I was rewatching Max Headroom recently and my favorite episode stood out to me. It's about an addictive game show called "Whacketts" which is so mind-numbingly insipid that even the punk operator of the pirate TV station that runs the show wonders why it's so popular. Turns out that the Whacketts broadcast is interlaced with a signal that looks like rapidly changing hexadecimal numbers and functions as a "drug" that induces euphoria in anyone who is visually exposed to it.
When I was a kid I thought this was somewhat dodgy science fiction. As an adult in the age of Cocomelon and Skibidi Toilet, I'm not so sure.
Yeah, we imagined brainwashing would involve rapidly flashing hidden messages. In reality, it involves a head sticking out of a toilet.
Hearing some of the things my elder daughter hears from other kids in the kindergarten, I sometimes wonder if we haven't jumped into some bizarro alternate universe.
Having actually sat down to watch Skibidi Toilet, it's fine. It's basically a series of over-the-top action sequences done with Garry's Mod assets. It's watching someone mashing action figures together that they kit-bashed out of other action figures.
I'm looking forward to hearing the story of the animator that got inspired to go into the field by watching Skibidi Toilet. It's going to happen.
That's a tale as old as time, though. In the 1980s, I got in trouble for using "this sucks" or "this blows" around grade one or two. It's now common slang, but it was still too close to its sexual origins at the time (which of course was over my head, but I of course wanted to emulate the older graders).
When I was a kid I thought this was somewhat dodgy science fiction. As an adult in the age of Cocomelon and Skibidi Toilet, I'm not so sure.