Something else right along the same line here....
Some of the hokeyness can be related to the era.
Not to sound like the old coot that I am, but we are looking at
history here. We're looking at things that were normal for the early
70's.
The music, the clothes, the lamb chop sideburns.
My kids would barf at that, but that stuff was the norm at the time.
Now I have to admit that I had forgotten about some of it, but it was
there. Takes me back to my old leisure suit....

I also agree about how insightful Leslie Stevens was.
It's easy to forget that virtually, the only computers at that time
were the mainframes in the universities, government, and big business.
Home PCs were essentially a dream. The ARPANET only had a handful of
entities connected to it at that time. The term Internet didn't even
exist yet. Whew! The technology to pull up a video file from a
different computer system and display it was way beyond anyone's grasp
(we used those nasty old keypunch cards to program on, and used
teletypes to print the results.)

And here's another piece of insight. In Short Circuit, they proposed
the 'Mega Trans Package' device that would short out electronics --
30+ years later we have EMP's.

It is truly amazing to look at the technologies of the eras.

Randy