It's tempting to trace the evolution back to the mid-70s, when Woody Allen patented a new movie hero model: the wimpish intellectual who gets the girl.
Local start-ups such as Qualcomm hoovered up the talent and put it to new uses.A third is the local-hero model in which a local entrepreneur sees an opportunity, starts a business and turns it into a giant.
The book also reminded me of shows that haven't been on my mind lately, especially "Oz," Tom Fontana's brilliant late-nineties HBO series about a men's prison, which pre-dated "The Sopranos" and established much of the anti-hero model that has come to dominate the past fifteen years of drama, in both excellent and problematic ways.
Essentially, WildChords takes the Guitar Hero model and applies it to early-stage musical education.
It does this by plying some of the Guitar Hero model to music education, using audio technology to recognize the sound of your guitar through the iPad's microphone, recognizing the chords you're playing, and turning your geetar into a controller.
While it might appear, on paper, to be a backwards step in bringing FMV to the forefront of the Guitar Hero model, stirring memories of appalling Mega-CD games, in practice it's pitch perfect, snapping you out of your play space and into the screen, onto the stage.
It's a place for close encounters of the geekiest kind, as evidenced by the Millennium Falcon hanging from the ceiling and the action hero models lined up behind the bar.
When not about to deliver the coup de grâce, our hero (modelled on classical statues discovered in Renaissance Rome) rests moodily on a club approximately the size of Mt. Olympus, one hand behind his back toying testily with his golden apples; or he gets into slugging position, brows knitted, expression homicidally cross.
There's not a lot to go on, save for a few display images on top of a display of older Hero models.
The propaganda blitzkrieg, which also includes the breathless promotion of modern-day heroes and model citizens, seeks to counteract a growing sense that China, preoccupied by seemingly ceaseless economic growth, is ethically unmoored.
