The Tale of the Muntz

Someone asked me about this recently and I thought it bore writing down for posterity.

When I was a starving student in my final year at Cal in '95, I got word that my grandparents were moving from their mobile home park into a "retirement community". I was asked if I'd want to take their big-screen television, since they wouldn't have room for it in their new place. Naturally I jumped at the chance... What college student wouldn't love to have a big screen TV?!

Now keep in mind that I didn't spend a lot of time at my grandparents' place, and if I'd ever seen the TV on, it was probably when I was visiting as a young child and any memories I had of it were pretty hazy. My roommate Dave and I practically raced down to San Jose in a rented Ryder truck to pick it up.

It was larger than I'd remembered... Much larger. Think oh-my-god large. My grandfather practically purred over it, crooning about how they just don't make them like this now, that this was one of the first ones, that it was invented by this guy named Muntz who invented all sorts of things, see, here's the 70s-era brochure with a picture of him talking on a rotary phone in a car wearing a pirate hat... "A genius, I tell you! Mad Man Muntz, they called him! Way ahead of his time." He stroked the wood lovingly. "Look at that finish. I think this is mahogany." Dave and I looked at each other doubtfully... It was pretty clear it was painted particle board. This was our first sign that perhaps we weren't getting what we'd thought.

Goddamn, that thing was heavy and unwieldly. It wouldn't fit into the elevator, so we sweated and cursed the thing up the tiny stairwell into our apartment in Berkeley, with particle board shearing off the corners and giant wood staples stabbing us in the palm at every turn. Finally, with great anticipation, we sat down to watch my bootleg of the laserdisc version of The Empire Strikes Back.

The first sign of trouble was the THX logo, which was somehow seated inside a blue oval rather than a blue rectangle. The opening crawl of yellow text was unmistakably warped, with the lines drooping down curvaceously as they entered at the bottom of the screen, then curving upwards by the same amount before they left the top. Worse, the screen was completely washed out, only really visible with every blind in our apartment closed. Even then, we found we practically had to sit on each other's lap to both be able to see it at the same time, because if you sat off angle the screen reflected nothing at you. We ended up sitting bobsled-style, one on the couch and one on the floor. It suddenly occurred to me why my grandparents' recliners were practically a bowling-alley length away from the TV... So they could both see it at the same time!

After about five minutes of wincing, we turned it off, then took it apart to see what was inside. There was a 10-inch tube TV, a Zenith, I think, with a wire from an IR sensor messily soldered to the channel-changing buttons, laying on its back. The screen was practically a fishbowl to begin with. Then on top there was a black hood with a white interior, leading up to two gigantic, thick lenses, about an inch thick each, one concave and one convex. There was no lighting other than that the 10-inch TV itself put out. The screen, which was made of pretty much the same stuff as your typical home Super-8 projector screen, was curved to try to remove some of the distortion introduced by the multiple lenses and the original screen... for all the good it did.

Dave didn't speak about the TV anymore, just charitably avoided the subject and tried to keep from laughing at me about it. We continued to squint in the luxurious glow of my tiny 20-inch decade-old Sears monitor (bought to go with the C-64!) as it cowered in the shadow of the silent, behemoth Muntz for the rest of the year. We didn't even acknowledge the Muntz was there after a while.

Then the end of the year came and it was time to move out, and Dave turned deadly serious. "I am not moving that goddamned thing out of here. You cannot pay me enough to do that again. No way." I believe there was way more profanity in there than I'm quoting.

After I moved everything else I owned out of the apartment, I sat in the empty room contemplating the Muntz. I did not want it. No one else could ever, ever want it. There was no way for me to get it down the stairs by myself. I had no money with which to pay others to do it, much less cart it away to the dump.

There was just no recourse but to destroy the fucking thing.

I grabbed my hammer and a prybar, and started working the Muntz apart. When I ran out of good edges to pry at, I just started hammering and tearing at the particle board. Over the course of an hour or two I smashed and broke it down to manageable chunks, and started carting them to the dumpster. I can't remember if Dave come home during or after; he may have even participated. I just remember sitting cross-legged on the floor at the end covered in the Muntz's viscera: splinters of particle board and sawdust, with just the huge lenses on the floor in front of me like giant corneas removed from the corpse of some enormous beast. The carpet was a minefield of fragments and staples and other sharp jabby things daring anyone to walk in it barefoot. I think Dave's first words were "So we're not getting our cleaning deposit back?" but he was clearly relieved that it was gone at last.

I think I still have the lenses somewhere. I wish I'd kept the brochure.

Update: There's a Wikipedia entry on Mad Man Muntz, and in particular it has a description of this TV. (Looks like it was a Sony inside, not a Zenith.)