Did this actually happen?

I could have called this post many things, one of which might have been "Early 80s Canadian educational television shows that scarred me for life," but I chose that title because a while back, something made a vague memory resurface of a program we used to watch in fifth grade called "Read All About It."



And I was thinking, did a show that dorky really exist? Didn't it revolve around some pre-adolescent time traveling kids who were always called on to defeat some "evil" nemesis called "Duneedon"? Naturally, I turned to YouTube to verify my hunch, and lo and behold, some gracious person has uploaded clips of seasons 1 and 2 as well as the openings (one of which you can see above--oh, that catchy theme song!) The show wasn't completely insufferable, because each episode was fifteen minutes long, and most of us were more captivated by those kids' accents [i.e. their pronunciations of words like house ("hoase") and about ("aboat")] than the plots.

In its own way, "Read All About It" tried to be "cool" by adding talking, thinking computers, "Otto" and "Theta" (cue pretentious critical theory-soaked references [informed by Hayles and Haraway] to human-machine symbiosis here). But this was back when the coolness of emerging technology lay in its clunky obviousness, not in its drive toward complete invisibility--therefore, our attention was constantly drawn to what one of the computers was "thinking" via its cacophonous print outs or Theta's mechanical voice, which said things like "We...refuse...to...comply...with...your...demands." There was something really Forbin Project about that whole situation (i.e. computers communicating with each other and with humans). This clip (mainly the first three minutes) is exemplary of how the two computers (with their strange loyalty to those annoying kids) exercised their human-like agency to thwart their enemy:



Here's another Canadian gem (an ancient clip of a program called "Bits and Bytes" which is trying to make painfully obvious the innerworkings of computer technology):



Maybe I really miss the days of "Read All About It," because that show represented a time when computers were computers and people were people, and we could all live in our comfortable binaries....nnnaaaahhhh!