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Danger in Dreamland
Mar. 2nd, 2006 04:05 amOn one of my Doctor Demento tapes, recorded twenty years ago (January 26, 1986), I found a very good half-hour Firesign Theater interview. Apart from reminding me that I really need to buy a copy of Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, what really pricked my ears was this quote:
I have a copy of the album they were plugging, Eat Or Be Eaten, which is a sketch comedy concept album that mimics a reality-blurring computer game—we listen to a guy playing it, from his struggles to open the shrink wrap to his developing relationships with the rather eerie characters he encounters. (Is she saying she's "a band in the game," or is she telling him to "abandon the game"? I still get shivers.) Unfortunately, it's on cassette—I wouldn't own a CD until 1987, when Sergeant Pepper was released ("It was twenty years ago today") and I won it from a radio contest—so I can't investigate the "subcode graphics" that were encoded on the CD version. It was, they say, the first CD ever to encode pictures on the CD+G band; nowadays it's used mostly for playing karaoke lyrics along with the music, but there were about fifty albums, including Talking Heads' Naked, that used the space for creative purposes before the technology became obsolete.
I'm finding so many nuggets and gems in this audio mining project I'm engaged in, from Stephen Moore's "Marvin the Paranoid Android" singles to Weird Al's first (and never released) recording, but this is one of the niftiest to date.
"We have been working with a think tank and production company called The Record Group, which is Warner Brothers and Philips and Sony and such, and they're looking to put out a brand-new piece of entertainment hardware called the compact video, the CV. Which takes a crystal disc, takes a compact disc, and uses it to feed your computer, which also plays your music, it puts video up on the screen, it allows you to interact with it. And we're writing a game called Danger In Dreamland for the compact video. [...] It literally is an interactive game. You'll play it, you the Doctor will sit down and become Nick Danger's partner, and you'll have to go out and solve a crime with him, and etcetera etcetera."I sat there blinking. "They're describing the first CD-ROM game," I said to myself. "Before computers had CD-ROM drives." And, indeed, Firesign Theater was contracted by the developers of the CD-ROM Yellow Book standard to create the first demos—which, alas, never were released. I wish I remembered how little thirteen-year-old me, listening to this in early 1986, reacted to this casual mention of the coming revolution; I wouldn't actually encounter a CD-ROM until I got to college in 1990, but I imagine I was excited by the words "computer" and "game."
I have a copy of the album they were plugging, Eat Or Be Eaten, which is a sketch comedy concept album that mimics a reality-blurring computer game—we listen to a guy playing it, from his struggles to open the shrink wrap to his developing relationships with the rather eerie characters he encounters. (Is she saying she's "a band in the game," or is she telling him to "abandon the game"? I still get shivers.) Unfortunately, it's on cassette—I wouldn't own a CD until 1987, when Sergeant Pepper was released ("It was twenty years ago today") and I won it from a radio contest—so I can't investigate the "subcode graphics" that were encoded on the CD version. It was, they say, the first CD ever to encode pictures on the CD+G band; nowadays it's used mostly for playing karaoke lyrics along with the music, but there were about fifty albums, including Talking Heads' Naked, that used the space for creative purposes before the technology became obsolete.
I'm finding so many nuggets and gems in this audio mining project I'm engaged in, from Stephen Moore's "Marvin the Paranoid Android" singles to Weird Al's first (and never released) recording, but this is one of the niftiest to date.
