Jul 222010
This was twenty-three friggen years ago. Gah!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKDk-mg1J9Q
(For those of you too young to remember this, it was *all* over the airwaves in my later high school years.)
In my college days (first half of the Nineties) I fell under the spell of MST3K, and recorded a majority of the episodes on tape. I watched several of them 4 or 5 years ago, and something about the commercials just seemed… off. Partially it was the production values and advertsing of local businesses (ads you don’t get on satellite TV), but in the end it was the complete lack of “dubya-dubya-dubya dot useless crap dot com” that seemed the most unusual.
Well turn it up, man!
17 Responses to “Oh God, I’m Old”
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You can’t be too old. I noticed you let the 20th of July slip by without a single mention of Apollo 11.
Some things are too depressing to bring up. There was a time when I saw Apollo 11 as a great achievement. Now I see it as the zenith of western civilization… and that means we’re heading downwards now.
I sympathize. I went back for some Military Training last year and one of the privates asked me when I graduated Basic Training. When I told her 1991 she said “That was the year I was born!”
I told her that I appreciated that.
You think that’s old, huh? Not only did I see all the ST-TOS episodes on their broadcast premiere runs, I can remember snippets of the “Men Into Space” series on its original run, and had a toy space helmet from it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5CYbuuOH2k
AOK?
AOK.
I actually predate Sputnik 1.
Pat
Being born in 1962 I actually remember hearing most of that stuff on 8track, and those flat thingies, “records”. And what about K-Tell Records? Wifey has a pile of them, and a spin arounder to play them on!
I remember that. At least those were original hits! Many of those collections were not the originals .. or so I was told. I knew a couple of guys who acted and dressed like the persons in the commercial.
I remember “Men Into Space” well enough to want my own copy of the series. (I found it.)
When Apollo 11 returned, I said out loud that the new era had begun. Wasn’t the program canceled before they launched? There good reasons those of my age are depressed.
Is that Freedom Rock??
I was born in 1962 too, so I remember all that too, along with those
“spin-arounders”….LOL
Children. I was born in 1953.
Ah, youth! I was born at the end of 1949.
I might be the youngest here who remembers ads like those. Life without computers, too.
Jim
Life without computers? Science News Letter had, in the mind 60s, ads for “computers” that were plastic, hand-held versions of sorters (anyone else remember sorters?). I almost bought one, but it was out of my price range at $14.95 or some amount so equally outrageously near the cost of a real UNIVAC.
Somewhere around here I have the register plate from a IBM keypunch.
Major McCauley in “Men into Space” is seen working up the numbers for an on-the-fly course change, with a slide rule. I think that was what got me interested in those delightful gadgets (no, I don’t remember how to use them). I took some flak for doing my high school math homework with a slide rule.
You want to see a strange computer system, check out the one in Disney’s 1955 “Man And The Moon” Tomorrowland episode used on the circumlunar ship.
You enter data into it via a phone dial, and then select one of hundreds of tiny reel-to-reel tapes like were used in a answering machine to program the spaceship to fire its engine at the right time and in the right direction.
You can see it in action here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRDIf_3DqtI&feature=related
Thanks for that link, Pat. The music was creepy. I’d like to see all the Disney space stuff without having to worry about the odd disruption of the Internet.
Why did the helmets have those odd flat-front things on the top? What happened to the sets? The vertically-split helmets look like the Iron Man helmet toys.
You want to see the creepy stuff, watch this section of “Mars And Beyond’:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d76fiWRobU4
I got out of the Mars lander and saw stuff like that, I’d be screaming on my way back into the ship, and heading back into space inside of five minutes. 😀
I don’t know how the Disney artists came up with those things, but in the 1960’s it would have certainly involved LSD.
I was trying to make heads-or-tails of what the things on the helmets are also; are they some sort of lights to illuminate things you are holding when in darkness or the crew is sleeping, while keeping both your hands free?
I don’t know what happened to all those great models they built for the series, but it would be a shame if they were destroyed, as they really had top-notch workmanship on them, and some were very large (check out Wernher von Braun having a ball with all of his giant toys in part 4 and 5 of “Man And The Moon”).
Considering the impetus that the Disney series and comic books based on it gave to the US space program, they really should be in the Smithsonian.
Another good link! Thanks., Pat.
Start here, and watch Calvin & Hobbes visit Mars:
http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1988/09/14/
[…] I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before (in fact, I know I have) is that the change in technology over time leads to things from different eras seeming […]