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Categories: Internets
Tags: barnie's army, tv, tv pow
Ever want to play a video game on your tv over the phone? This was an option for kids in the late 1970s/early 1980s living in the Raleigh-Durham, NC area.
TV Pow! was a segment on Barney’s Army, a children’s show with animated hosts who introduced syndicated cartoons. Callers to the show could play a space-shooter, where UFOs would fly around a starfield crossing a targeting reticle. With the UFO in the crosshairs, players would shout “Pow!” and legitimate voice-activated controls would pull the trigger.
I found this via Discovery’s 10 Defunct TV Technologies (1978) which points out that analog delay threw the timing off.
The Barney’s Army fansite lists three strategies players would use: the single “Pow!” which needed to be well-timed, the more effective machine gun “Pow! Pow! Pow!,” and the Southern drawl “Pa-yohw,” which was too slow to be hit anything.