Earthlings Prepared for Outer Space!

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Movies/Wordpress/NOV06/ThisIslandEarth.flv 400 300]

My twinster Jean mentions here a bad 50’s sci-fi movie called “Queen of Outer Space.” Being the age that I am, I love 50’s sci-fi movies. A memorable screening I recall of one such movie, “This Island Earth,” from 1955, was in 1980, at a science fiction festival at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The scene I’ve posted here got big laughs out of the audience.

In April, 1986 I bought my first Laserdisc player, and “This Island Earth” was one of the first discs I owned. Today, I use that same player for capturing video on the computer. I pushed up the bit rate on this video to show that a 20-year-old disc on a 20-year-old player looks not too bad.

The technology was introduced in the U.S. in 1980 by Philips of Holland, which later sold the format to Pioneer in Japan. I had written a paper in the 11th grade about the development of video discs, and I was really taken with the superiority of LD over VHS. LD never caught on with the public at large, but Philips was able to apply its optical expertise to the creation of CD, with Sony handling the digital side of the format.