Tuesday, November 4, 2014




Influential Movies and TV Shows


One of the factors that had a very big impact in the creation of my first novel was the boob tube. The memorable movies and television shows of the yesteryears that up to today, still swim around in my head. I mean who could forget Richie Brockelman or The Greatest American Hero? How about Mork and Mindy, Charles in Charge or WKRP in Cincinnati? Well, yesterday but not that yesterday hehe… (I was about to mention Combat and UFO but never mind).

My introduction to CyberPunk really started with a film with the likes I had never seen before that I couldn’t sleep. (For those of us who grew up in the 80’s, you know what it was like back then.) There were a few films and shows which featured computers but this was different. It was inside the computer. Yes, TRON. A fantastic electronic megaworld called the “Grid”, the quintessential CyberSpace. This was then followed by another film which defined the meaning of the word “Hacker”. It was called WarGames ( Imagine launching a nuclear strike with your “whatyamacallit gizmo automatic trash compactor” in your bedroom with this bombshell of a chick beside you!) Ever wonder why so many of us got into computers in the first place? 

Also, during those times, very few women were into computers (they had this stereotypical stigma of being branded as weird and most of them didn’t like that) but when they saw the film, they started poking their noses where their noses didn’t belong and geeohwizohgosh! Look what we have today.  I don’t think social media would ever have succeeded without them. 

This didn’t stop there, Revenge of the Nerds came out a few years later then Johnny Mnemonic and suddenly being a computer geek was so cool. Television was going the same way, shows like The WhizKids, Automan and Riptide kept us glued to the screen. If you grew up in the 80's, there’s this one guy almost every kid and teen considered his/her hero. Richard Dean Anderson who could build anything with his Swiss Army Knife. Everyone one was in front of the TV when MacGyver was on.

The advances of computer technology we enjoy (and a lot of times take for granted today) probably would not have been created if the person who developed it didn’t sit on front of the TV as a kid and watched MacGyver build something, anything! “If you really put your heart and mind to it, you can build it.”  What an influence!  

Looking back, I did manage to build a lot of things in my day. After all, the Apple2+ was a perfect introductory tinkering machine to play around with. Just imagine putting all this films together, meshing them into an idea, mixing in ones “hacking” experiences and factoring in the recent and major events of those times (environment, the EDSA revolution, etc…) and you get “Project Pawai”.

Thanks for the read once again. I'll be sharing more info on how the novel was formed in my next post whenever that would be =D Stay Tuned...