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Join Me In My Time Machine
For no particular reason, I braced myself and watched a few minutes of the Star Wars Holiday Special, which will pretty much wreck any illusions you have that we live in a just and sane universe. A related video caught my eye, though, and it was the 19 minutes of commercials that were aired during the aforementioned special:
Believe it or not, I was much more interested in these ads, and they are a study. I felt like I was transported back to my childhood, and from the perspective of 2015, it's fascinating to get a sense of the gestalt of the United States in 1978. The first commercials are:
- General Motors - very salt-of-the-earth, UAW-promoting commercial showing how a typical GM worker is oh-so-proud of the fine American automobiles he's making. I suppose Detroit was starting to feel some heat from these newfangled Japanese imports. I notice that the "soldering" they show on the assembly lines is done with the skill and craftsmanship of a five-year old boy with a box of finger paints. No wonder the cars rattled.
- Trail Tracker toy - I vaguely remember those.
- CBS show promotions, featuring Lucille Ball (!) and Dallas.
- A Comtrex commercial with the most 70s hairstyles you can imagine.
- My personal favorite, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (which inexplicably is narrated by a man). You remember this one: "Look for.........the union label.........." Unions were already on the descent, but little did they know they would practically vanish were it not for the horrendously overprotected government employees we have in 2015.
- AT&T telephones, featured as (disappointing) gifts.
- A promotion of The Bible movie to be shown on CBS.
- Reggie Jackson promoted his candy bar ("Reggie") which, understandably, is no longer around.
- Another GM ad showing people make their engines and assuring the viewer that the engines do, in fact, work once they're delivered to the factory that puts them into auto bodies. The insecurity about the quality absolutely saturates these commercials. It's clear America had lost its way.
- Pillsbury cake mixes, featuring God-knows-what chemicals that taste "more like scratch" (scratch being a synonym for actual baking using actual ingredients).
- Hungry Jack commercial.
- A news break, which is a real blast from the past, discussing the Soviet premier scaring 12 U.S. Senators to death with talk about a neutron bomb and a story about a CIA espionage case involving, of course, selling secrets to the Russians.
- A Contac ad, which is the commercial I saw a million times as a kid with a bazillion little spheres bouncing all over the place when the pill was pulled apart.
- Another promotion for a CBS special - the Bobby Vinton Rock & Rollers (dear God).
By this halfway mark, I had lost interest in writing down each of these damned things, but it's worth a look, particularly if you are a certain age. And, with that, I leave you with a nominee for the worst song in the history of anything, plucked directly from the Star Wars Holiday Special:
- advertisements -
Those GM commercials, WOW. I was a bit of a hot rod guy in my youth, one of the weirdest things I saw was cigarette butts left inside of the engines of late 1960s-early 1970s big block muscle cars, specifically in the lifter gallery. It might not sound like much but if a scrap of filter paper finds it's way through the oiling system and into a rod bearing while you're having fun with your Road Runner ... BLAMMO ... hole in the engine block, 6 quarts of oil on the road and enough metal fragments that you might think someone dropped a grenade. Evidentally this was a thing at Chrysler, it's been noted in gearhead magazines years ago. To me it just reeks of the contempt the union workers had, you don't need to be a Mechanical Engineer or a machine shop manager to be able to guess this was a bad idea but they just DGAF much like the GM guys a few years ago smoking weed in the parking lot while on lunch break
Geezer-topia
You want to really see the 1970's
rent/buy/stream
Space Station 76
http://spacestation76.com/
Only in 2014 could they make the future look like the past. its StarWars, without the stars or the wars, but the doctorbot is quite goood.
Space Station 76 ... rent/buy/stream
or take
https://kickass.so/space-station-76-2014-hdrip-xvid-ac3-evo-t9594235.html
A dark chocolate candy bar named after a dark man, brought to you by the same PR team that took the NOVA to Mexico.
When I was a kid the future was all talk of flying cars and rocket jetpacks. Instead all I get is 140 characters.
1978?
Ah, yes, I remember it well.
It sucked.
Thanks, Tim! ( I think : ) A remarkable; eerie; and vaguely disturbing collage of images from an alien world. However, speaking as someone born in 1950, I also found it to be an enlightening glimpse into the bottom of the pre-internet, pop-culture matrix barrel of the clueless and feckless masses in which I had been embedded.
And yet, as debased as the human condition remains, and as exponentially worse the chaos in the world has become since 1979, the contrast in awareness between then and now that this video subtly comveys, provides indications that the forces of accumulative global awareness seem to be building towards, yes, a 'new world order' --but perhaps NOT the one envisioned by the banking squid...
(Insert greater, expanding overview here: ................ )
Of all the things people hoped and dreamed about for our present time, few expected our crowning achievement to be a globally connected repository of porn and lolcats and every day life to be a dreary tale of ever increasing globalist fascism, dead end jerbs, reality TV, HFC and HFT.
Amen, brother giraffe. On the other hand, Neitsche, for example, predicted this state of affairs a century in advance, insisting also that the highest and lowest elements of mankind would manifest at the same time and --in seeming paradox-- by virtue of the same progression of forces. Since this phenemonen must naturally be understood on, and as an evolutionary spectrum and not as a description of individual extremes, the implication is that a new cultural direction will inevitably emerge from the depths of decay.
I personally understand this in a manner somewhat in agreement with Terrence McKennna's "timewave zero" -- the historical singularity of maximum "novelty." In my mind, this is entirely consistent with Neitsche's own prophetic outline.
I too remember it well. Two years to graduation from high school and Pres. jimmy Carter had succeeded in convincing my generation America's best days were over, that we should resign ourselves to never again surpass 55 MPH, that interior lighting was for "special occasions", that gas lines, underpowered cars, shoddy construction of everything, was the new normal. I can clearly recall at 16 thinking how wrong it would be as an adult to bring children into Jimmy's new American future. Then Regan got elected and I discovered Existentialism and realized government is not reality, but more a menace never to be trusted, and certainly not something around which to build a belief system. Good times.
Very good, Number Six.
Who is number one?
Put number one on the phone
Very good.
You are now #2.
(Referencing "The Prisoner" TV series, which I see in your Avatar of PAtrick McGoohan.)