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What on earth was the above video made for? It’s a short film in the style of a tourist-lure travelogue promoting New York. Only its point is how lousy New York is. The Youtube poster is at least ten years off in his estimation of when it was shot–he says early sixties but the cars (among other things) show it to be the notorious New York of the early 70s. The funk music helps solidify this as well as the cabbie who uses the word ‘kooks’ to describe the crazy people he encounters in his job. Now dig: ‘kooks’ was a 50s/60s word so one could be forgiven for thinking that the use of the word places the film in the early 60s. But the cabbie is at least fifty-something years old, meaning that his use of the word ‘kooks’ was new and fresh ten years earlier and–as is often the case with us older ones–is a stale leftover of the hip world that he remembers from his fast-receding youth. Do you buy it? Well if not, here’s the ultimate proof that the damn thing was shot in the late 60s at the very least. It comes courtesy of a comment posted on the video and proves that there are people out there much kookier and obsessive about this crap than I am. Dig:

These scenes from days gone by appear to be from the late 1960’s.  Why ? In the beginning of the video you see the subways and one car with graffiti and it clearly has the “B” train letter on the side. The letter and number designations for certain subway lines started in 1967.  Prior to then,  there was no alpha-numeric designations for the trains . They had the BMT, IRT, and IND lines in the 4 boroughs, and just names like: Sea-Beach, West End, Culver-Line, Lexington Avenue, 7-th Avenue, etc.