The movie's plot (such as it is) concerns the hunt for "the lost jewels of the Czar" which, for no adequately explained reason, have been hidden in the warehouse of the Empire Transport Company of Los Angeles.

In typical serial fashion, various thugs, goons and ne'er-do-wells take turns stealing the jewels from each other, with the stalwart hero periodically bursting in through the door just in time to get the crap beaten out of him (in fact, he is knocked unconscious so many times I began to worry that he would suffer permanent brain damage).

Anyway, the goons are at the beck and call of a mysterious genius called The Whispering Shadow, who uses the futuristic technology of television to spy on his enemies and / or his own henchmen, no matter where they are. With his sinister television machine, he is also able to project a -- well, a whispering shadow! -- of himself in the vicinity of anyone with whom he wishes to communicate. Again, this being a serial, his conversations usually start with "You fools!" and end with "Do not fail me again!".

But what's interesting here is the screenwriter's misunderstanding of what sending and receiving images remotely would really be like. The idea that a television receiver could simply peek in on any location seems laughable today, but to the public in 1933 it probably did not seem quite as far-fetched.

Similarly, the Whispering Shadow's ability to project an image of himself to a location miles away is also an understandable misreading of television's potential. Without seeing it in action, the idea of television probably seemed vaguely spooky; the actual technology, when it emerged, was less fearful and more easily contained than imagined.

After the war computers carried the same mix of awe and dread that television had. And in movie after movie the notion of a thinking machine was taken far too literally. Computers were invariably depicted in the movies as unformed -- or deformed -- reflections of human sentience. Mechanical minds went bonkers on a regular basis in the movies: from Alphaville to 2001: A Space Odyssey to Westworld to The Demon Seed, a computer had to do little more than pop a vacuum tube in order to go on a killing spree.

(I will exempt Colossus: The Forbin Project from this list of insane computers; after all, Colossus did exactly what it was programmed to do. Created to protect the human race from the risk of nuclear war, Colossus simply carried its orders out to the letter -- enslaving the human species in order to protect it from its own destructive impulses.)

As computers became more common, however, the fear that they were plotting against us began to subside. But as always, new technologies provided us with new things to be afraid of. Which is why Sandra Bullock found herself at the mercy of the dial-up era Internet in 1995's The Net.

But lest you think technophobia is something new, remember that Mary Shelley's 1817 novel Frankenstein was inspired by the discovery that electricity seemed to have an eerie effect on the dead; when an electric charge was applied to a corpse it would often make strange, convulsive movements. One study described the body of an executed criminal suddenly sitting upright when a big jolt of electricity was run through it. To the 18th century reader, this would have seemed like messing around with the divine spark, engaging in the sort of alchemy that Dr. Frankenstein recklessly applied to his creation.

But of course the grand prize for technological anxiety goes to the Egyptian king Thamus. As related in Plato's The Phaedrus:

They say that there dwelt at Naucratis in Egypt one of the old gods of that country, to whom the bird they call Ibis was sacred, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. Among his inventions were number and calculation . . . and, above all, writing. . . . To [the king, Thamus] came Theuth and exhibited his inventions . . . when it came to writing, Theuth declared: "There is an accomplishment, my lord the kind, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom." "Theuth, my paragon of inventors," replied the king, "the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practise it. . . . Those who acquire [writing] will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.