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ARTIFICIAL PEOPLE Ventriloquist Dummies The sun may be slowly setting on the humble ventriloquist dummy. This makes sense, as ventriloquism is essentially a holdover from live theater, where it's actually impressive to see someone making wood talk. Once you've heard Ellen Degeneres supply the voice for an absent-minded fish, though, the novelty of watching a grown man squeak without moving his lips pales. It may be time to pack the ventriloquist dummy into his trunk, make one last falsetto gag about wanting to be let out, and move on. C+ Mannequins I like how mannequins are getting more abstract. They never looked like me in the first place, so I say go with it. Design them to look like a cross between a DeSoto and a giraffe. Color them all sorts of interesting pastel colors, or better yet make them chrome. Remove their heads so we can see what we'd look like in an Old Navy jacket after the revolution comes and we're beheaded for wearing an Old Navy jacket. I just head for the T-shirts and jeans anyway, so you can hang your clothes on a live snowy egret for all I care. B RealDolls In case you've been living in a cave or a retirement community for the last few years, a RealDoll is the Kobe beef of artificial sex partners. A full-sized woman with silicone flesh and actual articulated joints, buying a RealDoll is as close as you can get to having a real sex partner while still being really pathetic. My favorite is the guy who painted his indigo to make it a dark elf. Because you want it to be as much like fucking an actual magical spider-worshipping underworld denizen as possible. D+ Crash Test Dummies These guys were heavily overexposed in the eighties, starting with a series of PSAs and moving into action figures, video games, and the inevitable rap. Everyone rapped in the eighties, it was really embarrassing, and even more so when the rappers are designed to suffer terrible injuries in automobile accidents. And that's not even getting into the whole "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" thing. It's sad, really, because crash test dummies, in the generic, are cool. You stick them in some eastern European death box and they get hurt real bad. What's not to like about that? Just the fact that the names "Vince and Larry" send you into a retro aneurysm. C- Animatronics Never having visited the Hall of Presidents, I associate animatronic people with two things: Christmas and bad pizza. Christmas is of course for the usual array of mall-bound elves and Santas doomed to wave and/or cavort in an endless loop of robotic holiday cheer. Which, frankly, is what Christmas always feels like to me anyway. The pizza is because of Chuck E. Cheese's, which was absolutely the coolest thing in my life for about six weeks when I was ten. I don't know if a giant rat counts as a "person," but there was also a chef. These days I'm generally "eh" about android entertainment, but then I consider the alternative -- guys in stuffy outfits -- and my position changes to "Bring on the robots!" C+
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