Word: videos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Smith, a straitlaced former anchorman for New York City's WCBS-TV, and Actress Hartley, who once filled in as a Today co-host, engage in strained banter on an elaborately homey set. The show's regular features include personal ads, in which singles promote themselves via 30-second video clips, comedy routines that, good or bad, do not go down easily at 7:55 a.m., and Hartley's dog Daisy, which gets petted a lot. All of this is witnessed by a studio audience that on opening day found even Mark McEwen's weather casts worthy of applause...
Still, the show seems to have an appealing goal in sight: a friendly kaffee- klatsch in the tradition of radio's long-running The Breakfast Club. Some of the ideas work. Bob Saget, the show's announcer and "sidekick," narrated a funny home video of his own wedding. Writers Roy Blount Jr. and Calvin Trillin were on hand with wry commentaries. And a few of the segments (like an interview with a Wall Street executive at the gym where he goes boxing before work) struck just the right, what's-new-this-morning? tone...
...road of progress. But it's just one more intellectual breakdance in a field overrun by rhetorical jivin' and poppin'. After all, abstract painting is a mental art. Since abstraction is the mental process of selection and exaggeration, abstract art requires the intellectual equivalent of a Captain Video decoder ring to translate a picture into ordinary concepts...
...critics claim, it will fail for good capitalist reasons. No one will watch it. When enough people lose enough money in any venture, it dies; 3-D died. At best (or worst), colorization might carve out a market niche for a small group of cultural illiterates, the video equivalent of Classic Comics...
...drags recalcitrant actors from the wings and introduces them by their real names. After angry debate, they undertake to improvise scenes that will define their 1920s Sicilian characters, only to have the speaker break in and say they have talked enough. All the while, an impish man uses a video camera to record the proceedings and simultaneously project them onto a screen at center stage. The cameraman narrates a "documentary" of random black-and-white footage of Sicily, reaching a comic apogee by intoning about Gestalt psychology as the film shows pigs being slaughtered...