The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  “That killed the little bastards,” recalls Edwin Brit Wyckoff, chuckling. Together with the late Harry W. Prichett, his mentor and longtime business partner, Wyckoff created Winky-Dink, and he would like the record to show it, since he has often seen his invention carelessly credited to the show’s host and producer, Jack Barry. Barry, of course, went on to better-known, though hardly better, things: as host-producer of the fifties game show Twenty-One, he was at the heart of the contestant-coaching scandal later dramatized in the movie Quiz Show. Postscandal, Barry spent several years in the exile of Canadian television, returning to something like redemption later in life with the long-running Joker’s Wild. But he probably rued till his death the day CBS canceled the original Winky-Dink, his first and finest hour in the mass-cultural spotlight.

  For Wyckoff, though, the dream never died, and he markets it still. Five years ago, he and Prichett licensed the rights to a Nashville production company, planning to bring Winky back to broadcast TV and into the multimedia age, with CD-ROMs, a Web site, and streaming video in the works. So far, all that’s really come of the deal is a half-hour pilot, available for $9.99 on videocassette—with a Magic Television Kit—from online toy suppliers Bennysmart. Harry Prichett was still actively involved in the project when he died last February, lauded in his New York Times obituary for the brilliance of Winky-Dink but still shy of the kind of recognition one last revival might have won him.

  Wyckoff presses on, however, buoyed in part by the conviction that media culture has at last caught up with his and Prichett’s innovation.

  “With all immodesty, Winky-Dink was seminal,” he says, and in a sense he’s right. Where early television in general failed to understand itself as anything but a medium of the masses, Winky-Dink showed from the start that viewers felt a deeply personal connection to the medium, a connection that the right technology could easily exploit. Long before the niche markets of cable brought the phrase “I want my MTV” into the lexicon, and even longer before the rampantly personalizing Internet littered the media landscape with MyYahoos, MyMP3s, and other such monuments to self-regard, viewers already had the inchoate but deeply held feeling that some little part of the broadcast flow was their own, and Winky-Dink literally gave them a way to get their hands on it.

  By latter-day definitions, of course, the show’s interactivity was essentially bogus: Some young viewers, for instance, were dismayed to discover that when they failed to draw that rope bridge in time, Winky walked across the chasm anyway. But, for most, the illusion sufficed—and spurred them to a far greater level of activity than the one-click pizza ordering dreamt of in most digital-TV philosophies.

  “It was really anti-couch-potato long before the term couch potato,” says Wyckoff. With only a few seconds to draw before the action set in—and as little time to erase before the next drawing was called for—Winky adepts moved at a furious, giddy pace: “Come on, draw this! Now erase this! Oh, for gosh sakes, the pirates are coming! Quick! Run up and build a box so they can’t see him... It was always a kind of urgency,” Wyckoff recalls.

  “The way a game is an urgency.”

  At so fast a clip (and with so young an audience), the drawings were necessarily crude—a stringy squiggle, a simple circle, the outline of a small canister held up by Winky for tracing. But the visual tricks that brought those drawings to life could startle and delight: A simple shift of perspective turned the canister into a rocket ship, a fast-moving background turned the circle into a cannonball—which in turn morphed into a tennis ball when framed by a racket. Between drawing, watching, and drawing again, the dynamic that resulted was a broadly engaging one.

  “You can call it interactive,” says Wyckoff, “but the point is it involves your hands, it involves your little rear end as you wiggle around, it involves your soul, it involves your imagination, and it involves your surprise.”

  Above all, he adds, it involved your sense of authorship. Your circle became a cannonball, the cannonball became part of the story, but its identity, Wyckoff explains, remained linked to your own: “Something happened to my cannonball. Not your cannonball—screw your cannonball—my cannonball.” Stripped to its essence, says Wyckoff, this was the defining reaction to the Winky-Dink experience:

  “That’s mine.”

