Filmstrips (miscellaneous)

(1948? – 1990?)
Wikipedia Entry

Technology marches on and new technologies supplant the old. Often, the new version is clearly superior, but that doesn’t mean you can’t remember the old technology fondly.  And for me, that is the filmstrip.

In the 50s and 60s, they were ubiquitous in public schools, the only way to easily use multimedia in the classroom. A couple of times a month, the teacher would bring out the filmstrip projector and a phonograph (optional) and we’d be treated to a show.

The filmstrip was a single strip of film that came in a little canister. You’d pull the film out of the canister and put it in a holder on the projector, then thread it through. 

Once set, you were treated to a presentation. Each image was advanced manually, sort of a precursor to PowerPoint.

The design was clever. After being shown, the film was put into a little holder, threaded so that the first slide stayed the first slide when you were done.  No rewinding!  Some units even allowed you to fit the canister into the holder, so everything was ready for the next show.

Some of the strips had audio accompaniment.  It started out on records, that would give the narration to the slide, and then beep.  That was the signal for the operator to advance the image.

Of course, it was a high honor for the teacher to ask you to advance the film after each beep.*

As time passed, the technology advanced.  By the 70s, audio cassettes replaced the records.** Eventually, auto-advance  was added, probably disappointing the folks in the AV Club.

Of course, once videocassettes came along, they rapidly supplanted filmstrips. Now you could easily see moving images.  Filmstrips and their projectors became antiques by the 1990s.

And that was certainly an improvement.*** But they remain a fond memory for anyone who went to school in that era.

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*The other great bit of AV equipment when I was in high school were the 16mm film projectors. It was an even greater honor than to be asked to set those up and avoiding the dreaded problem of “loosing the loop.”  The other option – the slide projector – was too awkward to use until Kodak invented the Carousel projector in 1964.

**Or did if the school had the budget for it.

***Though, since filmstrips were done by professionals, they didn’t fall into the same pitfalls as PowerPoint.

To Be Alive!

(1964)
Directed by Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid
Written by Francis Tompson, Alexander Hammid, Edward Field
Narrated by Edward Field
Wikipedia Entry
Most of the exhibits of the New York World’s Fair were real: models and buildings that portrayed the future and the past. But one of the most acclaimed exhibit of the fair was the Johnson’s Wax pavilion – a short movie called to be alive!
Part of it was a gimmick. This was a few years after Cinerama brought the (mixed) wonders of a super wide screen to theaters, but the fad had not quiet died yet.  To be alive! tried something similar, but instead of having three cameras projecting across one extra wide screen, it use three regular-sized screens separated by a foot of black. This was easier to deal with technically, and audiences learned to ignore the black space immediately.
The movie is the musings of a narrator, who, tired of the rat race,* starts to wax poetic about how things were when he was a child.  The movie starts with the life of a child, and then follows a life span as it celebrates human existence. 
The strength of the film is in its images, which show people from all over the world, doing what the love and enjoying the world around them. The three-screen format was a feast for the eyes.
The film was a sensation.  The New York Critics Film Circle gave it a special award, unprecedented for a nontheatrical film. It was considered ineligible for an Oscar because of its format, so they cut it down into on single-screen version that played in LA and won the award for documentary short.  While still inspiring, the movie loses much of its impact when you cut out 2/3rds of the images.  Here’s a look:

The movie, like most of the World’s Fair, was ephemeral, more so because it required special equipment to project it. But it was a minor masterpiece that deserves to be remembered.
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*The images were very similar to those used years later in Koyaanisqatsi

New York World’s Fair

(1964-65)
Wikipedia Entry

I was turning twelve when the 1964 New York World’s Fair came to Flushing. It was a couple of hours away from where I lived and its combination of spectacle and education. I loved it.

The fair was an attempt to repeat the success of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, but it ran into a snag. The Bureau of International Expositions (BIE) had rules as to what could be termed a “World’s Fair,” and the New York one broke several of them, so the fair was not officially sanctioned, and its members were told not to take part. But New York went ahead anyway, and used exhibits from corporations and from countries that were not BIE members.

Back then, I didn’t pay much attention to the politics (though I did know it wasn’t official).  It was a World’s Fair as far as I was concerned, and I loved it. 

Twelve wasn’t considered too young to be on your own, so several times I wandered the grounds on my own. 

Some of the things that still stay in my mind.

• The Vatican Pavilion. One of the must-see items of the fair, since they brought Michelangelo's Pieta to the US for the first time. In order to accommodate the crowds, you stood on a conveyor belt that rushed you past the statue in about 30 seconds.  The statue was behind a glass wall with a blue background.  I remember being vaguely disappointed by it.
• General Electric.  A favorite, partially because my father sold GE appliances and TVs.  “The Carousel of Progress” was the big draw, showing how electricity had changed everyday life. A similar exhibit was set up in Disney World,* with one essential difference:  in the World’s Fair, the audience moved on a carousel around the exhibits in the center.  Nowadays, the audience remains in one place while the center turns.  That was a big disappointment when I saw the exhibit in Disney World.
• The Ford Motor Company. It had a “Magic Skyway” ride, where you got into an actual Ford convertible and saw models of history from prehistoric times to the future of 2000. I remember the cars more than I do the rides.
• General Motors. Their answer was “Futurama.” Their moving chairs were no match for Ford’s cars, but their vision of the future in the 21st century was just what my science-fiction loving heart desired.
• Pepsi Pavilion. Loosed “It’s a Small World After All” on the world. I found it cloying even back then.

