Modern times and modern devices

A sudden introduction to a new character in FurBabies.

AI makes its first appearance in FurBabies in the July 13, 2023 strip. It will be back

As mentioned in my last post, a blending of time periods in the settings and art direction ensures that an animated film ages gracefully and becomes a period piece, rather than becoming ‘dated’. Animated films are huge investments; they have to ‘play’ for years and remain consistent (unless re edited).

Disney edited out nearly all cigarette smoking in their films when they were released on DVD. They could not do this for Cruella de Vil in ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS, since that would mean redoing nearly all of her scenes. The most notable edit came in the Pecos Bill sequence of MELODY TIME, (1948) where Bill formerly rolled a cigarette with his tongue. This is not in current version of the film. Maybe they thought it wasn’t tobacco in that cigarette?

A comic strip is not ‘finalized’ like a motion picture. It can run for years and change its focus, and even its characters, over a period of time. PEANUTS is a terrific example of this: it appears on GoComics in two separate sections: “Peanuts Begins” and “Peanuts Classics”. In Peanuts Begins, which runs strips from 1950 to 1959-60, Charlie Brown, Lucy, and Schroeder are normal kids who are friends. They are also a bit younger than they are in later strips. Linus is a baby. Lucy and Schroeder are in preschool. Sally Brown is not even born yet. Snoopy still walks on all fours.

In the earliest PEANUTS cartoons, no one owns a television set. Charlie Brown writes his name on a picket fence with a crayon. The kids play football and baseball and generally spend a lot of time outdoors. The strip reflects Charles M. Schulz’s childhood in the 1930s. Peanuts enters the ‘modern’ world late in the Fifties, with kids watching television, and ‘psychiatric help’ from Lucy. Schulz did a startling cartoon about nuclear fallout in January 1958 that I asked my father to explain to me when I saw it a few years later. He explained it. I still see it vividly. It was the only Peanuts comic strip that gave me nightmares.

A new comic, CRABGRASS, is deliberately set in the 1980s, in a time just before the computer revolution. The characters do not have cell phones and computers. It’s an artistic choice; artist Tauhid Bondia sets it during his own childhood.

I decided to use a blend of times and technologies in FurBabies. While the Buffet apartment furnishings and utilities are very dated, Kate is a 21st century child. She uses a modern cellphone and tablet and a laptop computer that probably belongs to her parents. I decided that most of this technology would be flawed. The cellphone is the most reliable, but Kate cannot always use it correctly. A story line that begins on August 1 shows what happens when Kate tries to keep up with instructions from an online video.

Artificial intelligence, specifically Chat GPT, was in the news when I was developing the strip. I tried it out and found it wanting. It wrote an hilariously awful series of biographies of me, and of a fictitious cartoon character and studio, that I describe in earlier posts on this site. (Old McBeiman Had A Form, A-I, A-I, OH!) I decided that Kate, being a modern child, would try to use chatbots in her school assignments.

This story line will begin in mid August, since many American terms start then.

But something happened last week and this week that forced my hand. There was a ‘robotic news conference’ on July 7, 2023. Robots powered by AI actually spoke to the press. Click on the red text to hear what they said.

Robots gave a press conference in Geneva, Switzerland and most promised they would not take human jobs, or rebel against their creators. One of them wasn’t as accomodating.

On July 11, 2023, ChatGPT and Twitter crashed. They crashed again on July 12.

Tomorrow’s strip (July 13) was quickly redrawn. My AI character now appears about a month before it was originally introduced. The strip uses some of the quotes from the press conference, and…well, you will have to see what happens tomorrow on the FurBabies page.

Enjoy.