  PERHAPS THIS INTENSELY PERSONALIZED experience explains why, today, those just joining the growing ranks of Winky nostalgists sometimes seem astonished to discover that the show had any other viewers at all.

  “Since no one I have meet [sic] in the last forty years knows who Winky-Dink is, I have begun to think of this memory as more of a dream,” wrote Tom Dollard recently to the classic-television Web site TV Party, having come upon the pages set aside there for Winky-Dink and You.

  “I am glad to see that I am not alone.”

  Indeed he is not. Messages from at least two dozen other people are quoted on TV Party’s Winky-Dink pages, and second only to memories of getting busted by parents for drawing on the TV screen before the magic kit arrived, the theme that most recurs is the suspicion, in later years, that the show never in fact existed.

  “I ask this question,” writes Ron Davis from Missouri: “Why do so many of us think we hallucinated the whole ‘Winky-Dink’ thing? What was it about that show that made it at once vivid and almost too surreal for accurate recollection?”

  Doubts about the program’s existence are getting harder to entertain, however. Aside from the testimony of ordinary fans like the TV Party reader-respondents, material evidence of the show turns up with increasing regularity in vintage toy stores and on online auction sites. Check out eBay any given week and you’ll likely find some half a dozen Winky-Dink items for sale.

  According to Ed Wyckoff, the show generated over thirty items of merchandise, including records, coloring books, Little Golden books starring Winky, Winky T-shirts, Winky pillows, Winky masks and costumes, Winky phonographs, and Winky-Dink Secret Laboratories, and most of these have traded hands on eBay at one time or another.

  But the staple commodity, of course, is still the Winky-Dink Magic Television Kit itself, as heady a packet of postmodern madeleines as ever emerged from the media marketplace: the crayons, the scruffy cloth eraser, and above all the plastic sheet, whose distinctive acrid-sweet smell was apparently unforgettable and whose adhesive properties were still somewhat mysterious to an age only recently acquainted with Saran Wrap.

  Probably more than anything else, though, what has raised Winky-Dink’s profile in recent years is the ascendance of late-boomer celebrities who caught the second incarnation of the program in their youths and now occasionally give it a name check. Rosie O’Donnell, for one, has been known to sing Winky-Dink’s theme song on her own program, the 1,019th best thing about television. Bill Gates, too, has deemed it hip to acknowledge his low-tech predecessor in the field of interactive TV. And now the show can even lay claim to a certain ghetto fabulosity, its praises having fallen from the lips of none other than rapper Ice T, author of “Cop Killer” and other street-life serenades:

  “I watched cartoons like Winky-Dink where you had to get a special screen to stick on your TV and when Winky-Dink got stuck in a hole, you’d have to draw him a rope,” Ice T told an interviewer a couple years back, talking about his L.A. childhood.

  “It had a song: ‘Winky-Dink and you, Winky-Dink and me, always have a lot of fun together.’ Winky-Dink, man! Winky-Dink was some O.G. shit.”

  THE QUESTION REMAINS, however: Why does Winky-Dink even need celebrity endorsement to confirm its cultural heft? Why, really, has the show not long since ascended into the canon of iconographic Americana, right up there with Marilyn Monroe, the Apollo 11 moonwalk, and disco shoes?

  In one of the Winky-Dink memories gathered on the TV Party site, a man recalls (with what unspoken erotic frisson we can only guess) the spanking he received for drawing on the TV glass with his mother’s lipstick; another remembers that one day the secret word kids were asked to trace w
as the surprisingly arcane sabotage. How is it that such ripe ingredients have escaped the eye of a DeLillo or a Pynchon? How is it that nowhere in postwar fiction do we find a scene in which, sometime in the same year the Rosenbergs were executed, or the same year Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts came to a head, a mother comes home to find the word sabotage scrawled blood-red in a stranger’s hand across the face of her TV set, itself a strange new addition to the domestic landscape? Ed Wyckoff, it seems, is setting his sights low. Instead of angling to recommercialize his baby as the new-media application it always was, he should be working the crowd at PEN functions, lobbying for Winky’s rightful place in the next great American novel.

