Long before the Y2K panic or today’s panic over the internet replacing television, there was the happy talk of “Computer Critters,” a series of PSAs that ABC ran in the mid-1980s during their Saturday morning cartoon block. The message is that everything we use has a computer, computers do everything, that they’re going to take over our lives, and that this is a good thing. As a child, I appreciated the commercial because I myself was increasingly dependent on a computer (I wrote well on the word processor, but not so well by hand) and this crocodile person reassured me that it was okay. But even at the time, I thought there was something a little sinister about being so upbeat about the whole thing.
Long before the Y2K panic or today’s panic over the internet replacing television, there was the happy talk of “Computer Critters,” a series of PSAs that ABC ran in the mid-1980s during their Saturday morning cartoon block. The message is that everything we use has a computer, computers do everything, that they’re going to take over our lives, and that this is a good thing. As a child, I appreciated the commercial because I myself was increasingly dependent on a computer (I wrote well on the word processor, but not so well by hand) and this crocodile person reassured me that it was okay. But even at the time, I thought there was something a little sinister about being so upbeat about the whole thing.