’s
pursuit of increasingly specialized audiences. Despite this emphasis on print, however,
CBS classified the EVR within the cutting-edge research of the CBS/Comtec Group
responsible for “developing and applying communications technology in education,
industry and the home” (The Wall Street Journal 1967). Often invested in supporting
what participants referred to as the “knowledge industry,” these efforts frequently
played with emerging and not-quite-possible technologies, searching for new avenues
for interactive and interconnected communications (Jones 2000, 80R4).
EVR as Interactivity
Unlike the three previous continuity lenses, “interactivity” is not a specific medium so
much as it is a cluster of technological affordances articulated to a variety of media
that concern some sort of reciprocal engagement either with or through a particular
device. Presaging 1990s’ masculinist discourses recuperating the “feminine” passivity
of television through virtual reality (Boddy 2004, 69–70), EVR’s promise of “a new
age, that of manipulable television, TV under the viewer’s direct personal control,” led
to prognostications that ranged from the individual’s customization of content to democratic participation (Canby 1970, 31, emphasis in original). These conceptions, however, relied on different technological underpinnings. Customization was based in
time shifting and alternative programming enabled by uncoupling television from
broadcasting while the dual-track capabilities of EVR cartridges led others to promote
its “infinite possibilities for visual instruction” wherein programs split complementary
information, for example, questions and answers, between tracks (C. Smith 1970;
Yarborough 1971). Alongside pause, rewind, fast forward, and random access, the
EVR as an interactive teaching machine promised users greater “involvement” in their
media, considered crucial for improved learning (Yarborough 1971).
In addition to serving as a home entertainment technology, a skilling machine, and
a rather bulky e-reader all on its own, the EVR was pulled into persistent cultural fantasies (Jenkins 2006, 16) concerning Frankensteinian black box technologies that
cobbled together existing machines—in the EVR’s case, display monitor, keyboard,
video, picturephone, cable hookup, TV antenna, online processing capabilities, and
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even a printing function—to create an “all-purpose home communication terminal”
offering “all the information services ever envisioned”: electronic paper and mail
delivery, information banks filled with all varieties of content, two-way communication, video playback, computer-aided instruction systems, online information processing and management, and, of course, advertising (Martin 1977, 4–8; O’Connell et al.
1969, 37; Parker 1974, 4). In these and less totalizing visions of interactive technologies that paired the EVR with a couple devices, the EVR functioned primarily as a
mechanism for storage and retrieval, sometimes—TV monitor assumed—supplying
the “terminal.” Despite its prominent associations with cable—understood as a twoway communication technology—the EVR operated chiefly as a “library” that users
could sample at will whether they owned a player or not (Gould 1970c, 21; Isenberg
1970). This mode of “interactivity” offered an intensified version of the customization
hailed by television’s critics—one that capitalized on EVR’s capacity to manage
print—by sketching out a technology that allowed users to access any published content at the moment desired.
This hyper-individualized “interactivity” with all-purpose information machines
translated to interactivity with larger social systems when their two-way affordances
enabled content sharing and communication among users. The EVR—incorrectly categorized under videotape—appeared in plans for Instructional Television Systems (ITS)
as a medium of “delayed instruction” delivered to off-campus students and supplemented by “talk back” sessions during a faculty member’s office hours (Martin-Vegue et
al. 1971, 947–48). More extensive plans envisioned the EVR as part of a democratic
information resource—a “public information utility”—that could store massive quantities of information “at public expense in the public interest” and would “guarantee to
every citizen the right of access to both the sending and receiving ends of a major
medium of public communication” (Parker 1974, 4). The most radical plans for the
EVR’s role as a technology of social connection saw it as a means to overcome geographical distances between people and maintain or reshape the spread of populations
(O’Connell et al. 1969, 33–34; C. Smith 1970, 27). These possibilities are most clearly
identified by Goldmark in his New Rural Society (NRS) project, the HUD-financed
program of research and development he followed (potentially during and) directly after
EVR’s “failure.” Although the EVR preceded NRS in its execution, the latter plan—the
“culmination of a life’s work”—incorporated EVR-like technologies to pursue goals
Goldmark entertained since 1968 (Goldmark 1973; W. D. Smith 1972). Using sound and
video recording, satellites, cable, “faxmail,” educational broadcasts, and other experimental technologies, Goldmark hoped to solve urban overpopulation problems by transforming resource-poor rural areas into desirable living communities through technologies
that attract businesses and make high-quality medical services and education at a distance possible. A radical intensification of EVR’s interactive black box logics and its
distributive potential, NRS believed technologies could (re)distribute people.
Imagining EVR’s interactivity as part of larger communication systems sought
radical transformations of television’s informational and social connectivity capabilities. While on a broad scale, the marriage between the EVR, computing, and cable
shaped television into a vital instrument for education, business, medicine,
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and citizenship, for individual users, such black box systems promised a new way of
managing and accessing information as well as communicating with others. As part of
a new communications center for business and the home, discourses surrounding the
EVR presaged both home computing and the Internet—quite the feat for an unsuccessful home video format.
EVR as TV
Reflecting on its failure, Ellis Rubinstein, the editor of IEEE Spectrum, suggested that
“EVR was a radically new technology—too new, in a sense, for everyone involved
with the project” (Rubinstein 1976, 96). More than a singular failure of home entertainment technologies, the EVR is a spectacular series of failures that touched on a
variety of aspirations regarding the possibilities of electronic communications held by
a range of intermediaries occupying different sectors. By focusing on the EVR as a
threshold format, rather than a failure, we can use an analysis focused on continuity
and divergence to better account for how the EVR occupied a transitional position
along several different avenues of technological development. Doing so reveals that
the EVR was not so new as its proponents suggested.
Following Jonathan’s Sterne’s suggestion to trace the histories of “possibilities”
(Sterne 2003, 2), we can pursue these strands—the EVR as a phonograph, film cartridge, print, and interactivity—to locate how different sectors undertaking what appear
to be far-removed communications projects were all engaged in laying out new possibilities for television by experimenting with other technologies, content forms, exhibition practices, audience formations, uses, alternative temporalities, and information
management functions. While other case studies are needed, attending to threshold formats may well be one strategy for better understanding the underexplored role that
non-entertainment industries and institutions (hospitals, hotels, business, government,
education) hold in the development of emergent technologies and media practices. The
convergent thinking that defined the EVR’s newness alongside its claims on older technologies reveals little about how user cultures used the device, but much regarding how
these intermediaries were engaged in efforts to produce the conditions for certain kinds
of convergent media practices that break down distinctions between work, learning,
and leisure demanded by reigning industrial and educational interests and the emerging
“knowledge industry.” This short-lived process both reflects long-standing corporate
engagement with convergent media and presages the capitalist underpinnings of contemporary convergence (Andrejevic 2011; Driscoll and Gregg 2011).
Allowing our familiarity with histories’ successes to obscure our understanding of
its failures risks shortchanging those technologies—and their supporters—that entertained ambitions far greater than those we attribute to them now. Under the guise of
failure, the EVR—when remembered at all—is regarded as a home video format.
Much like obsolescence (Henning 2007), the “failure” of the EVR as it is constructed
historically has been manufactured through the establishment of equivalences among
small-format video players. Such equivalences render the EVR’s most radical potential irrelevant while simultaneously setting the stage for subsequent technologies to
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claim newness in ignorance of their continuities with threshold formats and the cultural desires that animated them.
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1. I wish to thank Jeremy Morris, Sarah Murray, and the anonymous reviewers for their
insightful comments and suggestions as well as Sue Topp and Drew Davis for their generous assistance during my visit to the Motorola Solutions, Inc. Legacy Archives.
2. A fog surrounds the extent to which the EVR (Electronic Video Recording) was put
into operation, when, and by whom. The 1971 figure comes from the above-cited CBS
advertisements.
3. Many of the promotional materials I consulted come from the Motorola Solutions, Inc.,
Legacy Archives Collection, Consumer Products, Teleplayer, and Electronic Video
Recording System series (MSLAC). Subseries are indicated via abbreviations PA
(Promotional and Advertising Materials) and NR (News Releases).
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Author Biography
Kit Hughes is a doctoral candidate of Media and Cultural Studies within the Department of
Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she researches useful and
orphan media, television history, and archival theory and practice. She is currently completing
a dissertation on the rise of television as an industrial and workplace technology. Her work has
appeared in Media, Culture & Society, American Archivist, and Film Criticism.
581383
TVNXXX10.1177/1527476415581383Television & New MediaOswald and Bailey
Restarting Static: Television’s
Digital Reboot
2016, Vol. 17(1) 62–79
DOI: 10.1177/1527476415581383
tvn.sagepub.com
Kathleen F. Oswald1 and Wm. Ruffin Bailey2
Abstract
This article examines the digital television (DTV) transition with particular focus on
technical protocols, political and legal decisions, and home hardware. Considering
the great potential for redefining television in the digital medium, we highlight ways
in which television was “rebooted” rather than reinvented. Without the technical
constraints that shaped analog television, many carryovers to DTV can be ascribed to
social rather than conventionally technical influences and stakeholders. Three themes
emerge from our analysis: (1) a technocratic discourse that favored resolution
over reception as central to broadcasting as public service, (2) an inadequate public
information campaign and failure to explore the range of opportunities presented by
the digital format, and (3) a rearticulation of the home theater assemblage to cope
with DTV through replacement-driven obsolescence. We argue that approaching
DTV as a “reboot” serves as a model for investigating digital transitions more broadly
in a new model of public service.
Keywords
television, DTV, digital transition, analog, Raymond Williams, obsolescence
Cord-cutting—the process of forgoing traditional cable service—has become increasingly popular as the cost of cable continues to rise and consumers turn to Over the Top
(OTT) Internet content providers such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. Over the past
five years, the number of exclusively over-the-air (OTA) households has been on a
steady rise: a 2013 press release from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB;
2013) reports that the percentage of OTA homes had risen to 17.8 percent in 2012 and
1Villanova
University, PA, USA
Services Network, Inc., SC, USA
2Engineering
Kathleen F. Oswald, Villanova University, Garey Hall Room 28, 800 Lancaster Avenue, Villanova, PA
19085, USA.
Downloaded
from tvn.sagepub.com at Sakarya Universitesi on December 18, 2015
Downloaded from
http://www.elearnica.ir
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19.3 percent in 2013, with minorities and the eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old market
leading the trend. In 2009, that number was closer to 10 percent, and a fundamental
shift was happening in broadcast television (dtv.gov).
