While Marvel Comics fans wait in the hope that Southern Methodist University in Texas will post more Stan Lee video, let’s see what else my new favorite YouTube channel has to offer. Here’s one that’s a sociology lesson all by itself, showing how much American culture has changed over the past 50 years.
If you don’t know what that first tune is, it’s this.
In 1972 we stopped putting men on the Moon, but our Earthbound future was just beginning. That year, Stewart Brand explained it in his article “Spacewar” for Rolling Stone.
The world of tomorrow, that we have today, was also described in 1972, in perfect detail, in a couple of films. The promise of interactive television, as narrated by DJ Casey Kasem…
… didn’t happen with analog cable systems, but it was of course eventually realized by digital networking.
“Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing” was produced in 1972 at WGBH-TV in Boston. That same year, WGBH also produced a much more entertaining movie, the cult favorite Between Time and Timbuktu. It opens with none other than my childhood idol DJ from WABC in New York, Cousin Brucie.
https://youtu.be/Sdp5-YdS9aE
More of Stan Lee explaining the Marvel Super Heroes. Incredibly, nobody seems to have known this film existed.
A teen band in Los Angeles, The Linda Lindas, have a viral video.
The girls have been signed to a small record label. They got the idea for their band from Linda Linda Linda, a 2005 Japanese movie.
Schoolgirls are the subjects of countless Japanese movies, anime, and manga. From sweet, innocent and charming, to super-powered, to graphically pornographic, girls in school uniforms are everywhere in Japanese media. I rented Linda Linda Linda back when I had a 3-disc Netflix subscription. The movie is safely at the sweet and charming end of the spectrum. The DVD is out of print, and whoever owns the rights would be smart to make the movie available online as soon as possible.
Are there cybernetic assassin schoolgirls? Of course.
A song in English by a Scottish band really is the theme to the anime series. Here’s the complete recording. It’s one of the most remarkable productions I have ever heard.
The comic books on the wall behind Stan Lee date this to early in 1966, so he was 43 years old. Stan was promoting the upcoming Marvel Super Heroes syndicated cartoons. A couple of years later he was sporting a beard and a toupee. I’m hoping a complete copy of the film shows up.
More of my urgent retirement time-wasting has been accomplished with my 60″ 4:3 video projector arrangement in the living room. The screen was a freebie from work, and the new-old stock Viewsonic projector was a $65 eBay acquisition. Upon arrival, the only thing that showed its age was the projector’s rotting air filter foam, that was easily replaced with some foam I had on hand. With a TV tray table and a $25 Bluetooth speaker, I can set everything up — and take it all down — in just a few minutes.
The trick to getting the best picture is watching everything with my laptop computer, so the projector runs in its native 1024×768 resolution. The laptop has the now-rare feature of a VGA connector, and the projector’s inputs are analog-only, including VGA. (Tech note: native VGA is required on the laptop, because copy protection prevents HDMI-to-VGA conversion from working.) Being an early 3-LCD design, the claim was, “vibrant, true-to-life images with better color brightness and a wider color gamut.” (Better than sequential DLP color was what they were implying.) I connected my X-Rite ColorMunki Display meter to the laptop and ran free DisplayCal software. The results live up the manufacturer’s claim. The resolution and color profile are adjusted automatically when connecting the VGA cable to the laptop.
Being intended for business presentations, the projector’s contrast ratio isn’t good enough for modern dark shows and movies. But this quirky, inexpensive, cobbled-together setup is perfect for my intended purpose of watching old cartoons and TV shows streaming over WiFi, or with a USB DVD drive I’ve had for years. It’s fun to realize how much video projection had progressed in the 20 years since the Kloss Novabeam of the mid-80’s.
