'Lost in Space' Actor Harris Dies
Mon Nov 4, 9:44 PM ET
By ANTHONY BREZNICAN, AP Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Jonathan Harris, the flamboyantly fussy actor who
portrayed the dastardly, cowardly antagonist Dr. Zachary Smith on the
1960's sci-fi show "Lost in Space," has died. He was 87.
And so another bit of pop culture passes from the scene, assuming a kind
of iconic immortality on some cable channel. Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs
thought that after death, they would ascend to heaven as a god, and be
seen as a star. These days, the more modern view is that you become a star
first, and then die in syndication.
In another ten years or so, very many of the shows in syndication will
have casts made up almost entirely of dead people. Keeps costs down, I
suppose. Why do you think that RCA re-issues a new Toscanini set every 10
years or so? Think about it, though. For the first time in history, we
have the world-view of previous generations being passed down directly(in
color, even) to generations with very different demographics and cultural
outlook. Some big discordancy there. Fred MacMurray may have gone to that
big Disneyland in the sky, but his early 60's earnestly square outlook is
still being beamed out to millions every day as the picture of normal
California family life (if that's not an oxymoron.)
The 21st Century is being continuously inundated with scenes from life in
the mid-20th Century, a vicarious form of time travel. People are now able
to escape to eras of their choosing, if only for a little while, and if
only in the imagination.
But what if the good old days could be brought back to life, in some
directly experienced way?
There are already speech synthesis techniques that work by concatenating
tiny pieces of utterances from a human speaker to form new utterances.
Given enough voice samples, you could have the voices of famous people
saying things that the people themselves never said in real life. More
than that, you could have the voices of famouevenue production.
Note that Microsoft already owns an encyclopedia (Encarta) and a
multimedia archive (Corbis)? What happens to shared cultural experience
when it is no longer shared, but licensed out?
My guess is that as the real world becomes more entangled with the virtual
world, personas will be as important as persons, and that the future of
the future lies in customizable re-creations of the past.