Although viewers are increasingly interested in what OTA content has to offer, the
shape of digital television broadcasting (DTV) did not become a subject of extensive
popular, congressional, or scholarly debate, nor was there a market-based standards
war akin to VHS versus BetaMax or HD-DVD versus Blu-ray. Instead, the DTV protocol was determined through discussions between industry powerhouses, the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC), and the National Telecommunications and
Information Administration (NTIA). This is not unusual: the shape systems take are
often dictated by those who create, maintain, and own them rather than those who use
them. James Carey (1989, 209) explains that the ideologies used to justify technological systems often originate from “professional engineering societies, universities, and
research laboratories” rather than the public. We argue this technocratic bias was at
work in the articulation of DTV at the expense of public comment.
Despite widespread awareness of the transition, a lack of public education left 1.5
million OTA viewers unprepared at the time of the transition in 2009 (Nielsen 2009).
The new scheme also resulted in smaller broadcast footprints that reached fewer viewers—Lisa Parks (2013, 10) notes that the FCC knew in advance of the transition that
11 percent of full power stations would reach 20 percent less viewers postswitch—a
direct result of the new digital signal, which is less resilient in the face of topology,
interference, and structural features such as buildings and trees. “Public education”
efforts surrounding the transition were not centered on these limitations in reception,
instead promising that DTV would deliver higher resolution, bringing us a step closer
to our better digital future.
“Digital media” is becoming a communication monopsony for new media and
media remakes, and it is worth clearly distinguishing DTV from other digital streams.
OTT programming—programming delivered through an existing Internet network—
comes from a number of providers, including conventional networks, satellite, and
cable companies, as well as recent entrants such as Netflix and Hulu. For this article,
DTV refers to the federally mandated digital transition in U.S. terrestrial broadcast
television, referred to in public education campaigns as DTV, the DTV transition, or
simply “the transition.” We argue inadequate public education efforts, largely in the
form of television PSAs, helped drive the ambiguity surrounding these terms.
Furthermore, promotions urging both OTA viewers and traditional analog cable and
satellite subscribers to upgrade to paid digital HD packages further complicated matters.1 As we illustrate, this lack of understanding often resulted in unnecessary equipment upgrades, new cable or satellite subscriptions, and changes in equipment and
services made by cable and satellite viewers unaffected by the DTV transition.
Although the transition was signed into law as part of the 2005 Digital Transition
and Public Safety Act, the motivating factors for DTV date to the mid-1990s and were
initially articulated in two ways. It first needed to provide “High Definition” television, with increased audio and video fidelity. Second, the new system had to more
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efficiently use existing spectrum to free space for emergency first responders and private-sector auction. The settled date for the transition was February 17, 2009.
A soft launch in Wilmington, New Carolina, in September 2008 presented the transition team with a sense of the challenges they would face with a national deployment.
It quickly became apparent that although the viewing public was aware of the transition, public understanding was inadequate, with many OTA viewers unclear on what
equipment was needed, why equipment stopped working, and where to get a converter
box. This led to the passage of the DTV Delay Act on February 4, 2009, delaying the
switch to June 12, 2009. This article seizes on the OTA DTV transition, a critical
moment in communication history that deserves increased consideration, exploration,
and review.
Exploring Sociotechnical Formation
Langdon Winner (1986, 121) explains that in large-scale systems, “choices tend to
become strongly fixed in material equipment, economic investment, and social habit,”
and in this piece, we interrogate the logics that underpin those choices in the formation
of DTV. Raymond Williams ([1974] 2003, 152) likewise suggests that early decisions
have “extraordinary persistence into later periods, if only because they accumulate
techniques, experience, capital or what come to seem prescriptive rights.” Once decisions become codified in hardware, they endure largely without challenge.
Williams ([1974] 2003) argues that scholars should restore intention to communication research by understanding technology as the outcome of a process of determination, a complex system where many factors compete for influence. In 1974, he
argued that “how the technology develops from now on is then not only a matter of
some autonomous process directed by remote engineers. It is a matter of social and
cultural definition, according to the ends sought” (Williams [1974] 2003, 137), hoping
to underscore how understanding television as a cultural technology highlights the
potential for meaningful social action. Calling for immediate action to influence the
future of broadcasting, he argued the conditions of socially resonant action within a
protocol were “information, analysis, education, discussion” (Williams [1974] 2003,
157).
Understanding television as a process of interconnected determination is crucial to
examining the rearticulation of television from analog to digital. To that end, we
review the implementation of DTV in the United States in relation to technical standards, home hardware, and political aspects of broadcast and reception to reveal the
motivations behind the transition.
Finally, this work intends to jumpstart a lagging scholarly body of knowledge on
DTV. There is a wealth of technical work, particularly in IEEE articles, dealing with
methods to improve reception and interference, from measuring and modeling “airplane flutter” interference at different wavelengths and distances (Wongkeeratikul
et al. 2008) and preventing interference from unlicensed devices (Bendov 2008) to
error correction that improves an signal’s “threshold of visibility” (Ghosh 1995).
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Cultural approaches to the formation of digital television, however, are scarce.
Constance Ledoux Book’s (2004) DTV and the Consumer provides a review of the
transition period between early adopter broadcasters’ dual-broadcasting analog and
digital signals from 1997 through 2004, stopping several years before the drop-dead
transition date. Book’s volume is part collection, part textbook, concentrating on consumer awareness of DTV, descriptions of key technical topics, and sidebars written by
industry insiders extolling the positive potentials of DTV. Lisa Parks’s (2013)
Infrastructural Changeover: The US Digital TV Transition and Media Futures is more
critical, capturing the moment of the switch in excellent detail, exposing its socioeconomic dynamics.
Our expanded analysis shows that the digital transition was marketed as a “reboot”
or “upgrade” of analog broadcast rather than a rebirth, and this melding with the language of digital “progress” is not accidental.2 Like a reboot, where a power cycle can
seem to magically make a broken system work without serious change, much of the
DTV transition unnecessarily retained legacy conventions from the system that preceded it. Such discourses worked to elide public discussion and consideration despite
DTV’s status as arguably the most significant change in broadcasting since the introduction of television itself.
The DTV transition is an example of a public technology changing fundamentally
under the noses of users, without their consent, by people with a financial stake, at the
expense of those who rely on it most. Furthermore, it represents a missed opportunity
to build better media. Through analysis of FCC and NAB documents, public service
announcements, informational websites, news coverage, and conversations, this article explores (1) a government/legal discourse that un/intentionally neglected to carry
out an adequate public information campaign or encourage debate; (2) a technocratic
discourse that favored resolution over reception, promoting enhanced picture and
sound while sidestepping smaller broadcast footprints, interference issues, and the
need in some cases for new reception equipment; and (3) a call to rearticulate the home
theater assemblage through a system of replacement driven by obsolescence.
Rebooting Television
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000, 273) refer to “the formal logic by which
new media technologies refashion prior media forms” as remediation; however, their
emphasis is largely on one medium being translated into or appropriating the effect of
another distinctly different one. DTV recreates television as digital, broadcasting in
the language of zeroes and ones, though it is arguably not distinct from analog TV in
the way that remediation describes. While enabling higher resolution images and
higher fidelity sound (something DTV does), the protocol also makes transmissions
possible that would make DTV distinct: the transmission of any digital artifact, from
the metadata of broadcast schedules, which the DTV protocol includes, to smartphone software updates or digital versions of local newspapers, which it does not.
Although the addition of UHF to VHF or color to black and white broadcasts preserved backward compatibility, DTV reboots television’s reception from scratch,
66
which unquestionably makes possible the novel features we mention above. Instead,
we demonstrate that what changed was merely television’s substrate. DTV’s remake
did not foreground what Bolter and Grusin (2000) describe as an “oscillat[ion]
between transparency and opacity” (19); very little was “refashioned and improved”
(14–5).3 Viewers still receive two-dimensional moving images with sound, tune
broadcast streams using channels, and receive content via radio transmissions as with
the analog system that preceded it.
We therefore argue that DTV was not a remediation but rather a “reboot.” Just as a
personal computer (PC) is rebooted to allow its software to correct major flaws in its
presentation, “reboot” has increasingly been used4 to indicate a reintroduction where
the spirit of the original is preserved while characteristics that are outdated or no longer applicable in the new context are be changed to suit. In contrast to “remediation,”
a reboot “only” replaces the unseen prerequisite, preconsumer substrate—the software, so to speak—that powers that medium. Reboots are replacements in-place: the
character of the medium does not change. Our argument is that these reboots happen
not from a lack of imagination or possibility but because of cultural, largely preconsumer forces.
Bolter and Grusin (2000, 46) remark, “The digital medium can be more aggressive
in its remediation. It can try to refashion the older medium or media entirely, while still
marking the presence of the older media and therefore maintaining a sense of multiplicity or hypermediacy,” and though the potential exists, this “aggressive refashioning” simply does not happen in a reboot. There are simply too many features of DTV
that expose areas where the “spirit” of analog broadcasting unnecessarily remain.5
There is no fundamental shift that would warrant a claim that “one medium might
offer a more appropriate representation than another” (2000, 44). DTV and analog TV
are predominantly, in their consumption, the same. It is precisely on this lack of fundamental change that we focus our attention.
Every digital reboot of a medium is a productive time to study techno-social assemblages precisely because of the clean slate they provide. Although conventions formed
in relation to the material conditions of the original medium may be preserved, it is
important to uncover whether or not they remain necessary to the rebooted medium.
Unnecessary conventions and associations remaining unchallenged after a reboot
expose stakeholders and institutions whose aims were hidden by the overly familiar
assemblages of the past.
Technology as Progress: Resolution over Reception
Robert Graves, Chairman of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC)
Forum, argues that higher quality sound and image resolution was one of the primary
motivations for the switch from analog to DTV in the United States (Graves 1996).
Understanding DTV as happening through a more complex process of determination,
we examine protocols relating to video and sound, transmission, software, and hardware that have shaped and been shaped by the current form of digital broadcast
television. Comparing the chosen system with alternatives demonstrates the extent to
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which the system is not necessarily inevitable, natural, or ideal but rather one possible
result.
DTV was initially conceived as a means of providing high-definition television
(HDTV) and was developed in competition with several analog HDTV protocols.
