prompt: wear, title: movie night in plato's cave in idea barrages

There is something oddly fascinating about cultural notions that only made sense in one small window of the zeitgeist, surviving beyond their usefulness, treated normally outta sheer social momentum. One of the broadest artifacts like this in media is, of course, that bizarre longevity we’ve allowed The Laugh Track. At the dawn of the medium, it made a little bit of sense, with audiences that understood audio-visual entertainment in the context of live stage or public film screenings. Hearing the reactions of all the people around you was part of the ritual of reacting while consuming a movie or a vaudeville show, there was a kind of logic to providing new TV consumers with that artifice to ease them into a new way of consuming commercial art. Eighty years into video production, however, even the oldest consumers of television were born into a mode where they primarily consumed video with two or three family members on a television, and the younger people mostly watching on individual screens, private one-person televisions, smallish monitors, laptop screens, tablets, smartphones. The experience of audio-visual media has become fundamentally private. If the laugh track was pitched today, it’d be laughed out of the boardroom where it was suggested, but it just kind of hangs in our collective subconscious atmosphere like broccoli farts in a Panera Bread sandwich-shop. Just part of the usual scenery.

It’s not the only thing like that, lingering in the media landscape. I am far from the first person pointing out how many sitcoms from the 1940s through early 2000s simply couldn’t exist in a time when most adults have cellular phones. All the wacky misunderstandings, the inability to get in touch at the most ridiculous of junctures, they fall apart like candy floss in a sunshower once people have cellies. There’s no other time in history that truly bonkers Tom Hanks series “Bosom Buddies” could’ve existed than the early 1980s. At any other point in time, either the right or left would’ve protested it out of existence but now survives in a dim remembrance as mainstream culture’s major introduction to the actor who talked to a volleyball, that one time.

But my personal example is, of course, the eldritch horror abomination that was the children’s health mascot Slim Goodbody. Can you imagine if in 2025 they told an actor who looked like some more heteronormative spin on Richard Simmons to wear a tight bodysuit with all of his internal organs printed on it while prancing about exercising and telling kids to eat their peas?

In 1950, he would’ve been fired under suspicions of communism. In 2025, he would’ve been jailed and put on a list with guys who drive around panel-vans giving out candy! But in 1975, Woodstock burnouts with their first kids in early elementary, just took it as normal, told their kids “Listen to Slim and eat your peas!” and took a weed-nap. It’s context. All life is context.

And some of it has exposed intestines, for some reason.