There’s a meme going around that generations should now be divided by “Too old to know Homestar Runner/at the right age to know and love Homestar Runner/too young to know Homestar Runner.”
Admittedly, this is rather prejudiced towards knowing Homestar Runner, but seeing as I do (and seriously Stwong Bad, he’s the bee’s knees!), I don’t find this a problem. In part, because I think anyone at any age can discover the sparkling majesty of Trogdor and other Homestar Runner goodies. It’s beyond generations.
But there’s another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it phenomenon that’s little known these days, in part because it wasn’t pop culture, it was a means to create pop culture. You see, before the Interwebs grew enough to purport to make everyone a “content creator” and we had video cameras and editing suites in our pocket, there was a device that replaced a huge bunch of specialized gear in the average tiny TV studio and promised THE FUTURE with COMPUTER-GENERATED IMAGERY. Also, cheesy video wipes. Look, I was in Wisconsin, we were state constitutionally bound to do cheesy video wipes.
It was glorious and it was called the Video Toaster.
Readers of my Babylon 5 viewing guide may have noted a lot of us were excited by the pilot TV movie not simply because it was sci-fi, but because the visual effects were being done by the Video Toaster, gear we had at our own TV station! For a lot of us video folks in the 90s, this hit us right in the Edison Carter, as it were. We felt empowered and emboldened. And it didn’t matter that it took a weekend for some of our animations to render because we had the power to animate as never before!
And not long after our exposure to the first version, NewTek launched a newer model called the Video Toaster 4000. Yes, young whipper-snappers, everybody was adding “2000” to products and titles with Y2K but a few years away, but NewTek was bold enough to jump a couple thousand years more. Witness the confidence on display with this promotional video introducing the Video Toaster 4000.