Over the next fifteen years, till the turn of the century, sales of the Cartoon Engine were steady and profitable to all parties, with Montgomery Ward controlling exclusive retail rights. Although the number of units shifted was never as high as the figures for other, competing entertainment technology, such as stereopticons and magic lanterns and gramophones, the Mueller device found its way into many thousands of parlours and classrooms. Hetty Mueller’s prolific creativity, equal to or even greater than her father’s, insured a steady stream of thaliatype packs that could often capitalize on topical events and personages. Best-sellers included “Ragtime Romances”; “Spanish-American War Follies”; “John L. Sullivan’s Peachy Punch-outs”; “Tammany Hall Titters”; “Coney Island Capers”; and so forth.
Cheap and inferior rivals to the Mueller product sprang up, such as the Kneeslapping Kinetikon; the Professor Wogglebug Waggery Widget; and the Charalambus Charade-o-graph. But they made little advance against the high-quality hardware and software provided by Mueller.
More disturbing was the proliferation of off-colour or outright obscene thaliatype packs created by unscrupulous third-party vendors and sold under the counter at drugstores and soda fountains and bar rooms, mostly to male customers. Children, naturally, were frequent users of the Cartoon Engine, and when an adult inadvertently left a filthy thaliatype pack in place and let the machine fall into juvenile hands, the resulting scandal aroused public condemnation of the device by bluestockings and Mrs. Grundys and Carry Nations and Anthony Comstocks everywhere.
But these minor scandals could not kill the Cartoon Engine. It took mass media to do that. As the twentieth century dawned, magazines became cheaper and cheaper and more numerous. Publications like Argosy and Munsey’s and The Saturday Evening Post and the original Life and Judge humour zines offered the same thrills as the Cartoon Engine, without any of the work, at cheaper prices.
By 1905, sales of Mueller’s brainchild had plummeted almost to zero, despite the desperate introduction of such racy official thaliatype packs as “Evelyn Nesbit’s Barebum Boffs.” Twain’s death in 1910 was the final nail in the coffin of the Cartoon Engine. Montgomery Ward discontinued carrying the item, and Hetty retired at age sixty-one.
During the Depression years, when entertainment budgets were once again strained, an elderly Hetty Mueller re-emerged briefly, and managed to convince Sears, Roebuck to stock a new version of the engine, cheaply constructed out of tin and celluloid. But sales were so disappointing—in large part due to the ancient nature of Hetty’s jokes—that after the catalogue of 1933 even this cheapjack successor was put to rest, with Hetty Mueller vanishing once more into obscurity.
The relatively brief heyday of Dr. Mueller’s Panoptical Cartoon Engine—the thirty years from 1875 to 1905—represented a golden time when every citizen of the globe with a small sum of cash could personally generate his or her own “comic cuts,” experiencing the dual pleasures of artist and audience. And thanks to the site you are now visiting, such delights are once again available to the masses, albeit only in virtual, cybernetic form.
THE NEW CYBERIAD
“Our perfection is our curse, for it draws down upon our every endeavour no end of unforeseeable consequences!”
—Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad
THE FIRST SALLY, OR,
THE DECISION TO RECREATE THE PALEFACES
The green sun of the Gros Horloge system shone down benignly and with wide-spectrum plentitude upon two figures seated in an elegant landscaped garden, where, alongside the vector-straight beryllium paths, beds of nastysturtiums snapped, blueballs and cocktuses swelled, rhododendrites synapsed, and irises dilated. Each recumbent figure rested on a titanium and carbon-fibre lawnchair large as one of the sentient ocean liners employed by the Sea Gypsies of Panthalassa IX.
These titanic figures exhibited a curious mix of streamlining and bumpy excrescences, of chrome suppleness and pitted stiffness, of corrugated wave-guides and monomaniacal monomolecular matrices. Their bodies represented a hundred thousand accumulations, divagations, improvements, detractions and adornments compiled willy-nilly down the millennia.
These raster-resplendent, softly sighing cyber-giants, big as the brontomeks of Coneyrex III, were Trurl and Klapaucius, master constructors, than whom there were none better. Renowned throughout the unanimously mechanistic universe for their legendary exploits, these experts of assemblage, savants of salvage, and demons of decoherence had beggared every rival, beguiled every patron, and bemused every layman. No task they had conceived and laid their manipulators to had lasted long undone; no challenge that had reached them via singularity spacegram, Planck projection, or eleventh-dimensional engraved invitation had stymied them for long; no quantum quandary they had accidentally stumbled into had held them captive for more than a quintillionth of a quinquennium.
And this state of affairs was precisely the problem, precisely the reason why Trurl and Klapaucius now lay all enervated and ennui’d beneath the jade radiance of Gros Horloge.
Perfection had cast a pall upon their persons, and perverted their projections from the puerile preterite into mere pitiful potentialities.
“Dear Klapaucius,” said Trurl in a weary voice, breaking their long winsome garden-cloistered silence for the first time in more than a month. “Would you please pass me the jug of lemon electrolyte? I’ve conceived a thirst in my fourth-rearmost catalytic converter.”
Klapaucius stirred a many-hinged extensor, dislodging a colony of betabirds that had built their nests in the crook of this particular arm during its long immobility. The foil-winged betabirds took to the skies with a loud tinny sonic assault from their vocoders that sounded like a traffic accident on the jampacked freeways of Ottobanz XII, where wheeled citizens daily raced to road-rage exhaustion. The birds circled angrily above the oblivious constructors.
Conveying the jug of lemon electrolyte to his partner, Klapaucius said, “It feels very light, lazystruts. I doubt you will find the refreshment your thyristors and valves crave.”
Trurl brought the flask up to one of his perceptors and inspected it. “These volatiles evaporated completely fifteen planetary rotations ago, plus or minus ten cesium disintegrations.”
“I suspect there is more lemon electrolyte in the house, in the stasis pantry, as well as various other flavours, such as watermelon, tarpit and mrozsian.”
Klapaucius waved toward the immense transmission-tower-turreted manse looming across the greensward, one-hundred stories tall, its top wreathed in clouds, its many launch cannons, hangars, bays, long-range sensing instrumentation, autonomous aerial vehicles and effectors gathering dust.
“Would you fetch the fresh drink for me, dear Klapaucius?”
“Not at all.”
“What? What was that rude rejoinder?”
“I said, ‘Not at all.’”
“But why not? You are closer to the house by at least a million angstroms. Your path thereto is not even NP-complete!”
“Yes, true. But the thirst is yours.”
Trurl shook his massive head with an air of sadness. “Klapaucius, Klapaucius, Klapaucius—whatever has become of us? We never used to quarrel like this, or express such mutual rudeness.”
“Don’t be a tunnel-wit! We’ve always quarrelled before now.”