I’m not a big fan of nostalgia humor. It’s ultimately lazy and reaches an unnecessarily small audience.

Fortunately I myself am lazy and reach an unnecessarily small audience! So I’m gonna go ahead and let myself off the hook just this once.

Every now and then, a product or show from the past rears its “the fact that this was made 25 years ago isn’t a good enough excuse for why it’s such a bad idea” head and something must be done about it. Today’s “thing that actually happened” is called Saturday Supercade, a cartoon about what is essentially just another kind of animation, video games. All part of that “Hey this photograph really brings that movie-still to life” school of inter-media design.

What’s really amazing is that CBS managed to transpose these video games — which at the peak of their technological advancement were still barely more than multicolored, 2-D Legos accompanied by music that today would make even midi-files sound like a fully orchestrated fugue — into a form of animation that was somehow less visually compelling than the two-bit characters the originals had to offer.

Interestingly, the only difference more glaring in this area of “what one is promised and what one is actually given” is provided by contrasting game covers and the actual games.

As a child, I’d look at the video game covers at stores and simply marvel at the technology that could create such detailed and life-like animation. But then, inevitably, you would take the game home, hurriedly de-box it, pop it in…and oh my god is that green polygon supposed to be a dragon? Oh yes, yellow and red squares are coming out from where its mouth would be, serving most likely as a crude representation of fire. A fierce smear of a dragon it is then!

Every game was the same.

Look at this cover for MISSILE COMMAND.

Oh my crap, according to the cover MISSILE COMMAND is going to be amazing. It will revolutionize entertainment single-gamedly. But wait, oh no, what’s this? The actual game?

Look, I think those large green circles composed of smaller squares on a black background are clouds of nuclear devastation! Or an out-of-proportion beach ball. Or a dragon. So…riveting.

But the game makers of the world knew they couldn’t ride the somewhat-reality-based-games gravy train forever. Players would demand more realism from them if there was something realistic to compare the game to.

Enter more abstract games like BREAKOUT and SUPERBREAKOUT, which features the now staple video game character Thick Bar That Bounces Square Ball at Rows of Rainbow-Colored Rectangles, pictured below in breathtaking accuracy…

…minus of course the grizzled Jai Alai Astronaut-Prisoner who didn’t make it into the actual gameplay somehow.

Thus, gamers had acquired a taste for the abstract. Gaming systems shifted into creating stranger and less reality-based games over the next few years, eventually reaching their “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be playing as” zenith with the addictive and inscrutable Q-BERT.

One observation I had about this game was that if an alien civilization visited our planet for relics of our society, and the only human memento found was a copy of Q-Bert….the only clues they might glean about us are that 1. as our collective protagonist, orange coconuts who swore frequently were held in the highest possible regard, while conversely 2. we deeply deplored purple snakes, purple pigs, and purple cranial elephantiasoids, and 3. our weapons hadn’t evolved past the ball-bonking phase.

And you know what, people?

They’d be right.

Anyway, it was fun to imagine that at some point, a bunch of writers had to sit down and tap out the script for the Q BERT portion of Saturday Supercade. I can only imagine what a thankless task that must have been.

WRITER: You know I won a Pulitzer, right?

TV EXECUTIVE: I know. That’s why I picked you. I want my best and brightest on this.

WRITER: But there’s nothing to write about. There’s just a coconut and a snake.

TV EXECUTIVE: Nothing? We’re only talking about the greatest rivalry found in nature. “COCONUT V SNAKE!” Think about it.

WRITER: Coconuts and snakes are not natural enemies. They’re almost completely unrelated in the food chain.

TV EXECUTIVE: Well, not on their own, to be sure. But when that snake enlists the help of a pig and a gremlin…huh? Now it’s a different story, isn’t it?

WRITER: No.

TV EXECUTIVE: Yes.

WRITER: No.

TV EXECUTIVE: Yes.

WRITER: No.

TV EXECUTIVE: Yes.

WRITER: Ok.

TV EXECUTIVE: See how easy that was?