A couple of nights ago, my brother and I were watching an old Western movie, “The Return of Frank James.” There was a young man playing a role in the movie who seemed really familiar, but we couldn’t figure out who he was. Finally we realized it was former child star Jackie Cooper.

This got me thinking of the general predicament of watching movies and finding yourself puzzling over who a certain actor is. It seems that with the advent of facial recognition software, this kind of puzzlement should be a thing of the past. Let’s say someone creates a database which contains facial information for all famous people. When you’re watching a movie, the broadcast can essentially whittle down the list of potential facial recognition targets to only the actors in the movie. At which point, you should be able to just point to the character on the screen with some kind of laser pointer, and that would provide the name of the actor and perhaps even bring up pertinent facts about his or her career.

Actually, the idea that your television should be able to recognize a human face on the screen brings to mind all sorts of possibilities. For instance, it would be great to watch a scene in a movie and attach a Groucho Marx glasses mustache contraption to the actor. Or paint in devil horns. We’re almost in the year 2013, why are we not doing this?

The most obvious use of this technology is the following: we should be able to interact with the screen in such a way that we can drag giant cartoon penises around and poke them at the faces of the actors on screen. So you’ve got some dramatic actress moping about the loss of her children in “Sophie’s Choice” or doomed Holocaust victims condemning Germans in “Schindler’s List” and meanwhile cartoon penises are bumping off their chin.

You might be saying, “Wil, this is silly. What is the point of such technology?” To which I argue that manipulating cartoon penises on screen is clearly the wave of the future. You can either get on board, or be left behind.