  And frankly, I wish he would. Because having paid my $9.99 for the videotape version, I have seen the commercial future of Winky-Dink, and I’ll tell you this much: The future isn’t what it used to be.

  Admittedly, my expectations may be a bit inflated here. A late boomer myself, I also witnessed the second coming of Winky-Dink in 1969, but unlike many of my young peers (or the college students who, in a brief campus craze of the time, cut classes to Wink out), I possessed neither the magic kit nor the gumption to play along without it. My apprehension of the game was almost pure fantasy, therefore, and seductive as only pure fantasy can be. The instant I figured out how the “magic” was supposed to work, I was under its spell, yearning to touch the screen and pierce the barrier between the mundane world and the televised one I was already, at the age of six, spending hours of every day in. But after that first viewing I never watched again and did not bug my mother for a kit. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I feared even then that the real game couldn’t live up to my dream of it.

  In any case, by the time I finally got my hands on an official Winky-Dink kit, three weeks ago, the magic had decidedly faded. I smoothed the plastic sheet onto my TV screen, popped in the video (three five-minute cartoons from the 1969 production, plus some fresh-made studio filler), and after all these years got to draw a cannonball of my own into Winky’s world. And what can I tell you? Watching Winky-Dink on videotape in the year 2000 wasn’t anything like watching it on broadcast television in 1969.

  The problem, I can assure you, isn’t that I’ve outgrown the childish yearnings that first attracted me to the show. Nor is it, as some might argue, that media themselves have outgrown Winky-Dink, rendering it hopelessly crude in comparison to the three decades of evolution in digital video games that followed. There’s some truth to the point, but in the end it founders on its assumption that media evolve in a single straight line—that Winky-Dink, that is, was really just a rough draft of Pong and all that followed. It may look that way in hindsight, but as I peeled the plastic sheet off my screen I realized, finally, that what Winky-Dink had long ago promised me was an exquisite intimacy with something newer technologies in fact come not to build upon but to bury.

  By that I mean television itself. And by television I mean, of course, what the good folks at TVLand mean—the sweeping, oceanic flow from which we pick and choose a meaning that is at once uniquely personal and vastly public. Television in this sense is not something you can summon by popping a video in the VCR or clicking a mouse or even surfing through the cablesphere. Its warm, communal glow dissolves into a thing at once colder and cozier when refracted through these newer technologies, all of which have tended toward an ever greater privatization of the viewing experience. Winky-Dink offered a kind of privacy too, to be sure, but it was closer to the privacy of prayer—a solitary communion with something great and universal and anything but solitary itself. And, as I discovered watching Winky-Dink on my VCR, that something doesn’t come when new media call. It can’t be time-shifted or stored-and-forwarded or tailored to your individual needs in any way. It’s simply there when you turn it on, and when you don’t turn it on it’s still there, immutable, immense. The digital-age thing they’re calling interactivity will never touch it, or let you touch it. But Winky-Dink did, once upon a time.

  Source: Feed Magazine

  Undead Media: The French Minitel System

  From Julian Dibbell

  A Mini Yahoo

  There will be an unusual union in Paris this week. Yahoo, the quintessential Web company, will launch a service for customers of Minitel, a national computer system in France, which uses old-fashioned technology that was supposedly made obsolete by the Internet.

  Yahoo has not yet announced the service, but it’s set to begin quietly operating this week, making Yahoo the first top-tier international portal to create a site for Minitel.

  Initially, Yahoo will provide e-mail accounts for people who use Minitel terminals located in homes and offices across France. Later, it plans to introduce other content, such as news and online chats. Yahoo’s move is much more than another content deal.

  It counters widespread and inaccurate perceptions of Minitel as an antiquated system. Ever since vivid graphics appeared on the Web six years ago, Minitel has been regarded as a technological relic.

