Was he just a doddering old fool, (yes!) or was he just a Judy-droid in disguise, manufactured at Area 51 and turned loose to warn Earth of a doomsday machine...the dramatic Stromatic invisible ray machine of destruction leaving the earths population devasted, decimated and decapitated with the Capital Hill Street Blues?
We have to take one giant leap for mankind ....backwards...before Star Trek tech hit the TV guide galaxy in 1965, and well before the era of Strom and Spock. It was the golden age of silver screen science fiction with rocket thruster Steely Dans and spacey gadgets galore, and later in the 1960's there was James Bond with not only gadgets galore, but also pussy galore, (my moneys on the pussy, batteries not included!)
To fully understand where our techno Darwinism came from to foster our love affair for our cellphones, apps, droids and Skype, we have to skip past Skype, further back in a time machine that was fully conceptualized by HG Wells in 1898, thirty one years after Jules Verne fired off a literary rocket to the moon in 1867! The time machine will take us on a journty to the golden age of tech when it began to evolve crawling from the mud to roam the digital earth according to the book of Gadget Genesis...it was the era of the comic strip and the comic book. where the dynamic duo of digital technology dwelled in ink, well before anyone could even pronounce "digital" or swear at it on a daily basis. So move over Captain Kirk, when it comes to the birth of todays technological wonders we have to open our copy of Clark Kent's "Daily Planet" newspaper, turn the page to the "funnies" and read about the amazing adventures of Dick Tracy and Fearless Fosdick!!
Dick Tracy, originally published as Plainclothes Tracy, was the techno debutante of the cop shop ball. Dick, may I call you Dick? Dick the strip came out of the cartoon closet and made his newspaper debut in 1931 during the great depression in the old Detroit newspaper, the Mirror. Written and drawn by Chester Gould, Tracy was syndicated nationwide, and along with the technological gadgetry that proliferated it was also different from most comics in that it made the most of the violence of the era..bootleggers, Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone in Chicago, in fact, most of Tracy's cases ended in a blast of gunfire that would have made Cody Jarrett's mama in Cagney's "White Heat" proud, however, Tipper Gore, the Jabba the Hut of forced morality would have gored Gould for the violence but a simple blast from a raygun would have shut her up.
Tracy along with being the first comic strip detective to use forensics instead of foreplay, also had a handy arsenal of go go gadgets that thrilled the comic reading public. Tracy had atomic powered gadgets, and even later got to hot rod around in a Space Coupe with a magnetic propulsion system that even Ralph Nader would have approved. In fact in the far out Sixties, Tracy went to the moon and fell in love with the Moon Maid and took great pains to feel her mountians and penetrate her craters. They had atomic lazer beams, air cars, flying saucers, and a weird adversary in the form of intergalactic talking dots!!!
His most famous piece of gadgetry was his two way wrist radio where he could communicate with headquarters via voice and later via visual as well as voice. Viva technology. Of course today we take our cellphones for granted and use them for texting and rarely for solving crime. The wrist radio was also crystal clear for constant clarity. Compare it to ordering a fast food meal at a drive through and you can barely interpret over the static what the space cadet in the food window is saying. Today we can communicate with our Space Station more clearly than we can a 17 year old with a headset trying to sell us an order of fries! (Not techno, but have you also noticed, you can no longer at a fast food establishment order a "medium" drink...no..they will argue with you over the counter.."Sorry Sir, we only have small, larger and larger!" The worst size being foisted on us is "Biggie" or "Biggie Sized"...I'm sorry I cannot say Biggie in public while ordering a drink in babytalk..I may piss my pants if I did. How can you have three diffent sizes without "medium" in there somewhere..but then again..unlike Goddard these are not rocket scientists we are dealing with..their only goal in life is to leave the world of fast food and advance their careers selling Cheetos at a self serve gas station called The Stop and Rob.
Enter comic strip stage left...Fearless Fosdick! The Fos, not to be confused with the Fonz, appeared out of nowhere in 1942 as a spinoff of the Lil' Abner comic strip by Al Capp as the counter to Gould's Tracy. It mixed slapstick, black humor and irony, along with social criticism of which Capp was famous. His somewhat leftist leanings made a wrong turn to the right later in life and in fact when John and Yoko had their Bed-In for peace, it was Capp who went to them for a filmed interview, which I saw and he was downright rude to the Lennons and you could see John holding back ..peacefully, while Yoko was cut loose and went for Capps juggler like a deranged Japanese Cujo out for blood! I digress... Fosdick also had an array of atomic weapons and gidgety gadgetry that propelled pop culture into the fifties and the golden age of flying saucers, Ed Wood, and Gort. Gort was the godfather of artificial intelligence making his debut in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" where on command of the words Klatuu Barada Nicto he would put down his shield and spare the earth from atomization. Lost in Space and the Jetsons had robotics as royalty, video screen communicators, and space cars and ships zapping around cities built into the sky. Then there was the Gidget series of films with silly Sally Fields...she never did get the hang of the new techno age but damn..what a film it would have been..>I can see it now..Fields character falls in love with Gort..they meet in a sleazy motel and have a three some with Robbie the Robot...all in tecnicolor in the new comedy hit..."Gidget Balls Gadget!"
Then we had our favorite spies! Add to the techno mix the wild cars and weapons in James Bond and on the televsion shows "The Avengers" and "The Man from UNCLE" with dots between each capital letter... and you have the birth of a new nation of technology, all very space age but soon to be a veritable reality in our daily lives. Bond got the babes, and Emma Peel gave us hardons, but dammit...only one show had a really big shoe that you could talk into...Get Smart with Don Adams and Barbara Feldmen..agent 86 and agent 99...so who do we want to fuck..Feldman or Peel? Or do we simply peel Feldman and have both? Batteries again..not included!
Get Smart had amazing new age weaponry and tools at his disposal to dispose of the bad guys and girls. But the shoe thing..that was pure Zen..in an atomic age sort of way! I've tried talking into my own shoe in public, and I did get a response! It was from a passerby who told me to do something to myself that was physically impossible, but it was fun trying to accomplish this feat of contortionism as best I could!!
So thank your Star Trek stars we have this technology...but it didn't originate with Kirk and Crew...they expanded on an idea that goes back the post Civil War era when Jules Verne took us on a rocket trip to the moon, then Wells took us for a journey through time in his Time Machine. That Time Machine led us to the future..the future of Dick Tracy and Fearless Fosdick, the Lewis and Clark of the Corp of Cartoon Discovery that in turn led to spies, spy babes, and Star Trek Conventions.
Cellphones, Skype and Droids...the next time your gadgetry rings in public in your pants..and someone says is that technology in your pants..or are you just happy to see me? Calmly look them in the eye and say "It's for you!"