Mannix (1967-75)
The American TV detective genre is replete with instances of rugged individualism, rebels who play by their own rules, in constant friction with institutions and authority figures who nonetheless rely on them to get things done.
During the decades prior to the personal computer age, computer technology was consistently aligned with soulless corporate interests and technocratic bureaucracy in opposition to American ideologies of individualism, freedom and autonomy. This contrast is especially stark in detective genres of the 1960s and 1970s, when hypermasculine action heroes such as Mike Connors' Mannix operated on the fringes of institutional sanction, often defying orders from superiors and technocrats who deploy computers for increased rationality and efficiency. The trope of the rugged individual is thus placed in direct conflict with these interests, reifying the primacy of emotion, intuition and other, uniquely human characteristics.
The laboriously abstracted process by which real-world operators interfaced with mainframe computers was rarely shown on TV or in movies. Instead writers and set designers remediated the practices associated with earlier technologies when trying to incorporate computers into popular-culture narratives of the 1960s. Hence, the punch cards that were used to store data and input commands to a mainframe computer commonly serve as the computer's means of communicating with humans, delivering messages in syntactically correct - if sometimes abbreviated - English sentences as if it were a teletype machine. In the case of the opening title sequence of Mannix, the show's title is simply printed in bold letters across a card emerging from the machine.
The opening title sequence from the first season of Mannix also deploys numerous stereotypes of 1970s action TV shows, including the use of split screens and high-tech imagery that is central to the investigative work of Mannix's employer Intertect. As a rogue agent who does not conform easily to institutional bureaucracy, Mannix continually contradicts the technocratic wisdom of the agency's computer system (played by an IBM 1460 mainframe), using intuition, and impulsive physical action in sharp contrast to the bespectacled geeks who analyze data from the computer and prescribe logical strategies of investigation.
During the first season of Mannix, a virtuosic range of futuristic technologies served as foils for Mannix's rugged individualism. In a recurring joke, Mannix evades both the visual surveillance of his boss, who has video cameras installed in every office of Intertect and the attempts at geolocative surveillance via a radio transmitter planted in his car, allowing Intertect operatives to track his movements around the country, though they are constantly proven to be incorrect. Although it was a popular success, at the end of the first season, the show's producer, Lucille Ball, argued that ordinary viewers were alienated by the show's fetishization of technology and Mannix subsequently opened his own detective agency where resisting the constraints of corporations and technology was no longer a central part of the narrative.
During the decades prior to the personal computer age, computer technology was consistently aligned with soulless corporate interests and technocratic bureaucracy in opposition to American ideologies of individualism, freedom and autonomy. This contrast is especially stark in detective genres of the 1960s and 1970s, when hypermasculine action heroes such as Mike Connors' Mannix operated on the fringes of institutional sanction, often defying orders from superiors and technocrats who deploy computers for increased rationality and efficiency. The trope of the rugged individual is thus placed in direct conflict with these interests, reifying the primacy of emotion, intuition and other, uniquely human characteristics.
The laboriously abstracted process by which real-world operators interfaced with mainframe computers was rarely shown on TV or in movies. Instead writers and set designers remediated the practices associated with earlier technologies when trying to incorporate computers into popular-culture narratives of the 1960s. Hence, the punch cards that were used to store data and input commands to a mainframe computer commonly serve as the computer's means of communicating with humans, delivering messages in syntactically correct - if sometimes abbreviated - English sentences as if it were a teletype machine. In the case of the opening title sequence of Mannix, the show's title is simply printed in bold letters across a card emerging from the machine.
The opening title sequence from the first season of Mannix also deploys numerous stereotypes of 1970s action TV shows, including the use of split screens and high-tech imagery that is central to the investigative work of Mannix's employer Intertect. As a rogue agent who does not conform easily to institutional bureaucracy, Mannix continually contradicts the technocratic wisdom of the agency's computer system (played by an IBM 1460 mainframe), using intuition, and impulsive physical action in sharp contrast to the bespectacled geeks who analyze data from the computer and prescribe logical strategies of investigation.
During the first season of Mannix, a virtuosic range of futuristic technologies served as foils for Mannix's rugged individualism. In a recurring joke, Mannix evades both the visual surveillance of his boss, who has video cameras installed in every office of Intertect and the attempts at geolocative surveillance via a radio transmitter planted in his car, allowing Intertect operatives to track his movements around the country, though they are constantly proven to be incorrect. Although it was a popular success, at the end of the first season, the show's producer, Lucille Ball, argued that ordinary viewers were alienated by the show's fetishization of technology and Mannix subsequently opened his own detective agency where resisting the constraints of corporations and technology was no longer a central part of the narrative.
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