2024-10-03 19:00:47| Engadget
Hey! If you have fond memories playing Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy on your family TV, youll love The Rubber Keyed Wonder. Its a new documentary chronicling the birth, life, death and rebirth of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum that premieres today. The crowdfunded film is an adoring look at the iconic and legendary artifact of computing history with plenty of high profile contributors. Two thumbs up! Go watch the film now, theres no need for you to keep reading beyond this point, I hope you have loads of fun!
If youre a die-hard fan, theres no need to keep reading!
(Hopefully theyve gone now.)
It was while watching The Rubber Keyed Wonder that I realized what makes me itchy about the current crop of pop-culture documentaries going around. A documentary should be an authored essay offering a point of view, an argument, or at least educating you about a subject matter. Theyre usually deeply one-sided, but they normally have something to say beyond hey, isnt this neat? Thats what Ive found lacking in documentaries like this and GoldenEra, since they dont have much at all to say beyond that. Which is heartbreaking when the films subject matter is nowhere near as neat and far more interesting as it's made out to be here.
If youre unfamiliar, Sir Clive Sinclair was a British inventor whose work made a huge impact on the electronics industry. He developed ultra-small transistor radios, pioneered the pocket calculator, the digital watch and the portable TV. His interest in green transport saw him build a single-rider electric vehicle decades before the advent of the e-scooter. But all of that is a footnote to his range of affordable home computers, the most notable being the Spectrum.
The Britain Sinclair grew up in was broke, and he made it his lifes mission to produce products that were affordable enough for anyone to buy. His cheap, mass-market products were big hits and deeply undercut the competition, especially in home computers. Unfortunately, the low cost also meant his gear was badly-made, unreliable and severely underpowered.
But the affordability and limitations sparked a creative boom that is credited with creating the UKs computer games industry. The heads of several major British studios cut their teeth on developing and selling games for the ZX Spectrum. And the second-order effects of Sinclairs work left a far deeper impact on the technology industry more broadly. Sinclairs protégé turned rival Chris Curry left to build Acorn Computers and, from there, founded ARM. The founder of what would become Rockstar North worked on the Sinclair production line in Dundee.
Sinclair was also reportedly difficult to work with, had severe temper tantrums and quite a big ego, too. He was fairly bad at business, and his refusal to listen to other people wound up costing him both of his companies, once during a fight with the UKs National Enterprise Board in 1976 and once again in 1985. Then there was his habit of rushing out unfinished products to keep money flowing into his company at the cost of his reputation.
The reason I bring all of those things up is because every single one is either given the briefest of attention or elided completely. The Rubber Keyed Wonder would much rather streamline its focus to the Spectrum itself and its impact, erasing the more interesting story around it. But if you know anything about the territory, and how bound up the machine and its idiosyncratic founder were, these omissions hurt the story.
But I understand why: This isnt a documentary that aspires to being a serious examination of a very interesting period in computing history. Instead, its a product of the fan-nostalgia industrial complex, where the most insightful comments are buried in favor of misty-eyed rememberings. Thats not to say it isnt honest; even the Spectrums most ardent fans are happy to admit the machine sucked on several fundamental levels. Even the Sinclair employees joke that they knew they were selling barely-functional crap a lot of the time, but that the hobbyists who bought them loved it nevertheless.
The film cant help but be informative, delving into the broader ecosystem that cultivated around the Spectrum. Theres its genesis, the games that made it famous, and the culture it spawned from independent computer stores to the cottage industry of magazines focused on it. But theres also plenty of time-sucking montages of playthrough footage from Spectrum games that sap the films momentum in favor of squeezing the audiences member berries.
Thats not to say The Rubber Keyed Wonder is a waste of time, especially given the dearth of material on the subject*. Theres plenty in there that I learned for the first time, and found some of the games Id not encountered as a kid to be seriously impressive. Its just a shame that you will probably leave this film with a nagging desire to answer some of the questions its just not at all interested in engaging with.
* Its probably the law that I have to mention Micro Men, the tongue-in-cheek BBC comedy that satirizes the feud between Sinclair and Curry. Both men went on the record to decry its factual inaccuracies, with Curry saying the film was very unfair on Clive Sinclair. It is, however, quite a fun watch so long as you accept that its mostly fictional. You can probably find it for free online if you look hard enough.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/the-rubber-keyed-wonder-is-an-adoring-portrait-of-the-sinclair-zx-spectrum-170047407.html?src=rss
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