HDTV development began in Japan in the late 1970s, and in the United States with the
ATSC in 1982, “formed by industry to perform the task of drafting the official standards documents for the winning system” (Reitmeier 1999, 1670). The Japanese
MUSE HDTV system was analog, and used 27 MHz of bandwidth per channel, putting it well outside the FCC’s requirements that a new system not exceed 6 MHz6 nor
interfere with existing analog broadcasts (Book 2004, 32). Proposed analog HDTV
systems were thereby eliminated, but the compression promised in digital proposals
remained. Although five digital methods would be proposed by several groups, eventually, the competing groups would join in a “Grand Alliance” and develop a single
digital HDTV standard whose goal “was to combine the best features and capabilities
of the formerly competing systems into a single, ‘best-of-the-best’ system” (Reitmeier
1999, 1671).
Two existing protocols were used for video and sound, though not without some
controversy. Keith J. Winstein (2002) covered a clear conflict of interest in the selection of the audio portion of the protocol in his article for MIT’s The Tech newspaper,
“MIT Getting Millions for Digital TV Deal.” As three standards were being considered by the Grand Alliance for sound—one from Dolby, one from MIT, the last from
Philips’s Musicam (already being used in European DTV)—Dolby struck a deal with
MIT that both institutions would share royalties if either of their proposed systems was
selected, effectively forming an alliance against Musicam. After the deal was struck,
Jae Lim, professor of electrical engineering at MIT and one of four deciding members
on a panel determining U.S. DTV audio protocol, voted not for MIT’s in-house design
but for Dolby’s. Winstein reported, “Other members of the Grand Alliance cited the
Dolby system’s American roots and its technical superiority over Musicam, not MIT’s
financial interest in Musicam’s rejection, as the likely reasons for Lim’s vote,” yet the
appearance of impropriety is painfully clear (Winstein 2002, para. 11).
The selected system has limitations, and while overcoming them is possible, solutions are still lacking. In a perfect situation—a sort of clean room for DTV reception—
the protocol provides the additional resolution and audio fidelity that might motivate
viewers to upgrade home theater equipment. But while a strong DTV signal has
noticeably superior sound and image quality, it degrades rapidly over distance and
obstruction. This degradation is immediate and severe: rather than analog’s maintenance of a fluid signal partially hampered by static, DTV sound drops completely and
video becomes blocky or freezes, making deciphering impossible. This system clearly
favors resolution over reception. A key feature of the deployment of DTV was a relative lack of citizen education about these and other reception-related issues—and a
corresponding lack of opposition—up and until the switch. These protocol decisions
were largely decided before a public discourse had started, which may explain the
overall lack of attention paid to DTV. To help remedy this shortcoming, we next briefly
discuss how the future of OTA broadcast was decided in technical conferences,
68
industry meetings, and policy with only the most cursory opportunities for public
comment.
A Lack of Public Education and Decision
Although there were at least three major opportunities for discussion—before the 2008
soft launch in Wilmington, North Carolina; after the DTV Delay Act (S.352) was
passed on February 4, 2009; and at the time of the switch on June 13, 2009—lack of
public debate about the transition to DTV is not surprising. This can be attributed to
three interrelated factors: (1) underwhelming public information and education efforts
about the transition, (2) a low percentage of OTA-only households, and (3) a prevailing discourse of technical superiority that framed DTV as a step in the inevitable
march of technological progress.
Although public service announcements warned viewers that they could lose
their signals, efforts did not encourage discussion or educate viewers about changes
inherent to DTV. The emphasis was not on options and technological compromises
but instead operated via coercive inevitability, as expressed in the text of a spot
from a station local to Charleston, South Carolina: “Get the facts on DTV so you
won’t miss a single episode of Judge Mathis” (WTAT Licensee 2009, 4). The transition was non-negotiable. Viewers’ only possible responses were capitulation or lost
access.
Nearing the initial transition date, the FCC urged passage of the DTV Delay Act
(S.352) on the grounds that efforts in consumer education and support were uncoordinated and inadequate. In the months after the passage of this act, the FCC, NAB, and
other organizations involved with the switch increased efforts to avert a public relations crisis. Where early television spots warned that the lack of a converter box would
mean no programming for the OTA viewer (placing responsibility on the viewer), it
was not until the time surrounding the Delay Act that PSAs explained smaller broadcast footprints could mean costly antenna upgrades and that some viewers would lose
channels regardless. Even this new warning only implicitly admitted that a DTV signal
would be more difficult to tune than its analog predecessor.
Even in the months following the delayed transition, there was little public opposition to the switch, partly explained by inadequate public education about DTV. It is
important to underscore the difference between education and awareness, as many
viewers were made aware that a change was occurring but did not receive the education necessary to understand if and how the switch would affect them. DTV.gov reassured cable and satellite viewers that they would not be affected and made documents
available on the website to help OTA viewers ensure continued viewing. This passive,
self-serve, digital technical support for the obsolescence of an analog broadcast technology reached an ironic subset of those most impacted by the transition.7
Despite public education campaigns, a converter box coupon program, and the
DTV Delay Act, 1.5 million households were still unready for the transition a month
after the switch on June 12, 2009 (Nielsen 2009). Lisa Parks (2008) explains that in
addition to elderly populations, a multicultural viewership was also affected, with the
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FCC listing transition information in more than twenty languages from Amharic to
Yupik:
That this array of languages appears suggests that ethnic communities might be
particularly impacted by the transition. Some of these communities have historically
received local over the air programming in their own languages. Whatever the case, there
have always been multiple “televisions”—whether the standards are analog or digital—
shaped in part by the various communities that arrange and use the technology. (Para. 4)
Further evidence that the transition affected television viewers unequally comes from
a Nielsen (2008, 2) Report, showing that in 43.7 percent of households where TV
access was solely OTA, the annual household income was less than $25,000 per year.
Historically considered last in infrastructure deployments such as electrification, telephone, and cable, rural areas were perhaps hardest hit by the transition. DTV poses a
variety of challenges in rural areas, including poor transmission and lack of alternatives
such as cable. As Brian Depew explains (entry posted February 2, 2009, on The Blog for
Rural America), “Digital signals drop off abruptly at the end of their range, whereas
analog signals fade out gradually,” making what were once distressed yet accessible
analog signals completely inaccessible. In sum, inadequate public information efforts
assured viewers that they could continue watching with the aid of a converter box (or
new television) or would need to subscribe to basic cable with their current sets, trading
the immediacy of forced upgrades for a monthly payment (more for less).
Potentials
First, it is important to understand that signal loss is not a technical requirement inherent to digital transmission. DTV signals carry digital payloads as with content served
on the Internet, though digital television’s zeroes and ones are received in a different
manner than those of a PC. When a browser loads a web page, it coordinates with a
web server to ensure that it has received the full message that was sent—any dropped
or imperfectly received sections can be requested and re-sent. A television, as a passive receiver, does not include any means of re-requesting dropped information: it has
to get it right the first time.
Forward error correction (FEC) anticipates this issue by sending the same information multiple times, reducing reception errors with redundancy (Mohr et al. 2000,
821–22). Increased redundancy in DTV broadcasts would provide the digital tuner
with the opportunity to restore broken messages by combining duplicate streams,
resulting in fewer blocky or dropped DTV signals. Sound could be transmitted in a
number of fidelities, also with greater redundancy, allowing a low-fidelity but ultimately constant audio feed for poor reception conditions. In 2011, the “Final Report
on ATSC 3.0 Next Generation Broadcast Television” included a section on FEC protocols already at use in China, stating, “FEC coding is the key to delivering high data
rates at low [carrier to noise] values” (p. 15). In other words, FEC is essential for highquality reception, and the first DTV standard missed the mark.
70
A digital broadcast also provides the potential for interesting hybrid systems: a
television connected to the Internet could, for example, check and see if it has completely received broadcast content, and efficiently supplement data not fully received
OTA with data from the Internet before display. OTA signals could also be used to
transmit digital content, such as local newspapers or popular YouTube videos. Users
could then seamlessly supplement such broadcast content with their own choices from
the Internet. When the broadcast payload is digital, any kind of digital artifact can be
sent.
As ATSC Forum chairman Graves (1996, para. 3) remarked in 1996, “Besides dazzling pictures and stunning sound, HDTV will give consumers a high-resolution display and a huge data ‘pipe’ that can deliver a host of other information services.”
Constance Book (2004, 48) explains that, in 1995, the ATSC Grand Alliance “move[d]
forward with an interoperable system that allowed entertainment, computer and technology industries to work together,” and these PC-style interactions were part of Glenn
Reitmeier’s introduction of DTV in 1997 that included interfacing the new broadcast
format directly with PCs. In a 2009 report, Acting Chairman of the FCC Michael
Copps suggested that after the implementation of DTV, spectrum could be used to
provide broadband Internet to underserved rural areas (2009a). Although rural affairs
advocates looked forward to rural broadband via broadcast as Copps had suggested,
such features have not been attempted.8
Book (2004, xii) observed in 2004 that with the exception of some early computers
that used televisions for output, the home theater (particularly with respect to OTA)
and the PC largely developed on separate tracks. The High-Bandwidth Digital Content
Protection (HDCP) protocol’s license agreement regulates the creation of devices that
provide content via High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) ports, including
Blu-Ray players, most gaming consoles, and many PCs and mobile devices. It demands
that “Licensed Products shall be designed and manufactured in a manner that is clearly
intended to effectively frustrate attempts to discover or reveal Device Keys or other
Highly Confidential Information” (Digital Content Protection 2002), largely and
effectively preventing content sharing between the home theater and PC. Internet–
television integrations began in closed gaming platforms (Netflix and Wii) and set-top
boxes (Roku or Apple TV), partly because of the difficulty of transferring streaming
content from a PC via HDMI to the television. This changed with the advent of the
smart television, which adds capabilities beyond a tuner and a display, effectively putting a set-top box inside the TV. Although DTV is accessible on smart TVs, Internet
functionalities are not integrated with broadcasts beyond toggling between applications. What if DTV viewed on a smart TV added director commentaries and interviews—standard DVD and Bu-ray special features? What if an author being
interviewed on PBS could send the first chapter of their book to viewers?
These and other aspects of DTV (including extending Super HD and 3D programming to users) can be changed by tweaking protocol. Unlike analog broadcast standards—fixed to ensure backward compatibility for eighty years—DTV has a built-in
contingency for changing protocols and formats through versioning (DTV 2.0, 3.0, 4.0
. . . ). Where a black and white television from the 1930s could display VHF
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broadcasts in the United States even in the last days before the transition, today’s DTV
converter box and digital tuners could be rendered obsolete much more quickly
through versioning. The ATSC DTV Standard explains that “existing decoders will
automatically ignore new [DTV versions]” (ATSC 1995), making it easy for broadcasters to obsolesce the home theater with minimal change to broadcasting
hardware.
