Since I seem to be time-travelling today anyhow (I’ve already been to 1999 and 1976), let’s take a moment to consider the future…
May312007
Archives
May312007
Trippy Bicentennial Cartoon
You know, I like to think I’ve got pretty good recall of all the various things I was exposed to during my childhood, especially the pop-cultural stuff, but even I have forgotten a lot of the truly weird crap that was floating around in the 1970s. Consider, for example, this animated musical tribute to our nation’s 1976 Bicentennial:
I think my favorite bit is the cornucopia spewing forth hamburgers, hot dogs, and console television sets. That’s America in a nutshell, isn’t it?
May312007
I’m Time-Travelling Again
According to the digital clock-sign at the train station this morning, it was 4.21 AM, January 1, 1999. Oh, goodie, now I can relive all the madness that led up to the premiere of The Phantom Menace…
(Seriously, that would be fun, don’t you think? The final few moments of unadulterated excitement before Star Wars fandom broke down into testy pro and con factions…)
May302007
Ever Wonder How Big the Enterprise Really Is?
Okay, so we all know intellectually that those imaginary spaceships we love in movies and on TV would be really frakkin’ big if they were real, but do you have a genuine, visceral sense for how big? Have a look at the image below:
***IMAGE MISSING***
That’s the handiwork of one Jason Fortuny, who decided to see how the U.S.S. Enterprise (the Next Generation version) would relate to his home town of Seattle. Various sources put the ship’s official length at 643 meters. As you can see, that’s gobsmackingly big in relation to real-world objects we can actually relate to, about seven city blocks long. Click the image to see it larger, and then click through to Jason’s site to see the ship’s silhouette laid over a GoogleEarth map of the city. Neat stuff…
May302007
Virgin Mega-Sale
Just a little PSA for anyone who lives in the Salt Lake area: the Virgin Megastore at Gateway is going out of business, and everything in the place is currently 25% off. Even with that hefty of a discount, the prices are still higher than you’d pay online — no doubt that’s why they’re going out of business — but a sharp-eyed shopper might be able to land some bargains. I myself picked up those groovy multi-disc collector’s editions of Rebel Without a Cause, The Maltese Falcon, and Forbidden Planet, as well as Edward Scissorhands for The Girlfriend. Just in case you were wondering…
May302007
Did the Earth Move for You, Too?
So, Monday night, The Girlfriend and I were at her apartment catching up on the season finale of 24. (Last week was a busy one, so I taped all the season finales; tonight we’re planning to see how Lost wrapped up. And yes, I recorded these shows on good old-fashioned VHS tape. None of them fancy digital video hard-drive doohickeys for this grumpy old curmudgeon!) We were down to the final five tension-filled minutes when we heard something that can only be described using one of those comic-book sound-effect tags: crackBOOOOOM!!!
This was followed by the couch lurching sharply sideways.
Anne and I looked at each other with the same “what the hell was that?” expression, then she asked if I thought we ought to go outside. This seemed a prudent course of action…
May292007
By Request: More Crap!
All right, all right, the people have spoken (well, three of you have, anyway), so here you go: more Star Wars crap!
May252007
Drive-By Blogging 3: Revenge of the Blog
In honor of the 30th anniversary of my all-time favorite film — and if you don’t know what that is by now, then you haven’t been paying attention — allow me to present a whole mess of related links. You folks out there in InternetLand enjoy looking at this stuff tonight; me, I’ll be off watching the movie itself. My bootlegged copy of the original, unrevised version, of course…
May252007
A Sampling From Around the Galaxy
The blogosphere is, not surprisingly, sagging under the weight of personal 30th anniversary remembrances today, so I thought I’d offer a few links to some “official” coverage:
May252007
Revisiting My Memoirs
So, it occurs to me that the Big Anniversary Entry I posted earlier this morning is somewhat vague about my own personal experiences with Star Wars in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and some folks who are just joining us may wonder why. Well, it’s because I’ve written about that subject before, of course:
I was seven years old in the summer of 1977, the prime age of susceptibility to a story featuring young, swashbuckling heroes, strange-looking creatures, and scary — but not too scary — villains. (See also Potter, Harry, Modern kids and.) I’m sure I must’ve seen a few movies on the big screen before then — I vaguely recall a couple of early-70s live-action Disney films about people in really bad polyester knits — but the first truly memorable film I saw in a theater…
Wait. Stop.
I’m not going to continue with that thought. My experience of seeing Star Wars for the first time couldn’t have been much different than a lot of other people’s. We were all kids, we’d never seen anything like it, we stood in lines that went around the block (literally, in my case — I saw the film at the long-lost Centre Theatre in Salt Lake; there was no lobby to speak of, and the only place to queue up was outside, on the street), big spectacle, big excitement, tiny little brains melting, lifelong obsessions forming, blah blah blah.
We were all there, weren’t we? And those of you who weren’t have probably heard about it from someone who was. It was the defining communal experience of our generation, at least until the towers fell.
But here’s the thing that was unique about my personal experience: I didn’t actually want to see Star Wars. I had no interest in it whatsoever, and, in fact, I remember being frightened of it. I don’t recall why, but something in the TV ads gave me a major case of the willies.
Read the rest here.