Why the picturephone failed

David Szondy has a new page in his delightful collection, Tales of Future Past. It's about the picturephone and why it failed to catch on. The 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey featured Dr. Heywood Floyd talking to his daughter (and the bushbaby she got for her birthday) over picturephone from a space station in earth orbit, but in real life, the picturephone was a marketing failure:

The picturephone was a disaster. People queued in droves to avoid buying it. What happened? Part of the reason was the cost. Picturephone was not cheap: $125 per month plus $21 per minute. Also, there was the problem of how you use a picturephone when you're one of the very few people who have one. Without a compelling reason to think that people were going to sign up for picturephones real quick you're faced with the reality that there's a whole lot of nobody to talk to out there.

Whatever the reasons, the picturephone limped along briefly and then was quietly pulled at a loss of $1 billion.

Szondy explains some of the technical issues that made analog videotelephony so expensive, and also explains why, now that the digital version of the technology is much, much cheaper, picturephones still haven't caught on:

Having worked with videophone systems myself, and having answered the phone first thing in the morning after being up all night with a cranky baby, no tea, unshaven, and generally looking like hell, I can attest to what the missing factors are: 1) People really do not want that much intimate contact and 2) Videophones are a pain.

Calvin and Hobbes's Watterson reviews Schulz bio

Bill Watterson, who wrote and drew the delightful Calvin and Hobbes, might be thought of as the polar opposite of Charles M. Schulz, at least when it comes to merchandising. While I've seen plenty of unauthorized window stickers of Calvin defiling a Chevy logo or Calvin kneeling before a cross, I don't think I've seen any authorized C&H merchandise, other than compilations of the strips.

But Watterson, like Schulz, explored a side of childhood that most cartoonists skim over. So it's interesting to read Watterson's review of David Michaelis's new biography of Schulz in today's Wall Street Journal:

Undoubtedly the most fascinating part of the book is the juxtaposition of biographical information and reproduced "Peanuts" strips. Here we see how literally Schulz sometimes depicted actual situations and events. The strips used as illustrations in "Schulz and Peanuts" are reproduced at eye-straining reduction and are often removed from the context of their stories, but they vividly demonstrate how Schulz used his cartoons to work through private concerns. We discover, for example, that in the recurring scenes of Lucy annoying Schroeder at the piano, the crabby and bossy Lucy stands in for [first wife] Joyce, and the obsessive and talented Schroeder is a surrogate for Schulz.

Reading these strips in light of the information Mr. Michaelis unearths, I was struck less by the fact that Schulz drew on his troubled first marriage for material than by the sympathy that he shows for his tormentor and by his ability to poke fun at himself.

Lucy, for all her domineering and insensitivity, is ultimately a tragic, vulnerable figure in her pursuit of Schroeder. Schroeder's commitment to Beethoven makes her love irrelevant to his life. Schroeder is oblivious not only to her attentions but also to the fact that his musical genius is performed on a child's toy (not unlike a serious artist drawing a comic strip). Schroeder's fanaticism is ludicrous, and Lucy's love is wasted. Schulz illustrates the conflict in his life, not in a self-justifying or vengeful manner but with a larger human understanding that implicates himself in the sad comedy. I think that's a wonderfully sane way to process a hurtful world. Of course, his readers connected to precisely this emotional depth in the strip, without ever knowing the intimate sources of certain themes. Whatever his failings as a person, Schulz's cartoons had real heart.

I was intrigued by the description of Schulz as "shy and alienated during his school years, retreating from nearly every opportunity to reveal himself or his gifts. Teachers and students consequently ignored him, and Schulz nursed a lifelong grudge that so few attempted to draw him out or recognized his talent."

Sue-happy together

Flo and Eddie (Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan) of The Turtles give a chalk-talk (really a marker talk) about seven managers, multiple lawsuits over eight years, and their boneheaded, impulsive business decisions. "We trusted everybody, we believed, and we'd sign anything."



Via Mark Evanier, who writes, "A friend of mine in the record business told me that these four minutes should be required viewing for anyone who's thinking about becoming a professional musician. It's a tale that is, alas, not unique."

Not to be a tease with the title of this post, here are The Turtles on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, singing "Happy Together."



What a sunny song!

The dark side of Charles Schulz

There's some controversy over a new biography of Charles M. Schulz by David Michaelis.

David Michaelis first contacted the family of Charles M. Schulz seven years ago about writing a biography of Schulz, the creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip. It turned out that Schulz had read Mr. Michaelis’s biography of N. C. Wyeth, and that Schulz’s son Monte also liked the writer’s work. He ended up helping persuade the rest of the Schulz clan to cooperate with Mr. Michaelis, granted full access to his father’s papers and put aside his own novel writing to help him.

But Monte Schulz said that when he read Mr. Michaelis’s manuscript in December, members of the family were shocked by the portrayal of a depressed, cold and bitter man who was constantly going after different women.

“It’s not true,” Monte said. “It’s preposterous.”

The Times story suggests that not all of Schulz's kids disagree with Michaelis' perspective. What Michaelis says about Schulz's life and art makes sense to me.

“He was a complicated artist who had an inner life and embedded that inner life on the page,” Mr. Michaelis said in an interview. “His anxieties and fears brought him Lucy and the characters in ‘Peanuts.’”

“A normal person couldn’t have done it,” he said.

What I loved, as a child, about this comic strip, particularly the paperbacks with the earlier years, is how the strip dealt with disappointment, with insecurity, with feeling like a loser, because that's how I felt, too. That had to come from somewhere in Charles Schulz's life story.

Here is the December 2000 Time piece by Michaelis about Schulz mentioned in the New York Times story.