We present these missed opportunities and limitations to suggest that while DTV
was framed as enabling a better way of watching television—high-definition (HD)
programming, station multi-casting, more surround sound choices—the full range of
possibilities of the digital were not explored. PSAs were less about public information,
instead serving as promotion and hype for newly manufactured hardware in a down
economy.
Processing the Transition
In the 1970s, Williams saw cable as an opportunity to reboot television, including the
possibility of adding upstream capabilities; instead, cable programming in the United
States largely focuses on niche consumer markets rather than geographic locales.
Although an exhaustive discussion of cable is outside the purview of this article, this
progressive approach to the potential of television in part underlies the legitimation of
the digital reboot. We have mentioned some of the public service and consumer benefits of the switch, including enhanced audio and video, “multi-casting” that has provided consumers with more channels of programming,9 and the possibility of using the
digital stream to offer content as varied as users can access via traditional Internet
providers. Even with these in mind, we argue that this implementation of DTV contradicts the idea of serving the “public interest, convenience and necessity” through
shrinking broadcast footprints, necessary equipment upgrades, and the FCC’s inability
to attract investors to newly open spectrum.
Understanding the focus on resolution over reception requires considering the transition from the perspective of broadcasters. Gigi Sohn, a member of the Advisory
Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of DTV Broadcasters, convened in 1997
by Vice President Gore, explains that the importance of owning wireless television
broadcast spectrum paradoxically became a means to mandate carriage by cable providers. Having a high-power, OTA local broadcast ensures providers are covered by
the “must carry” ruling in Turner Broadcasting v. FCC (1994), which stated that cable
companies must carry, without surcharge, each locally broadcast OTA station to every
cable subscriber. “Must carry” was later extended in a weaker version to satellite
broadcasts by the Satellite Home Viewer Acts of 1988 and 1999.10 This puts OTA
networks in a powerful position, ensuring that their OTA content could be forcefully
made accessible to the widest audience.
In a 2008 presentation, Sohn not only identifies the potential driving power of
“must carry” but also suggests completely divorcing the must carry/OTA connection.
To help maximize the potential of available electromagnetic spectrum, Sohn notes
there is no longer a technological reason to pair a single station with one
72
analog channel’s worth of spectrum, as broadcasts can now share the same channels
with digital encoding. Although Sohn does not make the comparison, DTV encoding
and transmission is similar to WiFi’s: broadcasts can share spectrum in a manner similar to the way many WiFi networks can share the same unregulated bandwidth without
undue signal degradation and interference. Although traditional analog radios and television tuners did not have a reliable method of parsing multiple signals on overlapping
or identical frequencies beyond the use of directional antennae, digital broadcasts
make spectrum sharing feasible. Although there was a limiting materialism involved
in the interference experienced by analog transmissions (the same materialism that
arguably restricted earlier radiophones and amateur radio broadcasts before the Radio
Act of 1927), the “one broadcast, one channel” fix continues to unnecessarily limit
DTV.
The weaknesses discovered in the U.S. DTV implementation make more sense in
this context of “must carry,” as the ruling positions OTA broadcast and subsequent
reception a secondary issue, structurally subservient to the goal of reaching the over
60 percent of American households that receive cable.11 When interpreting the Radio
Act of 1927 to define the “public good,” the Federal Radio Commission (and its successor, the FCC) initially concentrated not on content but rather on what system provided the best reception. With DTV, the measurement of “public good” has now shifted
to that which provides the greatest resolution. Thanks to “must carry,” reception in the
clean room of cable is certain, and high-resolution OTA—affected by real-world degradation by planes, wind, and time of day—becomes an afterthought.
The Home Theater Assemblage: Rise of the Flat-Screen,
Death of the VCR
Williams ([1974] 2003, 140) cites color television and the portable television as examples that capitalism drives the creation of new consumer durables, predicting that “the
major development of the late seventies may well be the large-screen receiver: first the
screen of four by six feet which is already in development; then the flat-wall receiver.”
He reasoned the new sets would “mainly strengthen the existing large-network television institutions which, as in the case of colour, will undoubtedly develop programmes
to promote and exploit them” such as subscription services that distribute movies and
sports events (Williams [1974] 2003, 145). Although Williams’s forecast of flat-wall
receivers did not come to fruition until the late 1990s and early 2000s, the insight is
nevertheless valuable: flat panel televisions have been promoted either directly or
indirectly through HD cable, Blu-Ray, HD gaming systems, and HD OTA programming. Although PSAs informed consumers that they could continue to receive a signal
on their current television with the addition of a converter box, the HD advantages of
DTV associated with the conversion only “benefit” the viewer if they have access to a
home theater with a particular set of relatively high-end features: an HD display, surround sound, high-powered multi-directional antenna, and digital video recorder
(DVR). The benefits touted in the public information campaigns require substantial
upgrades, begging the question, “Who was this system designed to benefit?”
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Oswald and Bailey
It is hard to argue the subjective value of HDTV. The detail of HDTV calls to a
viewer’s eye in ways the previous system never did, asking for closer visual review of
everything from newscasters’ complexions to trash blowing across a sports field. If
DTV is a means to providing this, there will be little argument against the system from
those who get this content via cable, satellite, and other subscription-based means of
transmission that are able to provide more reliable bandwidth and reception than current terrestrial, OTA signals.
The market striation of OTA and the cost of new hardware offers a stark contrast
between digital haves and have nots. Taking socioeconomic and geographic data into
account, it is hard to imagine that those for whom the purchase of a new antenna and
subsidized converter box is a nontrivial expense (remembering that consumers most
affected by poor reception are in rural and urban areas) would be able to afford a flatscreen TV and surround system. Viewers were no longer able to receive programming
using the same set of rabbit ears that successfully tuned analog broadcasts from the
same station. Instead, a significantly more expensive, multi-directional roof mounted
antenna might now be required, which may still result in poor, rapidly degrading
blocky reception or no signal at all.
A basic cable subscription provides a less shocking up-front outlay for those without the means to upgrade their home theater, and upper tier subscriptions likely appeal
to those who can, pushing both toward dependencies on paid providers. Although all
the transition demanded was a digital tuner, the realization of all DTV has to offer calls
for a more radical alteration to the home theater assemblage: more advanced reception
equipment, a wide-screen television, and a 5.1 surround system. Old hardware was
forced out because of its tenuous connection to DTV: the mere replacement of the
tuner quickly expanded to a call to upgrade the display and time shifting devices such
as the VCR, perhaps hardest hit by DTV.
As the name “converter box” suggests, what DTV renders useless is not the television’s screen so much as its tuner, which must decode the digital feed from OTA television broadcasts. Converter boxes decode the DTV signal and convert it to a lower
resolution analog signal that older televisions are designed to display. VCRs contain
an internal tuner separate from the TV’s own tuner, which is what made it possible to
watch one show while taping another. Unfortunately, the transition meant that VCRs
could no longer tune OTA content either, and the ability to program recordings was
lost. To record a broadcast at a specific time would require a DTV converter that either
communicated with the VCR (and VCRs were not manufactured in a way that allows
this to happen) or a converter box that could itself be programmed to tune different
channels at different times, synchronizing these streams with a VCR programmed to
begin taping concurrently. Of the converter boxes reviewed by Consumer Reports
(2008), only four of the forty-three enabled such synchronized, timer-based channel
changes. Even with those four, recreating the equivalent of the pre-DTV home theater
required that both television and VCR have external digital tuners,12 and viewers
would have to program both the converter and the VCR to record.
Strangely, the DTV converter box coupon program strictly forbade combining
DTV tuners with the ability to time warp content, preventing DTV-ready VCRs and
74
other recording devices from receiving the government subsidy. The Deficit Reduction
Act of 2005, which included the law covering the converter box coupon, included the
following section proscribing all but a very limited, very specific definition of the
boxes:
DEFINITION OF DIGITAL-TO-ANALOG CONVERTER BOX—For purposes of this
section, the term ‘‘digital-to-analog converter box’’ means a stand-alone device that does
not contain features or functions except those necessary to enable a consumer to convert
any channel broadcast in the digital television service into a format that the consumer can
display on television receivers designed to receive and display signals only in the analog
television service, but may also include a remote control device. (120 Stat 24, emphasis
added)
The Department of Commerce interpreted this law to mean that “Video or Audio
recording or playback capability such as VCR, DVD, HD-DVD, Blue Ray, etc.” were
“disqualifying features” for coupon-eligible hardware. Nor could the hardware include
outputs that included “Digital Video Interface (DVI); Component video (YPbPr);
High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI); Computer video (VGA); USB IEEE1394 (iLink or Firewire), Ethernet (IEEE-802.3), Wireless (IEEE0802.11)” (Code of
Federal Regulations, title 47, sec. 301.7), many of which would have allowed reception by a PC and the PCs’ use as potential time shifting hardware. With the costly
proposition of upgrading home hardware, consumers experienced another nudge from
analog to the highly regulated realm of DVR. Presented as an almost natural successor
to the VCR, the DVR often requires another monthly service charge, makes sharing
recordings especially difficult with the absence of easily removable physical media,
and, when paired with an Internet connection, conventionally data mines viewing habits, reporting to providers what is watched and when.
This uncoordinated13 use of DTV as a free-floating legitimator14 for the development of noninteroperable consumer durables makes the motivations for change in the
home theater more difficult to surmise than the effects. These shortcomings invite
speculation and research: Who designed and benefited from the federally subsidized
converter box program? Why were constraints prohibiting time shifting placed on
hardware qualifying for the subsidy? Who designed the letter that arrived with the
coupons, which mentioned boxes could be purchased at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and
Radio Shack? Why were converter box manufacturers not required to provide a builtin interface for changing channels, much less an extended warranty that would match
or exceed the life span of the televisions they would be connected to? According to
DTV.gov, only 34,879,001 of 64,104,514 $40 converter box coupons were redeemed
by their expiration date of November 19, 2009. What happened to over a billion dollars in vouchers that were never cashed in? Affordable converter boxes were difficult
to find right after the end of the coupon program; did viewers buy new TVs as prices
dropped and the subsidy disappeared?
