Harry Marks: I officially retired two months ago. I just need to sit back and address a couple of the thousands of things that have passed through my head in the last years. And one of them is this idea of finding an easier tool. And this interest really starts with me. When somebody says, tell me a story, you must have a thousand of them. I go blank. Yet, I hear myself telling stories all the time. I mean, just little sketches of interesting moments that are appropriate to tell at that moment. I never know how to start to tell them without being jogged. Something has to jog me. So, I'd like to see a jog tool like the one that one that was built into a program called Echo Lake, the software tool developed by Greg Lake. I found myself writing and bringing up images and getting a story just because it was a very comfortable arena to be in. What I'd like to see is an excellent design example that would give people the opportunity of turning out a good-looking document. So that's what I'm going to turn my attention to. So far, I haven't found the panacea.

Interviewer: Do you see anything going right or that is promising about this technology in terms of what we consider broadcast culture?

Harry Marks: One of the things that I have seen which is working to a degree is the ability for designers and producers to use really low end tools to do broadcast work. Disney has a group of people in a little office called 1066.. They are led by Peter Hastings and Prudence Fenton, who are, by the way, two of the brightest and nicest people I know, and they are doing pretty amazing things

They're producing astounding things in a desktop Macintosh environment. They have a project called Mrs. Munger's Class, which is a component of ABC's Saturday Morning lineup. If you can picture a yearbook page with the little head pictures of the class and a larger picture of the teacher, that's pretty much the concept. It's the dialogue between the kids and the teacher that is the story. And it's hysterical. It's brilliant, and it costs next to nothing. Already, I've seen part of it automated where the faces are constructed so that they will read phonemes, so that if you type in "Hey, class chill out," the little mouths will move. They make these little forty second segments. I love them, I just love them. Where it succeeds is in making you buy into something that you know is wrong. In other words, you know these kids are not in a school bus or a classroom, that it's all cut and paste and silly animation that a kid could do. Or so it appears. But you're suddenly buying into the story of Mrs. Munger and her class of characters. I think the Simpsons, Rug Rats and South Park all do that. You start to realize that it doesn't have to be Armageddon. If the concept is good, and the writing is good, it can work. Mrs. Munger's Class is just a remarkable example to me of how the wall of reality kind of goes away. You don't need it because you're into it. They suddenly become real characters, to the point where I've heard grownups quoting lines from the characters in the class!