I’ve got some business-y posts lined up, but it’s Friday, I just got back from Mesh, so I’m both tired and thinking along these lines anyway, and I could probably insert 11 or 12 more excuses if I wanted, but I’m just going to go with this image that’s been in a browser tab for days because I can’t stop thinking about it:
First, the joke: it’s a still from Batman: The Animated Series, where a super-villain named Two Face is looking at a picture of what his life was like before he was horribly disfigured and went insane. And apparently he has a credit or bank card under his super-villain name.
I’m a Batman fan, so I liked the humour here, but here’s the thing, it’s not a Photoshop job, as far as I know – I believe it’s a real still from the show.
Think for a moment about what just happened.
The show aired in the early nineties. Back then, if you were home when it was on, you would watch it (fun fact, I once left an exam early to catch the show. Yes mom, I was done, had checked my work, got an A-, it was just a coincidence that the timing worked out but I like the story better the first, shorter, way, OK?)
If you weren’t home, you could tape it on your VCR, which probably would have been able to freeze frame on that image.
Then if you wanted to share the discovery, there were a few products out that could make a picture from your screen (I remember one that I think used Polaroid film,) but basically you’d have to take a physical picture of the screen, using a camera that tool film, either regular film or the aforementioned Polaroid instant stuff.
And then the only way you could share it would be to, what, fax it around? By which point you might not even have a clear enough image for the joke to work – it’s been taped, paused, filmed, and then converted to black and white by now. And how many people would you know who had both an interest in Batman and a fax machine?
That image was posted 3 days ago and according to imgur, it’s been viewed more than 8,000 times in the last 3 days, at broadcast-level resolution, and that’s just on this one site. I don’t know the circumstances of the discovery, but someone could have spotted the joke, grabbed an image, and posted it in under 10 minutes, easy.
This is the stuff that I try to notice and acknowledge from time to time, but I have to limit it or my head will explode.
We’re living in a world where anyone over the age of eight can have a “back in my day” story, and that window’s shrinking every week. How cool is that?
Leave a Reply