Word: mediums
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...there before the mortal audience was the collision of George Bush and Dan Rather. The two hurled angry clumps of words, and their clumps broke and powdered against each other's gleaming indignation. Not a molecule of coherent information emerged from the encounter -- except the encounter itself. The medium is the message, in Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum. Bush afterward compared the exchange to combat, but if so, it was the combat of Saturday morning cartoons: Bang! -- Poof! Boom! -- Poof! Language disintegrated on impact. When Bush slugged Rather with the line about Rather's once walking...
...above a mere catalog of Great Moments from TV's Past. The uninspired narration does little more than scoot us from one clip to the next ("Dragnet was the first hit police show. It has been followed by a succession of cop shows."), with little insight into how the medium got from there to here. The series focuses, wisely, on programming rather than the business of TV; still, somewhere amid the clips of Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason and Playhouse 90, one longs for at least some discussion of how networks came into being. Nor is there much...
Images do have a way of pushing out ideas on television, but that is no excuse for the intellectual flabbiness of Television. The series concludes with a sober-minded examination of whether the medium has fulfilled its "promise," which here seems to be identified with opera, ballet and Richard Burton reading selections from Dylan Thomas. So much for all those fun clips of sitcoms and game shows we have been watching for seven-plus hours. Television induces us to wallow in nostalgia, then tries to make us feel guilty about...
...caps, are obviously locals. "My brother got me a statue here last week. He thought I'd like it," says one, the soft twang of his western Virginia accent confirming the visual evidence. "I don't. Can I trade it in on something else?" Harper, a stocky man of medium height, thinks a moment, then replies, "I don't see why not. What kind of statue was that, anyway?" "Some kind of mannequin" is the reply...
...them, and showing no mercy. Watchmen has been attracting some heavy Hollywood attention. But a book of this scope can only be scaled down and confined on a screen, no matter how lavishly it is adapted. Graphic novels are cinema for the page, but they are already outsizing the medium they have learned so much from...