Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Retiring Guy Can Relate to Tongue-in-Cheek Essay on 60s TV Shows

Link to December 28 New York Times article, "Innocence Undone, Frame by Frame".

Excerpt: Many years ago, in the blissful days of three and only three networks, that boy — i.e., me — would watch the offered television fare and be amazed by the bravery of the actors and the magical qualities of the land in which they lived, a land where things like the rules of gravity seemed to be optional. For decades this innocent awe somehow sustained the boy as he meandered into adulthood and the drabness of real life. “Sure,” he would tell himself, “the car battery is dead and the medical bills are unpaid, but it’s O.K. because somewhere hats can fly off people’s heads straight up, and a girl can shoot bottles out of midair.”

Then these beloved old shows — “F Troop,” “The Munsters” and the rest — started showing up on DVD, making it possible to watch them in super slow motion, even frame by frame. And the boy, now grown, has begun to realize that many of his foundational memories were just tricks of the eye. So hurray that home DVD sales appear to be on their way to another decline in 2009. It’s imperative that these things disappear from the marketplace before any more old television series are digitized. Some shows were never intended for the DVD microscope.

And while we're on the subject of Yvonne de Carlo, if you have 98 minutes to spare, check her out in this film noir classic. (Middleton and Wisconsin Rapids have the only copies in LINKcat.)

Great still.

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