mstrorm

This documentary apparently started off well, using the Carry On films as a convincing-sounding example of how the hype of the 60s sexual revolution compared to the more conservative reality of society in general. (I say "apparently" because having seen the misleading inaccuracy later on, I became less willing to trust its analysis of a decade I wasn't even born in.)

It goes seriously downhill when it gets to the 1970s with ABBA as Peretti's chosen representative for the decade. Unusual choice as- media observation of Agnetha's backside aside- their public profile was relatively asexual. Still, despite some interesting observations, very little he has to say about them can be generalised into insight regarding society as a whole, beyond the fact that their divorces reflected a growing acceptance of that phenomenon. So what was the point?

But it really, really hits rock bottom when he chooses Baywatch to represent the 1980s. Er... hang on, wasn't that a 90s show?

Having looked this up, he's correct- but only in the most misleadingly pedantic sense. Yes, the first series aired in September 1989, but- as the documentary itself points out- it flopped and was cancelled, and only became a success story a couple of years later after being reworked into its better-known form (i.e. from 1991 until it finished in 2001).

So why on earth does Peretti choose it as representative of the 80s- of what "we" were watching during the decade we were fearful of AIDS, the "last decade of the cold war". David Hasselhoff is shown singing at the fall of the Berlin wall in late 1989, as if this had something to do with Baywatch, when in fact he was already famous there.

One could argue that the early-to-mid 90s that Baywatch actually represented showed the continuation, evolution and consequence of trends begun in the 80s. But this is beside the point, because that's not what Peretti says. The way he presents it, Baywatch is an 80s show- period- and is associated with all the things that obsessed us in the mid-80s. As this section draws to a close, a pastiche of the 1983 "Scarface" soundtrack (all analogue synths) briefly plays, as if to associate Baywatch with a decade prior.

Piretti doesn't strike me as an idiot, so what his motives are for this intellectual dishonesty are unclear. My guess is that he wanted things to fit his narrative whether or not they actually did, regardless of how much hammering was needed to get that square peg into a round hole.

After getting a 90s show to represent the 80s, Sex and the City (titled "Sex and City" in its caption) gets to represent the 90s, which is at least correct, though it's definitely "late 90s / millennial" rather than the entire decade.

Simon Cowell and the X Factor represents the present day but- like ABBA before them- this segment says less about sex (or asexuality) than Peretti wants to think it does.

Disclaimers; I didn't play Dragon's Lair when it first came out (although I'm theoretically old enough to). Secondly, I'm judging this from the Interactive DVD version.

Yes, by the standards of the time, Dragon's Lair is pretty. I even remember seeing an Amiga conversion of Space Ace in the late 1980s and being incredibly impressed. But is Dragon's Lair a good game or not? By today's standards, absolutely not. So we should make allowances for when it came out right? Er, no. There are games like "Asteroids" that stand up incredibly well today because they're so playable. And then there are games like Dragon's Lair.

Although I never played it at the time, I imagine I'd have been as impressed as anyone else- if not more- by its beautiful graphics. But let's be honest; that's about all it has. Dragon's Lair's appeal was always style over substance. (It's no surprise that the Amiga conversion that so impressed me was lambasted for its lack of playability.)

Yes, the animation is quite nice (although I wouldn't describe it as outstanding). However, if Laserdisc/FMV games were so great, ask yourself why they never took off and dominated the market in the way that Bluth predicted they would? The answer is they generally have horrible playability, reliant on figuring out the correct (fixed) set of actions at the correct time, and generally being quite frustrating to play. Well, this sums up Dragon's Lair perfectly.

It's often not clear what to do, and getting past the scenes is more a question of figuring out (or guessing) what to do and memorising it. This is horribly frustrating.

There's no plot as such in Dragon's Lair, just a bunch of hazardous scenes in which our hero dies, dies and dies again. The animation clips are generally short and abrupt, almost too short to be even watchable. At least it doesn't have the incredibly bad acting of live action FMV games...

I salute Dragon's Lair for doing something technically innovative at the time, and as I said I can understand why people liked it back then. However as a game, it's bordering on unplayable, and I suspect that this was always the case. It's an insult to the truly classic video games to excuse Dragons Lair's shortcomings as a product of their time. They're not; they're a product of style over substance.