An October 2008 Nielsen Report on DTV readiness suggested viewers would
switch to a subscription service or buy a new television: of transition methods for 583
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surveyed sets designated “un-ready for the digital transition” on March 2, 2008, only
25.2 percent were later made ready with the addition of a converter box. Of the remaining methods, a switch to cable comprised 23.2 percent of sets, satellite service 13.7
percent, and the remaining 37.9 percent of sets were removed or replaced (Nielsen
2008, 8). All options required some expense, but viewers opted three times out of four
for a more expensive option.
If nothing else, DTV sold new television sets.
Conclusion
Digital will do for television what it has done for every other communications technology
it touches—make it better, more efficient, more interactive, more competitive, and more
exciting than ever before. The world is going digital, and I have no doubt that over-the-air
television had to go digital as well. It’s a win-win for consumers and for the long-term
health of the broadcast industry. (Statement, Michael J. Copps, June 13, 2009b)
With initial arguments in support of DTV ranging from making new frequencies available for emergency first responders to auctioning “white space,” we are left at the end
with a statement reflecting the unarguable awesomeness of digital technology. Yet five
years later, many of the novel functions digital broadcast enables have not been implemented or even tested on U.S. viewers. Television has become more efficient, with
more data taking up less space on the airwaves, but there has not been a public conversation about providing stations less (or more or shared) spectrum on their channels.15
Television has not become more interactive, save the “interactivity” required to understand the technicalities of a home theater now obsoleted by converter box installation,
VCR obsolescence, and antenna issues. The digital transition has made television
more competitive as viewers realize that OTA broadcast can offer image and sound
quality superior to that of cable, and cut the cord, but overall, the digital reboot has not
been exploited much beyond providing fault-intolerant higher resolution content,
sometimes with additional lower resolution multi-casts, in the same amount of
spectrum.
This article examined DTV, highlighting some of the paths not taken to complicate
the question of whether or not, as “public education” initiatives implied, DTV is better
by virtue of being digital, or, as Copps boldly claimed, that this shift was necessary.
We hope this article serves to append to the record to reflect that DTV was not in all
cases a “win-win” and to demystify assumptions that technological progress equals
social progress. The reboot was largely a retrenching of the same determinisms that
preceded it.
Williams’s ([1974] 2003) hopes for television—from improved public service to
increased opportunities for alternative programming—have not been realized.
Discussing the balance between public service and commercial interests in Television,
he explained that commercial interests have weighed most heavily, from the choices
made for protocols through to the end result in home hardware. Despite wide uptake
of Television in television studies, more than thirty-five years after Williams’s call for
76
scholars and the public to champion positive social change in television, the digital
transition happened with little public involvement or discussion, much less debate.
Analog died not with a bang, nor a whimper, but static.
We hope DTV can serve as an example of how processes of digital conversion use
public service as an enabling discourse. What we find in this reboot, however, is rather
a redefinition of public service that ends in obsolete consumer equipment and increased
profit margins for connected industry powerhouses and equipment manufacturers. We
argue Williams’s analysis of television should not serve as a history, doomed for repetition, but instead as a way of thinking beyond the technical, beyond high definition,
and beyond the digital.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1. Cable and satellite digital transitions are business decisions not mandated by the government and are unrelated to the OTA DTV transition.
2. Parks (2013) comments, “DTV transition PSAs and outreach campaigns celebrated equipment upgrades and “switching over to digital” as if they were civic duties” (p. 9).
3. This is not to argue that a case for circular influence between computers and televisions
cannot be made. Constance Book questions why these screens diverged, particularly when,
at least briefly in the late 1980s, a single screen was often shared.
4. This broader use of the term reboot to represent replacement-in place has extended well
beyond any connection with digital artifacts: notable examples are popular film franchises
(Spiderman, Batman, Superman) and children’s programming (The Electric Company, Mr.
Roger’s Neighborhood/Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood). In the reboot, the spirit of the original remains, but the social context and the artifacts’ ability to cope with that context have
the potential to change significantly.
5.FCC created http://reboot.fcc.gov specifically addressing “rebooting” U.S. digital
infrastructure.
6. A spectrum width that matched current analog channels. This is an example of a legacy
holdover rather than a technical constraint in the protocol’s formation.
7. There was also a toll free number (1-888-DTV-2009), but the message was, essentially,
“If you’re not particularly technical, help yourself learn how to use DTV by going online!
Easy!”
8. It is worth noting here that Copps and Depew (“The Blog for Rural America,” entry posted
June 16, 2009) wrote about using television spectrum rather than a television broadcast,
though the potentials do overlap, just as the topics do in Depew’s post.
9. It is unclear whether multiple feeds from the same network are more advantageous to viewers or advertisers.
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10. In brief, satellite providers are not forced to provide local OTA broadcasts and can charge
a premium attached directly to the service.
11. And the approximately 20 percent of homes using satellite television.
12. We use the “digital tuner” rather than the term converter box simply because the latter is
misleading. These devices are no more devices for “conversion” than the analog tuners
they replace, which decoded an analog signal for display: they are simply external inline
replacements. Using a trick common as the earliest home video game systems, “converter
boxes” produce an analog output on a certain channel (typically 3 or 4), allowing even the
oldest black and white television to display content.
13. Here simply meaning, “without orchestration,” rather than “ungainly,” as the ability to so
efficiently close the door on analog’s benefits for the purposes of institutional surveillance
is anything but clumsy.
14. “Particular terms come to take on such significance that they can be used to justify nearly
any truth claim across numerous discourses to justify a vast array of initiatives, plans,
responses, and resistances.” See Packer (2010) for a more detailed discussion.
15. The codification and immutability of channels, themselves no more than a measurement
of radio space in the air, are, in part, a preservation of the status quo enforced through congress and the courts.
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Author Biographies
Kathleen F. Oswald is an adjunct instructor at Villanova University with research interests in
smart infrastructure, cyberwar, mobility, and television. She received her PhD in communication, rhetoric, and digital media at North Carolina State University in 2011.
Wm. Ruffin Bailey is a scholar-programmer with interests in the forensics of digital media,
software design, and open protocols. He is currently a senior software engineer with Engineering
Services Network, Inc. contracting on-site at the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems
Command, Charleston, South Carolina.
601212
TVNXXX10.1177/1527476415601212Television & New MediaPayne and Alilunas
Regulating the Desire
Machine: Custer’s Revenge and
8-Bit Atari Porn Video Games
2016, Vol. 17(1) 80–96
DOI: 10.1177/1527476415601212
tvn.sagepub.com
Matthew Thomas Payne1 and Peter Alilunas2
Abstract
Exploring the short and largely forgotten history of adult-oriented 8-bit video
games produced for the Atari 2600 home game console, this essay argues that the
games represent an important attempt by media producers to bridge the adult film
and interactive entertainment industries. Although American Multiple Industries,
Playaround, and Universal Gamex failed to establish a market, their titles nevertheless
demonstrate how adult games function as desire machines within an erotic economy
that sells a host of anticipatory pleasures. Indeed, the resulting public outcry not
only led to the game industry’s first sex-based controversy, but the antagonism
signals the desire to regulate sexual expression on a new media technology as game
producers—following the lead of adult video professionals—attempted to transport
users’ joysticks from living rooms into bedrooms.
Keywords
video games, Atari, pornography, regulation, moral panic, Custer’s Revenge
Will Custer have his sweet revenge? Or will he get it in the end?
—Game box copy, Custer’s Revenge (1982)
When it appears as more than a passing footnote in popular video game histories, the
story of Custer’s Revenge (1982) is often presented as a cautionary tale about a young
industry behaving badly.1 Produced for the Atari 2600 home video game console by
1The
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA
of Oregon, Eugene, USA
2University
Peter Alilunas, School of Journalism & Communication, University of Oregon, Allen Hall 236, Eugene, OR
97403-1275, USA.
Downloaded
tvn.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 18, 2015
Downloaded
from from
http://www.elearnica.ir
Payne and Alilunas
81
American Multiple Industries (AMI), Custer’s Revenge was remarkably simple in its
design: one plays as the pixelated titular general who, sporting little more than a waving
bandanna and an erection, scores points for dodging arrows while approaching a naked
Native American woman tied to a cactus (Figure 2). According to the game’s promotional literature, upon his successful arrival at the cactus, Custer “evens up an old score,”
which is to say he rapes the woman, gaining more points with each thrust (“The Brouhaha
over X-Rated Video Games” 1982, 145). Not surprisingly, given this conceit, the game
quickly became emblematic of the immaturity, violence, and misogyny that detractors
saw lurking within video games—especially as it unfolded just as a minor panic erupted
about video games being hazardous to children. The deluge of negative press that accompanied Custer’s Revenge even before its official release, stemming from protests by
Native American and feminist groups, became the industry’s first sex-based controversy.
Nevertheless, the brief, mostly forgotten story of Custer’s Revenge and the other 8-bit2
adult-oriented games—those developed by AMI, its successor Playaround, and one title
by Universal Gamex—remains marginal in media history.
These games, and their brief occupation of the national consciousness, are more
than novelties; however, their history—as taboo media objects and as political flashpoints—reveals the basic, erotic economy underlying all video games, or as Tanya
Krzywinska (2012, 158) calls them, “desire machines.” To be clear, these games were
neither sexual aids nor were they “erotic” in any obvious sense. They existed in a curious space in which they did not necessarily function in the same ways as more traditional pornography. For instance, they did not possess realistic graphics, nor did they
offer gameplay mechanics facilitating “haptic inattention” to free gamers’ hands for
masturbation or sexual behavior with others (Ruggill 2004), in the way adult films
played back on VCRs permitted. There were likewise no immersive erotic narratives
(as there were in some text-based multi-user games), or complex game systems transforming lust into quantifiable and manageable resources (Brathwaite 2006). Instead,
these games presented crudely “sexualized” arcade mechanics largely derivative from
extant titles, reconfigured to add salacious elements that might appeal to adult audiences curious about the potential of video games to deliver pornographic content.
This raises significant questions about pornography itself and what makes something “pornographic” in the first place. As Susanna Paasonen (2011, 80) describes,
“pornography sports the ‘authentic presence’ of arousal and orgasm with the aid of the
documentary powers of photography and cinematography by promising to convey
indexical traces of the events that have taken place.” In the case of these 8-bit games,
there were no indexical traces, no “authentic presences,” and certainly no documentary renditions of anything resembling “reality.” There were only pixels, moving
around screens, vaguely gesturing toward juvenile associations and connotations with
sex. Such suggestions were not only aggressively marketed by the games’ creators but
also seized upon by those seeking to regulate their dissemination, rendering the need
for “authenticity” somewhat moot. Ultimately, the graphically abstract rendering of
the games gave them a polysemic quality, allowing them to sustain readings and
dissimilar interpretations fueling debates ranging from what makes for good game
design to what constitutes free speech.
