I guess you all know the cartoon series The Flintstones.
One of the central parts of the fun in that series are the everyday products and gimmicks that are made feasible by primitive devices; you have, for example, photo cameras with a bird sitting inside chiselling everything it sees into a stone plate, and so on.
The cartoon regularly comes up with explanations on how this stone-age technology works, but three things are shown pretty often yet remain incredibly unexplained: TV, telephone and radio. Have the producers of the series (Hanna Barbera, no?) ever come up with (and aired) an at least faintly plausible expalnation for how this stuff works, or did they leave this mystery unrevealed forever?
Idiotic question, I know, but I find it interesting.
Screenwriters play just as fast and loose with modern, real technology as with The Flintstones. I love digging at gaffes in movies but for the most part I don’t let it get in the way of my enjoyment of a good story. One way to look at it is that the average person has a notion of how a camera or a record player works. The average person doesn’t understand the mechanics of television anyway so there is not much of a joke to be made from a stone age version of that technology.
Well they show how the intercom works, though that’s not really radio (remember the bird listening to the message and flying over to the other intercom and repeating it to the listener?). TV and the phone seem to be pretty much like they had in the 60’s; they show switch board operators for the phone and tubes and wires in the TV.
I remember one Flinstones movie (VHS only, I think?) where they listend to a weather report on the radio, and inside the radio was a bird looking through a pair of binoculars to see the weather.
Sometimes I wonder if the various stories I have read that have prehistoric cultures more advanced than we believed and using biotechnology (‘Orion’, ‘Neanderthal’) were inspired by the Flintstones.
‘Orion’ was by Ben Bova. Biotechnology may have been an exaggeration, as I don’t believe they shaped the animals they used in any way, but his neanderthals could control animals with psychic powers (and used this power to wage war effectively against a technologically superior foe). In ‘Neanderthal’ was by John Darnton (I had to look that up) and his neanderthals had structures shaped from living plants, which explained why archaeologists had found no sign of them.
I KNOW I have read better examples, but I can’t recall the names of any of the stories right now.