Yesterday I was in a restaurant in midtown Manhattan–not a full-tilt restaurant, more like a La Pain Quotidion style joint–and I was having trouble having a conversation over the din of the music that was playing. Was it even music? It’s hard to describe the sounds emanating from the speakers
A mere five years before portraying Franklin D. Roosevelt in the network mini-series ‘Eleanor and Franklin’, Edward Hermann portrayed “one of the country’s leading bachelors” in the very amusing Panasonic Stereo commercial posted above. We are deep in the early 70s groove here and Hermann’s portrait of the era’s swinging
The above 1973 commercial for a Pioneer home stereo system plays more like a current day SNL parody of a 1973 Pioneer home stereo system commercial than the real thing. Yet it’s the real thing. Did we really look, act and talk like that? The early 70s are becoming as
In the mid-to-late 1920s Jack Benny was a star monologist in Vaudeville, big enough to be tapped to be the ’emcee’ of the MGM musical ‘Hollywood Revue of 1929’. But as the above short film ‘A Broadway Romeo’ (1931) will make clear, this is not the Jack Benny that we
This week we’ve been looking at Bix Beiderbecke on film. Now let’s listen to his friend and collaborator Hoagy Carmichael for a few minutes discussing Bix. I don’t know when this radio interview is from nor who the English chap is conducting it. But he manages to get the normally
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmD7jeIEkfg (NOTE: HIT ABOVE ‘PLAY ON YOUTUBE’ BUTTON TO WATCH VIDEO. THE GUY WHO POSTED IT APPARENTLY THINKS HE OWNS IT). When I was a kid in the early 70s getting into jazz and old movies, two great revivals were taking place. One was The Marx Brothers revival, which began
With the introduction of Safety Film in 1925, the home movie craze began. Safety was a non-flammable alternative to the highly inflammatory nitrate stock which all movies previously were shot on. Smaller gauge cameras–16mm arrived two years prior in 1923–were easier to use and didn’t require much in the way
What kind of crap foods were people eating half a century ago? Consult the nifty little reel of commercials posted above to find out. Pizza rolls? Rice a Roni? Jello cheesecake anyone? Don’t mind if I do! The weird inclusion of a shaving cream ad at the end of the
The above short (eight minute) film was made to be shown at General Motors 1956 Motorama show. it purports to show how the future of driving will look twenty years hence and, while it makes the usual inaccurate assumptions about a future that never comes (a la H.G. Welles ‘Things
Here’s some outstanding colorized footage of New York City in 1948-49. (The dates are approximate based on the cars of the period). The YouTube artist known as NASS posted this a few days ago and as always I’m sharing it with you. It’s a remarkable moment of time travel, thanks