• Equitable Life.(above) Not much there except for a giant readout showing the current population of the US.  For some reason, I found that fascinating.
• New York State Pavilion. I liked the fact that they showed my (rather small) home town on a giant map of the city. It had three observation towers, who are best known today as a plot element of Men in Black.
• Belgian Pavilion I didn’t spend much time here, but it was famous for introducing American to Belgian Waffles and for the fact that it was so delayed that it wasn’t completed until the final day of the first season of the fair.
• Tad’s Steak House. One of the restaurants at the fair. Hardly the best, but quite a bargain – a steak dinner for $1.29! You got what now I’d call an indifferent grilled steak, baked potatoes, and garlic bread. All during my youth, a trip to NYC included at stop at Tad’s.

I probably went five or six times; toward the end, the novelty had worn off. My mother, who had been to the New York World’s Fair in 1939 said that this was nowhere near as good, but I thought it was great.

Of course, it came to and end.  Most of the pavilions were taken down (I had thought that was a waste, though it seems none were built to last more than a few years, anyway). The two that remained were New York and the Unisphere, the symbol of the Fair.

Still, it gave me many happy memories.

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*Disney had created many of the rides at the fair.

Nichols Damp-Proof Salt Shaker

(1932-19??)

There are some ideas that are simple and elegant and solve a common problem, but which never catch on.  Maybe it’s poor management, maybe it’s the economy, but the better mousetrap just doesn’t draw people to its doors.  The Nichols Damp-Proof Salt Shaker solved the problem of salt getting moist and clumping, and was a major part of my growing up.

The shaker was designed so that moisture could not get inside without any lids or covers.  The design was clever:  a cylinder of metal with holes at the top attached to something like a screw on lid (left above). There was a glass shell (right).*  You turned the glass upside down and poured in salt (not too much, or you couldn’t close it).  Then you screwed the bottom onto the glass and turned it so that the metal was down.

And there you were.  The bottom was flush with the table, and moisture couldn’t get inside. 

To use it, you picked it up and shook it up and down. Salt would go to the top of the cover and then fall through the holes onto your food.  Then you’d put it down and it would be sealed again.  Each shaker came with a rolled up bit of paper with instructions.

A nice bonus was that you could control how much salt came out.  Each shake would add the same amount, so it was easy to control.  Plus you couldn’t accidentally pour out too much salt if your hand was jostled.

Alas, the Nichols company had hard sledding bringing out the product during the Depression.  They finally went out of business, probably around 1940 or so.  My grandfather, however, ran a small general store on Eastern Long Island, an area where humidity was high.  When they failed, he bought the entire stock from his wholesaler. and continued to sell them.

They were in the store in the 60s, when I was in high school, with several boxes in the back in storage.  They were the only salt shakers on our table and I was surprised to find people used other ones.

By the 1970s, though, our supply was gone.  The patents lapsed and a memorable part of my childhood was gone forever.

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*This shows my favorite design. I liked the egg shape.

Freedomland U.S.A. (Amusement Park)

(1960-64)
Rob Freedman's Freedomland Page

By 1950, the American amusement park was dead.  What were once the jewel destination of urban areas had deteriorated into a place for carnival game ripoffs, it they remained open at all.  In fact, when Walt Disney tried to get money together for one in the early fifties, he found it next to impossible.*

But Disneyland showed that you could create an amusement park in a suburban setting and have people flock to it. And people tried to follow suit.

This included Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood.  Wood credentials were golden:  he had worked with Disney to help create Disneyland.  After a falling out,** he struck out on his own, forming Magic Mountain in Denver and Pleasure Island in Wakefield, MA. Then he went on to the biggest market in the country -- New York City.

And Freedomland U.S.A. was born.

Wood chose an American history theme for the park, and took it all the way.  It was shaped like a map of the US and was divided into sections like "Old New York," "Old Chicago," "New Orleans," "The Great Plains," "San Francisco," and "The Old Southwest."  Each section had a rides and exhibits tied in with the theme.  "The Old Southwest," for instance, included the Burro Trail (real burros), Mine Caverns, Pony Express, Opera House and Saloon (non alcoholic drinks and entertainment), and Casa Loca (a house built all askew so perspective was messed up).  It was billed as "Disneyland East."

I visited the park the first year it opened.  I remember wanted to ride the burros (though the line was very long) and the Casa Loca.  Great stuff when you're eight.

Of course, there were problems.  While the park had plenty of parking, it was not easily reachable by public transport. And running an amusement park in sunny southern California gives you many more days of operation than around New York City.

Though it attracted good crowds the first year, it couldn't sustain it.  The "Disneyland East" comparison only made sense if you had never seen the real Disneyland. Wood may have had some interesting design ideas, but the park, even new, didn't have the "spare no expense" design that made Disney a hit.

Attendance continued to drop.  Attempts were made to attract a teenage audience, but that was doomed because of the poor public transport.  Finally, in 1964, the park, citing competition from the New York World's Fair, closed down.  The land was sold to build Co-op City (an apartment complex) and was quickly torn down.

Some of the rides and equipment were sold to various amusement parks, several to The Great Escape in Glens Falls, NY.  When I visited there several years ago, I didn't realize that the Cyclone ride had been taken from the original Freedomland. Alas, once the park was sold to Six Flags,*** the Freedomland remnants were slowly retired.

Very little exists now, except in memories and web pages.  But, for a short while, at least, Freedomland was the future of fun.

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*He finally convinced the fledgling ABC TV network to bankroll the park in exchange for the rights to a TV show featuring Disney movies and characters.  Disneyland was ABC's first top five TV show, so both sides made out well in the deal.

**Disney removed Wood's name from any history of the park; as far as they are concerned, he never existed.

***Whose corporate mission seems to be to make visits there as unpleasant as possible, and makes it quite clear that they think their customers are cash cows to be milked dry.