Day: March 16, 2011

This is a minor point, but it goes to something larger.  The above image is from Season 3’s “Saturdays of Thunder”.  It’s just a brief establishing shot, but it manages to poke fun at the format wars of the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Notably, it needs no dialogue to set it up and it doesn’t take aim at any one institution.  It’s a joke at the expense of a general cultural artifact, and that means that all these years later it still works even though the specific conflict it describes is long over.  After all, vanquished video formats have…