Why HAL 9000 sang "Daisy"

WOW~!

Thanks for this Roger. I'm also enjoying an exploration of the rest of your site. I've been living in Japan for close to 20 years, but I'm still as much a Chicagoan as ever, maybe more so. Love your writing, love your discoveries.

You thought HAL-9000 was a bad Apple? Let me share with you something artful from a video game, Roger: GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System). Also, I'll take her song over HAL's (second half of the video).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgP4kT5-9Cc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glados

Yes, I've heard of this anecdote before, I'm not sure where. But just goes to show this guy's need for perfection. True visionary. What a film!

And to quote you Mr. Ebert - "Shivers ran down my spine"

Cheers!

I remember putting off watching Space Odyssey 2001 for so long, half afraid I wouldn't like it, and half fearing that I would find out that I was too dumb to get any meaning out of it. Not too long ago I finally watched it(in HD no less) and I can still remember that I had made popcorn halfway through the movie and when it was over I hadn't touched any of them. I was just mesmerized.

Hadn't seen the apple ad before and I just found that pretty lame, to be honest but I guess it doesn't age as well. considering how retarded the Y2K scare was.

I'm sure this is something that you already know, or that, given the lag between writing and posting a comment, that someone else has already left an as-yet-unseen comment about. But in case this responsibility falls to me: If you advance each of the letters in HAL one step forward in their alphabetic sequence, you get ...?

HAL's song ranks up there as one of the saddest death scenes in film, I think. The cool detachment of the machine slowly turns to an almost child-like innocence and it's almost too much to handle

I guess it's like the "Hello World" for programmers.

While Hal 9000's singing is one of the most piogant moments in the history of Film I could not help but smile at a previous commentator's mention of GLaDOS as the Hal of this century (ironic since Hal is also supposed to be from this century but you know what I mean.)

Now everytime a villain falls to his "apparent" demise over a cliff or some waterfall, I could not help but start humming her famous song from the ending credit of the game.

Even if games are not art, the song "Still Alive" is nothing but pure art. A fitting epitaph for all the genius villains, mad scientists and AI whose bodies (or chips) were never recovered.

Elvis might not be alive but Moriarties never die. Especially in movies.

Daisy--the Rosebud of a computer?

HAL is not only a mans name but a computer term which stands for Hardware Abstraction Layer and is responsible for communication between the software and the hardware.

Thanks for the clips, Mr. Ebert - magnificent stuff, sir! A outstanding and sad death scene? Maybe, but Hal's death, while quite cinematic, does get anywhere near the points that, say, Peckinpah's "Wild Bunch," Spielberg's "Jaws" (Shaw's death) or De Palma's "Scarface" (Pacino's death) receive. Not to plug the site, but an article I wrote on 10rant.com details this ranking in full. Top 10 Cinematic Deaths is serious business, after all...

What makes HAL's death even more touching is of course he's the only character in the whole film who displays any emotions

Sean, yes we all knew this, but this is an accident: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000

Hi Roger... so good to see that you're still active as a critic. I used to watch you with the late Gene Siskel all the time on At The Movies. Between that show and Leonard Maltin on Entertainment Tonight, those were my first exposures to film critique.

I actually own a record that was released by Bell Labs containing those early experiments in voice synthesis. The site is not mine, but you can find pictures of the record and an audio file at http://jukeboxmafia.blogspot.com/2009/02/bell-labs-speech-simulation.html -- enjoy! :)

Sorry, Sean... the HAL/IBM thing has been dismissed as a coincidence by many people, including Kubrick himself.

Clever, clever ad writers for Apple to have made this parody of the Y2K scare, although it's really only parody in retrospect; I'm mentally comparing this to the current Mac vs. PC ads and laughing at the way this ad foreshadowed the current campaign: just another version of the juvenile rant 'you like so-and-so better than me.'

2001 is still one of my all-time favorite films, but I'm not a gamer and wasn't aware of GlaDOS -- so I was delighted to see that clip on YouTube on the death of GlasDOS. It immediately struck me that HAL is a very 'guy' computer whereas GlaDOS is very 'girly,' right down to the passive-aggressive guilt trips, snarkiness and sniping cuts when the guilt didn't work, followed by the also very girly, upbeat death tune and lyrics, too (so much like personal affirmations combined with ad copywriting!). Both computers, in fact, manipulate with abandon, equally unsuccessfully in the end. Ha!! Just goes to show you: what you get when you combine high machine intelligence with strong survival instinct and minimal ethics is a tendency to megalomania, manipulation, and rampant rationalization. Those chip boxes are more like us in that way than we'd like to admit, manipulating and rationalizing and bargaining right to the very last. Gotta love it.