Downloaded from tvn.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCION on December 18, 2015
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This essay returns to late 1982 to examine the production and distribution histories
of Custer’s Revenge and the short run of 8-bit games, highlighting how these titles
became overdetermined taboo objects that functioned less as desire machines than as
controversy machines. As Eric Freedman (2007) writes,
Atari’s origin story is often written as a series of annual reports, tracing the company’s
financial demise—a tale of changing ownership and managerial missteps; but the more
interesting tale is found in the deceptively simple narratives that played out on its consoles
in family rooms across the nation.
Moreover, the historical parallels between the adult film and video games industries’
respective migrations from public to private spaces during this time remain striking.
Consider the similarities: both forms of cultural production that had been publicly
consumed and, in the case of arcade games (and some pornography), performed in the
open view of others in (typically) seedy locales on a pay-to-play basis had successfully
migrated from venues of ill-repute to the privacy of home television screens during
roughly the same time period.
Ultimately, the cultural desires in the era to regulate sexual expression on emerging
technologies, alongside the overwhelming failure by the games’ producers to recognize their own missteps in terms of game design and public relations, sent these games
into a rapid tailspin from which they never recovered. Rather than just the problematic
and juvenile gameplay and narratives that have long defined these games, it is also the
acts of regulation that make up their lasting legacy. As Walter Kendrick (1987, 235)
argues, the history of pornography is characterized by “the urge to regulate the behavior of those who seem to threaten the social order.” The makers of these games
certainly fit that description for those seeking to contain such threats. In the end, both
the game designs and regulatory responses were complex and often contradictory,
adhering to what Michel Foucault calls the “rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses.” That is, they were neither, as Foucault describes, “uniform nor stable,” nor
were they necessarily simplistically delineated. “There is not, on the one side,” he
writes, “a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it.
Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations”
(Foucault 1990, 100–102). The competing discourses surrounding the adult-oriented
Atari games of the 1980s embody such interwoven strategies, and the ways in which
social power circulated around the games remain important to capture a clear historical picture of their downfall. Indeed, Custer’s Revenge, along with the other games,
got it in the end—but not in the way their makers had hoped.
“We Want Them Laughing”: Custer’s Origins
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the U.S. public had fallen in love with video
games; in 1978, sales reached $454 million; by 1982, that figure had topped $5 billion
(Donovan 2010, 81). Atari’s acquisition by Warner Communication in 1976 enabled
the console giant to outlast its competition and enjoy vast market penetration during
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the early 1980s. However, with the acquisition came a new, top-down focus on streamlining production (with an accompanying de-emphasis on tinkering) that resulted in a
steady exodus of creative personnel. Four ex-Atari designers tired of not receiving any
authorial recognition left to form Activision and began creating third-party Atari
games. Atari/Warner subsequently sued Activision, and the companies settled out of
court. But this precedent helped establish the current royalty system, and by 1982, a
dozen-plus companies were producing Atari-compatible cartridges (Donovan 2010,
98). The video game industry was booming, and Time captured the moment in early
January 1982 with a cover reading “Video Games Are Blitzing the World,” as new
companies rushed in to seek out and capture part of the growing market share.
It was squarely into this terrain that AMI dropped Custer’s Revenge and its other adultoriented games. Freelance marketing consultant Stuart Kesten—a former marketing manager for Sterling Drug, Inc. and L’Oreal—and Joel Martin—whose background was in
the toy manufacturing industry—created AMI in late 1981 in Northridge, California, to
manufacture plastic storage cases for video and audio equipment (Marguiles 1982b, E1,
E6). After all, with home video exploding in popularity, rental stores needed stockpiles of
the plastic cases to accommodate the increasing crowds streaming through their doors.
Indeed, though fewer than 175,000 VCRs had been sold by 1978, a steep price drop led
to a sales explosion: four million machines were in American homes by 1982 (Cahill
1988, 127–128). Given that adult videotapes made up nearly half of all available content
in those early years, it makes sense that Kesten and Martin would seize on another idea
that would link the “back room” of video stores to the similarly explosive video gaming
market: create the first games intended for adults (Coopersmith 2000, 27).3 Under the
brand name Mystique, they designed a “How to Score” series made up of three games:
Custer’s Revenge, Bachelor Party, and Beat ’em & Eat ’em.4
These games were, ultimately, an attempt to transport users’ joysticks from living
rooms into bedrooms, much as adult video companies were doing at the time with
various home video formats. Given this, AMI licensed the “Swedish Erotica” brand
name from Caballero Control Corporation (CCC), a veteran adult film production
house and successful video distributor. AMI no doubt hoped that many of the same
consumers familiar with CCC’s videos would be willing to try adult games.5 Licensing
the “Swedish Erotica” label was, according to Kesten, intended to “help give the
games credibility with video outlets that are used to selling [CCC’s] video cassettes”
(Marguiles 1982b, E1). The games would retail for $49.95 (equivalent to $122 in 2015
dollars), $10 to $15 more than most other titles, following the tradition of adultoriented material commanding a higher market price (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015;
Coopersmith 1998, 94). AMI began publicity efforts in the fall of 1982, with a goal of
releasing the three titles in time for Christmas.
The games themselves were obvious, deliberate variations on familiar and recognizable Atari titles. Much like the decision to license the “Swedish Erotica” label, this
strategy not only allowed AMI to push the games into the market quickly but also
eliminated much of a learning curve for players. For example, Beat ’em & Eat ’em is
essentially Kaboom! (Activision, 1981), only instead of catching bombs dropped by
the “Mad Bomber” into buckets, the player’s objective is to maneuver two nude
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women beneath a man ejaculating from a rooftop. When all the semen is caught, the
two women lick their lips, and a new level appears. Similarly, Bachelor Party is
simply a re-skinned Breakout (Atari, 1976). But in lieu of striking colored bricks with
a bouncing Pong-style ball, a nude man bounces around the screen careening into nude
women. At the beginning of gameplay, the man has an erect penis, which gradually
decreases after these “sexual encounters,” before rising again for a new level.
Given the obvious sexual nature of these games, however rudimentary and crude
their actual visuals and gameplay, AMI knew that they faced a specific obstacle in
their quest for market success, namely, distributing and marketing a product clearly
intended for adults in a landscape overwhelmingly associated with children’s entertainment—even if it was not just children actually playing the games. As publicity
efforts began in earnest in October 1982, Kesten tried to mollify potential concerns
alongside the standard marketing pitch: “Our object is not to arouse; our object is to
entertain. When people play our games, we want them smiling, we want them laughing.” He continued, “If the kids get hold of them, it’ll be ok. There’s nothing wrong.
They’re cartoonish; they’re tongue-in-cheek adult situations that are not offensive—
except to the player when he doesn’t score enough points” (Marguiles 1982b, E1). In
fact, AMI went even further as the release approached, saying that the games would
not be sold to minors—a somewhat hollow promise, as that decision would be made
by individual retailers (Wise 1982, 7).6 All of this conspicuous public outreach put
AMI in a somewhat contradictory position: using the “Swedish Erotica” label to attract
customers familiar with CCC’s pornographic video offerings was a deliberate attempt
to position the games in a specific adults-only context, even as the company was entering a market aimed almost entirely at children and families. Yet none of this deterred
AMI, which planned to have 750,000 units of the three games on the market before
Christmas, and two-dozen additional titles for sale by the end of 1983. Kesten boasted
to the press in mid-November 1982 that “AMI will become the nation’s second-largest
video cartridge firm behind Atari” (Graham 1982, 110, 115).
If AMI’s initial efforts to build buzz around the games had gone somewhat smoothly,
the company’s next move was an unmitigated disaster. Planning to debut Custer’s
Revenge at the National Music, Sound, and Video Conference in mid-October 1982,
AMI invited “members of local area women’s groups and American Indian organizations to preview the game before the show opened,” an audacious combination of
invitation and provocation that put AMI squarely on the national radar (Wise 1982, 7).
On October 14, protesters from various women’s and Native Americans’ groups gathered outside the New York Hilton where the show was being held, along with members
of the press happy to capture the burgeoning controversy. Michael Bush of the
American Indian Community House of New York told reporters that the game
provided “a reinforcement of the stereotyping of American Indians as something less
than human,” while Robin Quinn of Women Against Pornography argued that, in the
game, “rape is not only a legitimate form of revenge but a legitimate form of entertainment” (“Atari Trying to Halt X-Rated Video Games” 1982, 88; Haberman and Johnston
1982, B3). AMI did not backpedal in its subsequent response but instead inflamed
tensions further, with a company spokesperson arguing that Custer’s Revenge featured
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“consenting video images.” He added, “Besides, it’s not that literal. With Atari figures,
you’re limited with how explicit you can get—they’re cruder than cartoon characters”
(Haberman and Johnston 1982, B3). AMI’s attempt to defuse the controversy backfired dramatically and disastrously, and put the games even more squarely before an
increasingly suspicious and wary public.
Not surprisingly, Atari weighed in the following day, with Atari’s consumer electronics division president Michael Moone lamenting AMI’s decision to create and market the
games. In a statement, he said, “Unfortunately, some individuals take refuge behind
certain legal precepts to the dismay of the majority of the people” (Marguiles 1982a,
H1). Two days later, the game giant said it would take legal action against AMI to keep
its games off the market, for failing “to adequately disassociate itself from Atari, thereby
capitalizing on Atari’s name and trademark” (“The Brouhaha over X-Rated Video
Games” 1982, 145). Kesten responded to the growing furor, calling the protests and legal
threat “amazing, since they have not seen the games.” He continued, “The purpose of the
games was not and is not and will never be to offend anybody. I think they are making
more out of it than it deserves” (Marguiles 1982a, H1). By that point, however, the fact
that nearly no one had actually seen the games mattered little; as with pornography in
general in the early 1980s, the perception of danger dominated the discourse.
Indeed, just as AMI was in the midst of these challenges, another powerful voice
decrying video games joined the conversation. On November 9, 1982, during a speech
on family violence at the University of Pittsburgh, United States, Surgeon General C.