  Its “dumb terminals” can present information only in text format. That means no charts, no photos and none of the cool graphics that have become mainstays of the Web. But that is only half the story.

  Launched in 1982, Minitel was intended to replace phone books and to allow access to information services. It quickly grew into the world’s first electronic marketplace.

  Thanks to Minitel, France is the only country in which both executives and farmers have been banking and transacting online for almost 20 years. An estimated 25 million people - nearly half the French population - currently use the 9 million Minitel terminals to buy train tickets, check stock quotes, access news, send e-mail messages or enter chat rooms.

  All those activities generated more than $1.8 billion in revenues last year. A key attribute of Minitel is its billing scheme. Users sign in at the various terminals and pay for the time they use the system at rates up to $20 per hour. In most cases, the invoice comes along with a person’s phone bill - and France Telecom (NYSE:FTE - news) takes a lofty commission as the collector.

  The prevalence of Minitel gives French people a way to conduct their business online and has slowed Internet adoption there. On the other hand, the network has created a high level of online literacy in France, in turn creating opportunities for Internet companies.

  Yahoo, for example, generates more revenue from classified advertising on its regular Web site in France than it does in many other countries.

  “People here have been familiar with online classifieds for years,” says Philippe Guillanton, managing director of Yahoo France. So, why did Yahoo wait until now to create a customized site that is accessible from Minitel terminals? Guillanton says at first the company didn’t want to tinker with its user interface, which is an important part of the company’s success. But that taboo was removed when Yahoo recently created a modified site for people using mobile phones to access the Web.

  Once that happened, the company decided to create another customized site for Minitel. Like other Minitel sites, Yahoo will collect usage fees via France Telecom. Other prominent Internet companies may follow. Even if they don’t, Yahoo already has validated the much-maligned Minitel. Minitel may use outdated technology, but it’s an online service with a solid business model. That’s more than most Internet companies can say.

  Source: Industry Standard magazine

  The unexpected survival of Telex

  From Tom Jennings

  Call of the telex: “I’m not dead yet”

  Like the pneumatic tube, messenger pigeons and French, this aging medium is here to stay.

  The first time I knew for sure I was looking at a telex machine, a magnificent cabinet-sized workstation of a beast, was in the early ‘70s sci-fi film “The Andromeda Strain” I watched on my mother’s black-and-white television.

  “The Andromeda Strain” was a bit like the Dustin Hoffman film “Virus,” only 20 years earlier and much more fun. This was back before the grunge and clutter o
f “Bladerunner” or “Alien”—back when the future was still futuristic.

  They had all the great equipment. There were secret underground government laboratories with squeaky white curving corridors, flashing lights, a big impressive computer that never went down and, of course, a telex machine.

  In a crucial plot development, a telex to Washington goes unnoticed because a loose scrap of paper jams the telex machine’s ... bell.

  A rather puritanical little boy at the time, I was seriously offended by this. What was a mechanical bicycle bell doing in the middle of all this gleaming high-tech stuff? And why didn’t those white-coated ones simply link their big, impressive computer up to Washington’s big, impressive computer with—you know, a wire?

  Of course, in reality, the white-coated ones were linking up computers with wires—the phone system—back at this time in the ‘70s. They were creating the Internet; they just weren’t telling Hollywood (or me) about it.

  Somewhere between “The Andromeda Strain” and my adulthood, the telex lost its place in the gleaming futurism of the popular imagination. Which is to say: People forgot about it. And that’s why I had a sense of vertigo—of traveling through time—when people at the fringes of Europe started giving me business cards with telex numbers on them.

  And not just the fringes of Europe, either. A quick perusal of German commercial Web sites, for example, reveals a surprising number of telex addresses, right up there alongside the phone number, e-mail and street address. That’s right, Web sites that give out telex numbers. This, of course, is pure German thoroughness: Fax if you have fax, phone if you have phone, and if you have telex, then, telex. Naturlich.