I found myself thinking about the past since this weekend. We rented the DVD of Down With Love with Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, a 2003 movie that deliberately mimicked the romantic comedies of the late 1950s and early '60s, such as Pillow Talk and Desk Set.
This little confection of a movie also used no digital effects, just the technoloy available 40 years ago, such as matte paintings and process footage. It showcased that far-off time known as the predigital era. Down With Love was set in 1962, the year I was born.
Because I was born over four decades back, I can remember that era of rotary dial phones with loud, mechanical rings, instead of chirpy bleeps. I tell my kids about my parents' vinyl record collection, all my dad's Mario Lanza records, old Broadway musicals and my mom's classical LPs. They had this massive console that contained a TV, turntable and radio that they bought in the early 1960s. This apparently was a popular appliance in first part of the '60s. Over the years, each component broke, one by one, until they had to trash it just a decade after they bought it.
I tell my kids about the old GE black and white TV that received four VHF channels -- 2 (CBS), 4 (NBC), 7 (ABC) and 9 (CBC/Canadian), and three UHF -- 20, 50 and 56 (PBS). The reception was quirky and got even worse when Mama ran the vacuum cleaner. Most houses in my neighborhood had antennas atop their roofs. Movies were broken up by ads. Their hosts included an old blowhard and bit player named Bill Kennedy on Channel 50, by Rita Bell and her "Prize Movie," with cash awards, I think on Channel 7, and by Sir Graves Ghastly the vampire ham on various channels in the 1960s and '70s. Cable didn't come to our Detroit suburb till 1980.
Obviously, there weren't any videogames. We played outside a lot, in the backyard, the neighborhood, and rarely at the park. The first time I saw a videogame was in 1974, when I spotted a Pong Game by a pinball machine in a Gaylord, Michigan, motel. That was two years after the videogame era began.
One of the strangest things to try and explain to my kids were the records off the back of cereal boxes. It's true and something along the line of those free prizes inside the boxes. You could get a little 45 or 33 rpm record off the back of a box of Rice Krispies or Alpha-Bits. Sometimes they bound plastic ones inside magazines, such as the one featuring music punctuated by burps that my dad found inside a MAD magazine. Mama didn't like that one, but Daddy thought it was a minor laugh.
Today having the Internet at my fingertips, I decided to see if there was anything about the cereal box records out there. I guess I hoped that such records weren't just some fever dream of a suburban childhood.
They weren't. According to the Internet Museum of Flexi/Carboard/Oddity Records, "Once bound by cereal boxes, held in the pages of a magazine, wrapped up in envelopes sent through our postal system or given away casually with some product, these bits of paper and plastic yearned to be set free to fulfill their destiny as ... PLAYABLE RECORDS."
This "museum" says these records first started appearing in the 1950s and continued into the '70s. They came from pop stars, as TV tie-ins, advertising jingles, and holiday novelties. The first cereal box records appeared on Wheaties in the 1950s.
My best memory of such a record was a TV ad for boxes of Alpha-Bits that contained not only little inflatables of the Jackson 5, but a record on the back of one or two their bubblegum soul hits. My memories of others are fuzzy, but I know I clamored when I saw a cereal box bearing one when I accompanied Mama to the supermarket.
And oh, the collection on the museum's Web site. There were the Monkees and the Jackson 5's contemporary, Bobby Sherman. (These guys, along with the Osmonds, were the boy bands of my child and tween years.) The Archies record displayed here also offered a mail-in offer for a Jughead hat, free with three proofs of purchase! Yet another Web site has all of Sherman's cereal box hit parade.
Another Web site shows a record with the legend "Toucan Sam takes you on a listening safari!" Oooh, educational and sugary too! It reminds me of the old tunes I remember - Josie and the Pussycats, the Banana Splits and the Sugar Bears, a phony pop group consisting of bears that are now on what Kellogg's simply calls "Pops." (The word "sugar" was also removed from a lot of cereal names after the government and medicos complained. For example, Frosted Flakes used to be SUGAR Frosted Flakes.)
The last time I saw a plastic record, it was in a 1979 tie-in book by Walter Williams, creator of the "Mr. Bill" segments on Saturday Night Live. You might remember Mr. Bill: he was the Play-Doh guy who was abused by another clay man named Sluggo and a set of hands named, appropriately, Mr. Hands. The record was a recording of the storybook about Mr. Bill's birth, life and travails.
CDs appeared around 1981, and cereal box records were a fading memory. The digital era arrived in the early 1970s, what with LED clocks and calculators. VCRs arrived in the late 1970s and cost hundreds of dollars. You could get VHS or BetaMax, which caused Sony Corp. take a bath numbering in the millions.
I guess the popularity of "retro" movies, such as Down With Love, and in 2002 of Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven, reflects the nostalgia that people always seem to reach for in their decade. Life looks crisp and clean in these movies, with their turntables playing music with needles and not laser beams, and TVs with Ed Sullivan and not some reality gunk.
There was a charm about that age's technology, that gave us groovy-shaped TVs and silly little records on backs of Froot Loops. I see the inevitability, though of nostalgia for those "quaint" CDs, Game Boys and tiny fold-up cell phones - and CD-ROMs taped to the back of cereal boxes. Yes, you can now get demo games on today's breakfast staples.
I am happy that I have witnessed technological changes large and small and will forever be amused by what passed for entertainment in my youth.
Can't wait to see how my daughters describe their gadgets to their kids!