Frankenstein Tomarken and TOS Fails
In addition to being one of the best years for movies ever, 1984 had this. I fell down a rabbit hole looking for more information on this Halloween episode of Press Your Luck referenced by banana enjoyer Melissa P.
That’s Press Your Luck’s host Peter Tomarken, who donned a Frankenstein mask and danced around for a good long while as the credits rolled after the show’s 1984 Halloween episode. You’re seeing one of the final frames before they cut to commercial. This recording of it has a fan-created intro before it, but you’ll see where it picks up into the actual sequence that aired. Worth a watch.
I was hoping to find out more about the impetus and production behind this show’s many holiday editions, including memorable Christmas episodes featuring appearances from Tomarken’s family. But most of the oxygen online around the show’s history is taken up by the one famous tale of contestant Michael Larson, who studied the game’s mechanics on tv at home, found a flaw, and practically ran the table with that knowledge. It’s of course a great and well-documented story that gives you a real feel for what life was like before computers ran everything. But it also crowds out any attention that might flow to the smaller aspects of the show’s history. In addition to all the stuff about Larson, you get utter long tail SEO-driven garbage like this “How to Become a Fan of Press Your Luck” article from content farm WikiHow. But not a lot of good show history stuff.
I read somewhere in my travels that the show ran notoriously lean, often opting to invite players back to participate again instead of reshooting flubs and screw ups. That also accounts for why the set was so cheap and therefore there were only 6 spin patterns for Michael Larson to memorize and use to his advantage. So who on the show’s staff was so passionate about the holidays to make special episodes with elaborate intros and the odd dancing Frankenstein? Was this a labor of love? Something to get network executives off their asses about low ratings? I haven’t found a book dedicated to the show’s history, but if you know of anything that might cover these producers or this era closely, drop me a note. Add it to the list of things I’d love to investigate further some time.
You’re not the only one who doesn’t read terms of service. You may not be shocked to hear that sometimes the relevant employees and departments within the companies that create them are also wholly unfamiliar with what they say. I’m not talking about conducting a person-on-the-street spot check of employees chosen at random who would have no direct connection to the terms in their job. I’m talking about those people or robots tasked with responding to requests spelled out within these documents.
As memorialized in this fascinating twitter thread, Sarah Wipperman followed up on a number of clauses from terms of service agreements she accepted, for things like the Nintendo Switch and Pokemon GO! game. She did what the docs told her to do, procedures like sending specifically-worded letters or contacting specific people, in order to hold on to rights around things like privacy, data collection, and right to sue.
Company responses ranged from just plain unresponsive to apparently unaware of the procedures and terms spelled out in their own documents. Through pass-along to multiple departments, they don’t seem capable of delivering their end of the bargain as they spelled out in the agreement.
The world of “I got ripped off/mistreated by a company” used to be so much more quaint. You’d watch a show called Fight Back! With David Horowitz, taped in front of a live studio audience, to see stuff like this. More often than not, the issues were far more straightforward, and more often than not Mr. Horowitz would manage to get some satisfaction for a wronged consumer. There are just a few episodes of that show around now, including these two full episode recordings. Whether it was ever a true sense or not, I miss the sense this show provided, that individual citizens/consumers had a fighting chance against the faceless corporate empires. It feels laughably naive today.
As it turns out, David Horowitz died earlier this year. I found this old quote in his LA Times obituary. You don’t find this particular flavor of objectivity around much any more, particularly on the airwaves.
“I don’t consider myself a consumer advocate,” Horowitz told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. “If you’re on television you have to really be broadcasting in the public interest … but you also have to be objective.
“Yes, you can do a commentary and advocate certain issues if you feel that way, but I do a lot of stories where the consumer’s wrong — where they’re trying to rip off companies too. I have to really walk that fine line in terms of being fair about something.”
JoAnn Morgan vs. an earlier era of Russian interference. This remarkable twitter thread from Mechanical/Fluids Engineer Megan H. is a fun serial history lesson about a woman who Megan spotted in Apollo 11. That woman turns out to be JoAnn Morgan, NASA’s Chief Instrumentation Controller at Kennedy Space Center back in the day. Megan lays out the pivotal role Morgan played in multiple Apollo missions and then the Space Shuttle program. She retired in 2003 after 45 years of service.
Image from this Vanity Fair article and interview Megan H. links to in the thread
Before I read this thread I did not know that when you hear garbled communication on old recordings of communications between mission control and the astronauts, that’s often deliberate jamming coming from Russian military ships and submarines trying to sabotage the missions. I always just assumed it was the limitations of the technologies of the time. Morgan led a program that developed countermeasures to limit the impact of these systems, and successfully kept them from impacting the Apollo 11 launch.
Those are the bananas I found for you this week. You can hit “reply” and the email will go only to me. You can support the weekly banana harvest by buying me a coffee on ko-fi.com, or just drop me a note.
Thank you.