No, you read that right. Jim Henson made a movie for a phone company that starred a farting robot.
Before Jim Henson achieved fame for his work with the Muppets, he spent a lot of time making commercials and the like. Case in point: This short film that AT&T just uncovered and posted to YouTube; not only does the movie feature a farting robot that looks like it’d be at home chilling out with Kermit The Frog, but it also explains how data communications work.
Henson’s film was made in 1963 for The Bell System (which eventually became AT&T). The company used it as part of an “elite seminar” given to business owners. The seminar, it turns out, was covering the (then) brand new subject of data communications and contained a lot of films and multimedia presentations.
The idea behind the film (according to a three-page memo written by the seminar’s organizers at Inpro) was to outline how the relationship between man and machine was continuing to grow but was “not without tension and resentment: ‘He [the robot] is sure that All Men Basically Want to Play Golf, and not run businesses – if he can do it better.'”
The film was discovered in the AT&T archives, and was authenticated as a Henson production courtesy of Karen Falk over at the Henson Archives.
While the film may look more bizarre and surreal than anything else by today’s standards, can you imagine how insanely weird it must have been to watch back in the 1960s, especially if you were a conservative business owner?
Source: Laughing Squid via Geeks Are Sexy