Roger, thanks again, you do a great job of helping to deepen my appreciation of the movies every time i visit your site

Irony = the Apple ad discussing an error having an error in itself!

The new century began January 1, 2001 NOT January 1, 2000.
[There was no year ZERO!]

Speaking of

a) computers

b) poignant death scenes

and

c) 2001

... may i introduce you to Roy Wood's song "Miss Clarke and the Computer"? (Note spelling of name)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHo4yGjYhJo

(Disregard the cheesy animation; just listen to the song.)

Ah, so that's where this post went! It appeared on my blog follower, but the link never worked.

And yes, ever Arthur C. Clarke wrote in the notes at the end of his book 3001 that HAL being once removed letter-by-letter from IBM was not intended. I wonder though: could it have been subconsciously done?

I recently named my new dog "Daisy" for the express purpose of calling her in the tone of a dying HAL-9000.

Roger--thanks for that. I've seen the Y2K ad before, but still get a kick out of it. I just found my favorite parody apple ad on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY57NgcZ8C0&feature=related

I am a Mac user for 24 years now (and am only 29 years old). I love Macs, but when you start claiming Gandhi would've used your product, you may have a few problems.

webdiva_in_chicago said " Clever, clever ad writers for Apple to have made this parody of the Y2K scare, although it's really only parody in retrospect"

Not at all a parody, and calling Y2K a "scare" is a gross understatement. Millions of man-hours were spent pouring over DOS and Windows code before the year 2000 to fix the 2-digit-year problem of when 99 rolled over to 00. While I won't say this problem was totally non-existent on the Mac OS, it was much less problematic, as the OS was architected from the beginning to use 4-digit-years in its internal representations, much like other older, more robust operating systems (e.g., OpenVMS). Even on these systems, programmers were not precluded from writing their applications with only 2 year representations! (Dummies!)

This is a case of cum hoc, ergo propter hoc -- so many presume that just because Y2K passed and there were only very few incidents (some of which were anything but minor - nukes in Japan come to mind!), that all the years of preparation by millions of people were unnecessary. In fact, this is a shining testament to the hard work of those people, and should not be tarnished by logical fallacies.

And some of that work was done by software engineers who properly designed their operating systems from the beginning, expecting them to last into the next millenium! ;-)

scoop said " The new century began January 1, 2001 NOT January 1, 2000."

Good catch!

And to Roger: thanks!

I don't know, Ahmed. I would make the case that Portal is art on a number of levels, and not just JoCo's song. GlaDOS is, for my money, the best creepy/funny villain of this young century with the possible exception of Heath Ledger's Joker.

I adore this scene. Although poignant, I felt like this scene added a new dimension to the story. I felt like I had watched HAL be absorbed by the universe and instantly forgotten in the enormous oblivion. This reminded me of Werner Herzog's fanatical approach to film-making, his fascination with men's lost pursuit of greatness - a plight of futility, much like HAL's futile attempts to stop the mission but being stopped by much more powerful forces. Wonderful.

I am white and I am not racist (I do not believe any race is superior or inferior to another), but I can't help but be prejudiced. I believe that the stereotypical "black culture" is poisonous to human development.

I know it is unfair, but I can't make myself ignore the fact that if I see a black person in an urban area, there is a high chance that he is the kind of person I wouldn't want to associate myself with (and a 100% chance if his pants are hanging around his knees). I don't go out of my way to treat him rudely, but I can't help but recognize the reality of the situation.

This isn't fair to the small percentage who survived a culture that hates book smarts, hates cooperation with white people, and rejects those who are anti-drugs and anti-crime. But I don't see any way that I could possibly think any differently.

I think it'll be a long, slow process until we share the same cultural identity as Americans (as opposed to white Americans and black Americans), and only then can racism and prejudice end.

On a completely different topic - I've been watching the Youtube videos of the Nostalgia Critic lately. He does entertaining reviews of movies, TV shows, and other things from the childhood of those of us in our 20s and 30s.

I came across this video today, in which he reviews Siskel and Ebert. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj3kS4T2vRg

It's really entertaining and I learned a couple of things I didn't know about you and Gene Siskel, and of course he had nothing but the highest compliments for you both.

But Roger, I couldn't help but notice the 3 minute mark of the video above - there you are, talking about how you played the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video game. Not only that, but you're criticizing a film because they showed the wrong level of a video game, which you were actually able to recognize from playing it!

It was just an unexpected moment that made me laugh, given your public distaste for video games. (You and I just define "art" differently, and that's fine.) I'll give you one thing though, if my first video game was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the bad impression might have made me permanently give up video games too. Awful, awful game.

Hey, are you guys talking about Portal in here?

I watched 2001 after playing Portal, and HAL actually made me appreciate GLaDoS less. She's a total rip-off.