Setting: The Eighties and the Monoverse

Let’s stop for a moment to talk about the eighties and the “monoverse.” I learned that term at Wyrd Con 2016, in the mediascape during a Q&A session. I’m not sure where it came from, but I like it. The monoverse is a way of describing the shared reality of the media universe before VCR and cable, when most of the country had three networks, a local station, a PBS station, and maybe some UHF stations. That’s if you were lucky and lived near a major market. Most cities had two papers. Every week, Time and Newsweek came out with a summary of what was happening in the world, and the television news ran at six and eleven, with local right before or right after.

VCRs didn’t infiltrate homes in a significant way until the late seventies or early eighties, and if you missed a show, you missed it until reruns aired in the summer. (I waited decades to see the end of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode “Alexander the Greater Affair,” in which Illya was about to be cut in half with a pendulum and Napoleon Solo was over a pit.)

Then there were Life and Look, magazines that served as a window to the rest of the world through photojournalism at its best. This was an age where a single image encapsulated an event or an era—the girl hovering over the dead body at Kent State, the girl running down the street with napalm on her, the ubiquitous shot of Earth from space, the moon landing. The unimaginable decadence and luxury of the Cannes Film Festival. Swinging London in a few shots of miniskirts and bell bottoms. The see-through shirt. It would be impossible to encapsulate that era without Life and Look.

Now, everybody has a video camera and everybody looks at fifty images a day on a slow day, and it is hard for any shot to make an impact. We have more, but less of it sticks. Back then, a single image—almost always without some pompous quote attached to it, telling you what to think about it—could steer an entire civilization. Mario Cuomo, legendary governor of New York, said something fascinating about his generation (the greatest generation) that I suspect is even more true now: “We knew less then, but we understood more.”

Politically, all three networks lived in the same universe. There might have been nuances of difference as to what they thought was and was not important, and there was some carefully calculated bias, but by and large we perceived whatever Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley was saying as pure, unadulterated truth. The daily papers all seemed to share similar facts and opinions, and editorials were kept on the editorial page.

The film industry was similarly organized. There were six and a half studios (Disney was its own thing), and there was some low-budget stuff dominated by Roger Corman and a few others, usually “B” pictures and/or garish sci-fi or horror. Easy Rider created the “youth movie” in 1969, but the monoverse was largely unfazed. The studios would adapt and survive in the seventies and go through what many would perceive as the golden age of film with a spate of young directors—some of whom are still relevant today.

For film, the monoverse was a small, well-defended universe rife with gatekeepers and moats. Only studios had the equipment to make and distribute movies—except for the small, scruffy, independent counterculture world of drive-ins and dying theaters, which either went “B” movie or “X” movie.

The monoverse didn’t die in a day. And some parts of it are still standing. There are still studios and networks, and there’s still The New York Times, but they are shadows of their former selves and exist more as brands than omnipotent entities. In the seventies and eighties, cracks started to form in the monoverse—Xerox machines would create fanzines, Super-8 would spawn a generation of filmmakers, smaller and cheaper cameras would challenge photojournalism. Syndicated television and toy shows were other cracks. It might have been the first time the networks were really challenged.

Another of those cracks was video games. They evolved heavily during the exact period that is covered in this book. As the book starts, we’re in Space Invaders and Asteroids world. Video games were played in arcades and 7-Elevens and bars, occupying much the same cultural space as pinball machines. Not long after, we had Galaga and Pac-Man. I never worked on a video game animated show, but there were a lot of them. From the point of view of the monoverse, they were in the same category as comic books and cartoons—which meant they were not taken very seriously.

However, when the Atari 2600 and Mattel’s Intellivision were released, they actually competed with networks and cable for the television set itself, although the monoverse mostly dismissed them as toys for kids and drunks.

The Coleco Adam, which would ship with Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom, was forecast to be a threat because it also moved the home computer to the television screen, but for technical and business reasons, it failed and offered the monoverse a reprieve. But they should have seen the handwriting on the wall.

At that moment, nobody but geeks were paying attention to role-playing games, with the exception of CBS, which did a children’s version of Dungeons & Dragons on Saturday morning. Again, the handwriting was on the wall. An entire generation was being trained by games, and that generation would change entertainment forever.

But for the moment, games were novelties to be licensed and exploited by traditional mediums. They weren’t viewed as anything more than that—at least not yet.