Everett Koop expressed concern that video games might be hazardous to the health of
children, claiming that they were becoming addicted “body and soul.” Noting that he
had no specific evidence to back up the claim, Koop nevertheless maintained that
video games could lead to adverse mental and physical effects and incite children to
violence (“Surgeon General Sees Danger in Video Games” 1982, A16). Reaction from
game manufacturers was swift, with industry groups calling for an immediate retraction; Atari Chairman Raymond Kassar told reporters, “We are appalled,” and the
National Coin Machine Institute sent a telegram to President Ronald Reagan characterizing the incident as “an uncalled-for witch hunt.” Koop issued a statement saying
his remarks were representative only of his personal views, but refused to retract them
(Blustein 1982, 10). The damage, however, had been done. The game industry, along
with its escalating sales and public popularity, was now associated with encouraging
and inciting violent behavior in children.7
For AMI, what followed was a series of legal actions, beginning with Atari filing a
lawsuit for perceived intellectual property infringement. Specifically, Atari believed
its customers would associate AMI’s products with Atari’s brand despite the disclaimer
on the game boxes that read “Mystique is not affiliated with Atari, Inc.” (see the bottom of Figure 1). “Several people have written to us that they are distressed that Atari
would be doing this,” noted Atari’s attorney Kenneth J. Nussbacher. “People have
been telling us they are going to throw out our products.” Yet, he was also aware of the
constitutional issues involved, claiming the company wanted to avoid First Amendment
battles by limiting the suit to trademark concerns—a creative workaround, given that
the real anxiety was over content (“The Brouhaha over X-Rated Video Games” 1982,
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Figure 1. Box art for Custer’s Revenge (1982).
Source: atariage.com.
Figure 2. Screen shot of Custer’s Revenge (1982).
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145). As the New York Times correctly pointed out, Atari’s actions could be seen as an
emblematic response to broader tensions regarding the encroachment of pornography
onto new consumer technologies such as the VCR and cable television (“The Brouhaha
over X-Rated Video Games” 1982, 145). In Atari’s case, that meant stemming the tide
as quickly as possible to restore an aura of “decency” to its brand. Indeed, Moone,
claiming that Atari was receiving some 1,500 complaints per day by mid-November
1982, told People that “we’ve built a business on family entertainment. We want those
games off the market” (Graham 1982, 115).8
Lending their considerable weight to the public discourse surrounding the growing
controversy were the various feminist groups that had been involved from the first
protest outside the New York Hilton. Indeed, at the 1982 National Organization for
Women convention, copies of a petition protesting Custer’s Revenge were distributed
to representatives of more than eight hundred local chapters. When Ms. Magazine
covered the controversy, noting NOW’s involvement, AMI continued its disastrous
public reactions pattern, with a company spokesperson claiming that Custer’s Revenge
was “strictly for fun. These little . . . figures are not doing violence to women. The only
thing that might be construed as violent is tying an Indian maiden to a post and ravishing her, but he doesn’t beat her first” (Hornaday 1983, 21).9 Such statements, along
with the strong associations between children and games, turned the company’s products into a political target extending beyond feminist mobilization.
In the United States, a handful of local governments used “the family” as the basis
for regulatory action. In October 1982, the Oklahoma City Council passed a resolution
denouncing Custer’s Revenge and other adult games as “distasteful” and “not in the
best interests of the community” (Paschal 1983). Also in October, Suffolk County,
New York, legislator Philip Nolan held hearings to determine whether or not the adult
video games posed an “imminent danger to the health and safety” of county citizens
(Rather 1983, 6). In mid-November, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors,
after testimony from the County Commission on the Status of Women, voted to draw
up an ordinance banning the sale of certain adult video games deemed offensive to
American Indians and women, and planned to ask the State of California to ban such
games as well (Michaelson 1982, D4). For AMI, the tide had irrevocably turned, and
the plans to capture a massive market in time for Christmas were all but doomed.
In a last-ditch attempt to restore credibility and reduce legal scrutiny, AMI filed suit
against Suffolk County on November 30, 1982. AMI sought $11 million in damages,
claiming that the county had violated its constitutional rights and deterred distributors
from ordering the game. Attorney John Weston (who had represented the adult film
industry in similar legal actions) warned that AMI would be “vigorous” in pursuing
legal action against similar efforts to prohibit sales of the company’s games (Baron
1982, E1). Neither side, however, gained much traction: AMI dropped the suit in
February 1983, and Suffolk County never progressed beyond the idea stage in terms
of regulating adult video games (“Long Island Journal” 1983, L13). By that point,
however, AMI’s overall efforts had already come to a complete halt. In early January
1983, AMI discontinued distribution of all the adult games, including Custer’s
Revenge. Kesten’s final commentary on the matter was more of the contradictory mix
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that had defined AMI’s efforts: “The publicity was just so negative that it was interfering with our company’s business.” Yet, as if to backpedal one last time, he also noted
that stopping production of the game “was the proper thing to do” (Paschal 1983).
With that, AMI retreated permanently from the video games market. But Custer’s
Revenge and the other games did not go with them.
Custer’s Redux: Playaround and the “Double Enders”
Following AMI’s decision to discontinue Custer’s Revenge, JHM, Ltd., the Hong Kongbased manufacturer, found a new distributor for the “How to Score” series in early 1983.
California-based GameSource would market Beat ’em & Eat ’em and Bachelor Party
under their label Playaround. Hoping to foreclose some of the publicity turmoil, and in the
process raising the bar on the “desire machine” patina surrounding the issue, GameSource
also decided to package the games in a faux-leather case (inside the regular game box),
with a miniature lock and key, ostensibly to keep children from having access, but also
creating an aura of erotic desirability which did not emanate from the gameplay itself.
Most of all, aware of the disastrous negative publicity, GameSource distanced itself
from the toxic Custer’s Revenge and its media circus. Spokesperson Richard Miller
wasted no time getting a statement to the press:
We are 100% in favor of good sexual fun between consenting video images, but no
company would want to be associated with either racism or violence toward women.
Such things have no place within the context of a video game. (Marguiles 1983, G7)
Curiously, this vociferous rejection of the game extended only to the American
market. Despite GameSource’s public statements, the company continued to distribute
the game in international markets with a few modifications. Custer’s Revenge was
renamed Westward Ho, and the Native American woman’s hand now waved in a
“come hither” gesture as the General approached. That simple gesture (along with a
slight wobble of her breasts each time the hand moved) was apparently enough to ease
GameSource’s concerns about “racism and violence toward women,” and to create an
aura of “good sexual fun,” at least for international consumers.
But this was hardly the only misdirection and attempt to manipulate the media and
consumers. In fact, the entire “new company” narrative was all but fabricated—and
not very well, as a Ms. Magazine investigation discovered (Skurnik 1983, 27). The
president of Playaround was none other than Joel Martin, Kesten’s partner in AMI,
and JHM, Ltd. stood for “Joel H. Martin.” Playaround was created to make the withdrawal announcement, dampen some of the controversy, and keep the games on the
market. Martin had clearly bought out Kesten’s share of the company (minus the
Mystique name and Swedish Erotica licensing) and crafted a narrative to make it
appear as if a new, completely unrelated company with a commitment to responsibility had taken over the games. Indeed, even Miller’s “consenting video images” statement had been crafted by AMI’s publicists (Skurnik 1983, 27). It was an inauspicious
reset.
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Figure 3. Playaround’s distinct “double-ender” cartridge design.
Along with the misdirection attempt, Martin’s Playaround also left an indelible
historical mark with a fumbling attempt to create adult games intended for women.
Indeed, Playaround’s legacy must surely be defined by the production of the “doubleender” game cartridges and their intended purpose. Named for their distinctive design,
these long cartridges offered players two different games, accessible simply by turning
the cartridge around and re-inserting it into the Atari system (Figure 3). Physical
design choice was merely the beginning: the game pairings were made so that there
was ostensibly a title designed for heterosexual men and another for heterosexual
women. Playaround’s impulse might have been to eradicate charges of sexism that had
plagued AMI by creating something “for” women (even if only to stabilize the market
by alleviating criticism), but the result was a bizarre, oddly constructed set of game
premises that further illustrate the distanciation from traditional erotic material, as
well as the difficulty of combining 8-bit technology, sex, and gameplay (to say nothing
of the attempt to manufacture a niche erotic game market for adult women).
The key to the “double-enders” was a simple inversion of the characters and ludic
activities, making it easier to create a second game. For example, in international
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markets, Westward Ho was “flipped” as General Re-treat, in which the Native
American woman, here given the name “Revenge,” approaches a bound Custer, dodging cannon fire, before having sex with him. Bachelor Party was flipped as Bachelorette
Party, with a simple gender inversion of the characters marking the only difference.
Beat ’em & Eat ’em was flipped as Philly Flasher. In this version, nude men stand
below a lactating woman, catching her milk drops, concluding with masturbation and
ejaculation upon level completion. This effort to force the mechanics of the original
game into a flipped version resulted in simultaneously juvenile and fetishistic scenarios that reveal the difficulty of 8-bit adult game design.
Playaround also created three new titles, which were then also flipped. Jungle
Fever and its inverted version Burning Desire features a nude man (or woman) hovering from a helicopter dodging stones thrown by cannibals while trying to save a man
(or woman) from being consumed by flames. By ejaculating (or lactating), the player
extinguishes the flames. Cathouse Blues—flipped as Gigolo—offers a slightly more
elaborate narrative. A licentious man (or woman) dodges police and muggers while
visiting brothels, paying in each one for sex with prostitutes. Knight on the Town or
Lady in Wading, the least “erotic” of the new titles, follows a knight building a drawbridge across a moat to save a princess (or prince), all the while dodging a dragon,
alligator, and gremlin. These new games were not offered on the same “double-ender”
cartridges, but were instead distributed in odd pairings.
Once again, this effort was no more than the re-skinning of already derivative
games. It is unclear whether the revamped packaging, the double-ender design, and the
“new” game offerings were elements that Martin carried over from Mystique—but it
certainly seems possible. Nevertheless, the point remains that the marketing and game
design were equally clumsy with attempts to force vaguely erotic elements into traditional game mechanics—ejaculate and breast milk, most frequently—being indicative
of poor game design and strange depictions of the sort of “traditional” sexual behavior
that was ostensibly the goal. Playaround’s ham-fisted attempt to create a women’s
market by gender-swapping the avatars was an abject failure, as was any attempt to
generate even a modicum of sophomoric humor. In addition to their crass offensiveness, as critic Tim Moriarty (1983, 19) noted at the time, the games were also poorly
designed to the point of triggering actual player boredom. For Playaround, there was
an entire community of players that was being ignored. But women were not asking
for these games; in fact, it seemed nobody was asking for them. GameSource shut
down the Playaround line shortly after initiating the deal with JHM, Ltd.
