The large radio tower in the RKO logo which appears at the very beginning of King Kong is a curious thing. It is a piece of an old medium, radio, in a new one, film. The logo seems awkward, a sign of a time in which movies were “moving pictures,” only beginning to gain the legitimacy of radio and print, to develop a vocabulary.

There are a number of elements of new media that are left over from their earlier forms: the prompt to “insert coin(s)” in home console versions of arcade games, electronic documents broken into distinct pages, to be stored in file folders on a computer desktop.

You might say these are analogous to vestigial traits.¹ They are remainders of past forms, still present but made useless by gradual change. The RKO radio tower is to film as the grasp reflex is to newborn babies.

This analogy is misleading. The truth is that carryovers from older to newer media are not always dead weight. In many cases old media serve as a fulcrum on which to advance the goals of new media.

Tropes as bridges

Consider the spinning newspaper trope (first used in Citizen Kane—an RKO radio picture). Presenting a brief banner headline, a film communicates that an important event has occurred, shows that it has impact, that it is known publicly, and that some time (enough to publish the paper) has passed. Taking advantage of the audience’s understanding of how newspapers work, this technique manages to get across a great deal of information in an efficient manner.

In this understanding, the radio tower before a film isn’t without function, but is instead a bridge between the old and new. It is as the language used to describe internet media—email, web-site—something familiar to explain something unfamiliar.

The spinning newspaper remains effective despite the fading relevance of and familiarity with newspapers nowadays. Ditto the comedic record needle scratch²: how many viewers laugh at it, but don’t know where and how the sound is produced?

(Of course, things continue to change. These tropes are not going to be effective forever.)

Tropes as interference

Ideas from old media can be useful, but can also interfere with the new. Their effectiveness and convenience can limit media as well as they can leverage it.

Take, for example, film and video games. Video games often use letterboxed screens (once only seen when watching widescreen film on television screens) to denote sequences in which players are meant to watch the game as they would a film, rather than participate in it.

For the same reasons, letterboxed cutscenes are frustrating. They are a sign that the game is no longer an interactive experience, but a passive one; that the designers were not able or willing to look beyond their understanding of film.

The sequence in which Sephiroth kills Aeris works in the same way as does the twist in The Sixth Sense. It’s more film than game. Like radio on TV (which The Score seems to think is a good idea), it disregards core, distinguishing aspects of the newer medium to shoehorn in an older one.

The spinning paper trope does not make a newspaper of the film in the way Final Fantasy makes a film of a game. The spinning paper requires viewers to read only a headline, not an entire article. The trope makes use of the newspaper form without mimicking it. In this way, it is a successful borrowing.

Artful use of old media is possible. The video editor included with Grand Theft Auto IV, with which players replay and edit stunts they’ve performed in-game, is an example of how, as Steve Gaynor has said, “taking cinematic techniques and applying them to games that isn’t ‘let’s just put movies into games.’”

Just as old media can be useful, a reservoir of convention and time-tested mechanics, they can be distracting and limiting. The methods and tropes borrowed need to be questioned, sometimes tempered and adapted, sometimes discarded.