Past Entertainment Articles.

Article for the week of 4/12/07

The Colors Controlling life:

Casefile: Monochromatic to Chromatic.

By, Puns McKenna

In the early 1920's we got a wonderful invention called television. That's right! Moving pictures and random entertainment shows brought into our homes. The new idyll used to bring families together in the comfort of their own homes. The first televisions were, of necessity, bulky and awkward. Cathode ray tubes the size of large flowers dominated the interior of that wonderful electronic device; transistors that resembled cucumbers; and least but not least… breadboards. Yep! That's right, breadboards. A breadboard isn't one of those nifty things you slice bread on. Nope! A breadboard is an electronic board filled with circuits and resistors.

So these large boxes with small screens that were televisions became the rage. Some would say that the television that their family had when they were kids would be considered archaic contrivances. Now we have digital feed, large screen universal home theaters. Grand places where even the most humdrum of couch potatoes can settle themselves in for a long afternoon, evening, or any length marathon in front of the "tube".

So where did T.V. get its start? Easy! Monochromatic productions shown on large screens in the local picture houses. Yeah, I know. What a drag, right? Once upon a time we had to go out of the house to watch a new flick. Well, I think we were much better off before television. Sure we had to go out and watch the latest black and white at the local theater. But look at what we got to do. We were out of the house; we were interacting with people, often complete strangers. We were "men about town" so to speak. Then in the late 1950's that all changed. We got the personal, colorized television. And thus the era of the T.V. really began. More and more people would plop down in front of the telly to watch the latest show or movie.

So Hollywood got its big break. They started slowly with the monochromatic jobs. You know those lurking, skulking black and whites with Ernest Borgnine, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and the like. They'd make and show harmless little films designed to make people grow closer to one another. Great date movies and all that so you could take your girl and prove how macho you are.

So when these large antennaed boxes were introduced into our homes, we began to go out less and less. For decades we had monochromatic entertainment. Now for the last fifty or so years we’ve gotten to partake of the chromatic angle. With the colors getting more intense and the scenes more graphic, people are more and more interested in their home entertainment centers than the great outdoors.

Now we get it all. Educational shows, historical shows, entertainments abound. So think about this the next time you watch television. Are the folks in Hollywood really trying to entertain, or are they trying to turn us into fat, dumb, happy couch potatoes?