“Somewhere in Between”: Gamex and X-Man
This situation changed slightly in 1983 with Universal Gamex’s X-Man, which had no
connection to Marvel’s X-Men comic book. Created by Alan Roberts, a former director
of industrial and softcore adult films, the player in X-Man must navigate a nude man,
replete with 8-bit erection, through a Pac-Man-like maze containing moving scissors,
teeth, and crabs (Figure 4). If the player can reach the door at the center of the board, the
screen changes to a wide profile view of what the game manual called “a sexy surprise.”
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Figure 4. Screen shot of Universal Gamex’s X-Man (1983).
There, the player controls a blocky man having sex with “the sexy blonde” woman for
thirty seconds (X-Man Game Manual 1983). Each subsequent completed maze level
offers a new “sexy surprise,” with different sexual positions awaiting the player. Although
it is difficult to argue that Roberts’ X-Man is a well-designed game or that it offers engaging or erotic play, it is nevertheless an interesting attempt at pairing game mechanics and
a scoring system with a premise in ways that the previous games failed to achieve.
A few observations should throw its gameplay differences into further relief. First,
X-Man sports a modest complexity of design (again, relatively speaking) where one
must navigate challenges on one screen before arriving at another. This did not exist in
previous, single-screen adult games. Second, instead of presenting the sexual union
between the woman and the (X-)man as the endgame, the 8-bit coitus in the second
gameplay screen presents yet another challenge. The objective during this quasirhythm mini-game is to match the woman’s movements to maximize her orgasms
(visualized by her flashing nipples), gaining points on a “sexual excitement meter”
with each thrust. A countdown timer adds to the tension, with bonus points awarded
for how quickly the player reaches climax. Finally, we see a modicum of symbolic
playfulness absent from the previous offerings in the game’s villains, with the malicious scissors, teeth, and crabs that guard the player’s path clearly playing on fears of
castration, the vagina dentata, and venereal diseases.10
If the previous game makers tended anxiously to teeter between two distinct poles
regarding their games—they were either harmless and fine for children or, like the
Swedish Erotica line, designed for adult titillation—then Roberts showed a surprising
degree of nuance about his creation. He also clearly understood the nexus of technological limitation and pornography regulation, unlike his predecessors. “If pornography is defined as arousing prurient interests,” said Roberts,
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then I have yet to see anyone who has been aroused by X-Man or any other adult game
. . . They don’t fit in with regular games and they don’t fit in with adult movies. They’re
somewhere in between. They’re adult, but they’re not pornographic. (Moriarty 1983, 60)
Roberts was undoubtedly correct. However, given what comprised the “sexy
surprises” of X-Man, that was surely only because 8-bit technology did not allow for
more visually sophisticated renderings. In any case, for Gamex it was too late.
We have not had the full support of the major wholesalers in the U.S. They have designed
corporate policies in many cases in reaction to the bad publicity of the Mystique games.
They have decided that all videogames are naughty. (Moriarty 1983, 19)
Custer’s Revenge had effectively poisoned the well.
Conclusion: The Regulatory Money Shot
If the January 1982 Time cover story captured the excitement surrounding the video
game industry, the fervor was short-lived. By fall 1983, the industry was reeling, suffering from a glut of poorly designed games well beyond the adult titles described here.
Even Atari lost a staggering $536 million in 1983, along with CEO Raymond Kassar,
who resigned in the middle of the collapse (Kleinfield 1983, D4). And while the market
failure of the adult games was a small piece of a much larger economic crisis, it suggests a crucial question specific to their intended genre: what is the “money shot” in
adult video games? This familiar moment of narrative closure in hard-core pornography presents (typically male) visible ejaculation at the conclusion of a scene.11 It captures, as Linda Williams (1999, 101) describes, “the visual evidence of the mechanical
‘truth’ of bodily pleasure caught in involuntary spasm.” The “money shot,” standing in
for the efforts to capture pleasure in mediated form—what Williams (1999, 36) calls
“the frenzy of the visible”—becomes especially relevant for 8-bit video games, and
raises questions about the nature and definition of pornography more generally. Could
an 8-bit game, with all of its technological, representational, and narrative limitations
capture and present this sort of “truth”—particularly in a climactic (both narrative and
sexual) sense?
The answer was no: these games—these desire machines—were not about closure;
they could not be “finished” in the same way as an adult film scene. Nor could they actually depict sexual pleasure, unlike their home video cousins, or offer the kind of “resonance” that Paasonen (2011, 16) describes as “moments and experiences of being moved,
touched, and affected” by what spectators see in pornography. The actual games offered
little more than the idea of sex wrapped up in a shiny new technology. The “money shot,”
as it were, might have been the anticipation of something that, in the end, could never
actually be delivered. That distinction, though, was meaningless in terms of regulation.
After all, as Kendrick (1987, xiii) argues, pornography is “not a thing but a concept, a
thought structure,” meaning the idea of sex was dangerous enough for those seeking to
contain and limit its expressions, however dull and technologically simple. Adult games,
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at least on the Atari 2600, disappeared—but not before they played a crucial and somewhat forgotten role in the cultural regulation of pornography in the early 1980s.12
The rudimentary design and commercial failure of the Atari adult-oriented games
belie their complexity and importance as charged cultural objects existing at the nexus
of technology, sex, and economics. Moving forward, media historians and game scholars should expand Krzywinska’s notion of “desire machines” to include more diffuse
operators and actors beyond the game console or the individual titles. There is not one
but at least three drivers of anticipatory pleasures in this history: (1) the game designs,
(2) the manufacturing and marketing of the carts and packaging, and (3) the controversy, public debate, and ensuing regulation. This last emphasis should continue to
account for Foucault’s “field of force relations” and the ways in which the controversy
occurred in complex and multivalent ways—not least of which was how the game
manufacturers harnessed the commercial power of sexual taboos in the hopes they
would garner the same attention (and success) that adult video was gaining.
Ultimately, the affective power of these games resided not in what was realized
graphically but in what was teased and withheld from view, not just for potential
consumers but critics as well. After all, the overwhelming majority of the public outcry
over the original games occurred in the absence of actual knowledge of the games themselves. If the “money shot” in adult film is the visual “proof” that pleasure has occurred,
then perhaps the climactic event for the adult Atari games was not in the content but in
the regulations that transformed suspect ideas into taboo technologies of desire. The
controversy that surrounded these games is inseparable now from how we understand
their attempts at stoking anticipatory pleasures. Both served as “desire machines,”
embodying Foucault’s (1990, 105–106) belief that sexuality is “a great surface network
in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to
discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another.” Custer’s Revenge and the other adult-oriented Atari
games of the 1980s characterize just such a node on the “surface network” of tensions
and anxieties of the era and, as such, represent much more than a failed and forgotten
entertainment technology. In the end, they symbolize a general desire for regulation and
the disciplining of how sexual gameplay might yet be imagined and configured, however crudely, for newly mediated spaces.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Diane Negra, the editorial staff of Television & New Media, and the
anonymous reviewers for their help with this article
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
94
Notes
1. See, for example, Tristan Donovan (2010) and Mark J. P. Wolf (2007, 110).
2. Technically, the term 8-bit refers to a game’s processor and its capabilities. More frequently,
the term serves as shorthand for the second-generation (1976–1984) and third-generation
(1983–1990) of video game console development.
3. There was one antecedent: Softporn Adventure, a text-based game created in 1981 by Charles
Benton and released by On-Line Systems (later Sierra On-Line) for the Apple II computer
(along with a version for the Atari 800; see Nooney 2014 and “Softporn” 1982, 33).
4. This emphasis on the double meaning of “scoring” runs throughout the games’ promotional literature. AMI planned (but never ran) advertisements in Playboy and Penthouse
that would have boasted, “When you score . . . you score!” further solidifying the framework (Marguiles 1982b, E1; “Video Games are Revealing” 1982, A8).
5. The “Swedish Erotica” line had nothing to do with Sweden; instead, it was a marketing ploy by Caballero to associate its products with the constructed sexual cultures of
Scandinavia that had found cinematic success since the 1960s. See Eric Schaefer (2014,
207–234).
6. Video game retailers still decide what titles are sold to whom, based on the recommendations of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), created in 1994. For example,
major retailers typically don’t sell “M” (for mature) games to those 17 years of age or
younger, and most refuse outright to stock “AO” (adult only) titles.
7. The fears of a connection between media and violence in children that played out during
this period had roots in the comic book crisis of the late 1940s, as described in David Hajdu
(2009). The first similar panic to strike the games industry was in 1976, following the
release of Death Race (based loosely on the film of the same name), as described in Carly
A. Kocurek’s (2012) essay.
8. Moone did not mention that, in 1973, Atari had released Gotcha, an arcade game colloquially known among its developers as the “boob game” for its two pink, breast-shaped
controllers. The game was not successful and did not last on the market long (Brathwaite
2006, 27).
9. Such statements become a rallying point within the antipornography feminist movements of the era, and references to the game appeared in Andrea Dworkin’s Letters
from a War Zone (1986, 317) as well as in the Final Report of the Attorney General’s
Commission on Pornography (U.S. Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography,
1986, 221).
10. From the game box:
Coming at you are the “Crabs” with their claws ready to tear your privates apart. Next come
the “Scissors” whose sharp blades can cut off your manhood. And last are the “Teeth”
who snap with a vise-like grip that will leave more than just marks. Get the picture?
(X-Man Game Box 1983)
11. In his adult filmmaking handbook, Steven Ziplow (1977, 34) describes the importance of
the “money shot” within the industry: “There are those who believe the . . . ‘money shot’ is
the most important element in the movie and that everything else (if necessary) should be
sacrificed at its expence.”
12. Adult games did find success later, beginning with Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the
Lounge Lizards (1987). The wildly successful game, created by Al Lowe for Sierra On-Line,
was essentially a remake of Softporn Adventure with added graphics, and spawned numerous sequels (Morrissette 1999, NP).
Payne and Alilunas
95
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Author Biographies
Matthew Thomas Payne is an assistant professor of Media Studies at the University of
Alabama. He is a coeditor of Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence and Joystick
Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, and has work appearing in “Games and
Culture,” “Critical Studies in Media Communication,” and numerous academic anthologies.
Peter Alilunas is an assistant professor of Media Studies at the University of Oregon. His work
has appeared in Creative Industries Journal, Film History, and Camera Obscura, and is forthcoming in the anthology From Porno Chic to the Sex Wars (2015).

Volume 17, No 1, 2016

Transcription

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