Cartoon genius Tex Avery produced this short in 1953, showing off TVs for smokers, water drinkers, and those afflicted by airplanes overhead.
The future of entertainment is a tricky subject and we're probably no more likely to end up with the right answer about where the future is leading us than Tex Avery did in his toon. Yet, if we look closer at this 1953 cartoon we see a number of trends we recognise today; the challenges of simplifying the technology and the audiences expectations of that technology is introduced into their homes, examples of customisation and specialised devices, the disruption of ordinary social life and it's reconfiguration in response to the media and towards the end of the cartoon we see new forms of interaction that reminding us of the Wii remote. The ideas of games and television are there from the very beginning - at least in the popular imagination.






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