1.07.2009

Kottke posted a link today to the opening credits from "3-2-1 Contact":



It surprised me how many of the images I remembered intensely: the baby with the weird tongue, the frog, the trampoline from below, the girl whispering a secret.

The video naturally pointed to a bit from "The Bloodhound Gang," my favorite "3-2-1 Contact" sketch:



and this led me to "The Great Space Coaster" credits:



and "Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings":



and the theme from Bill Cosby's "Picture Pages":



I wonder how many papers are being written out there about how YouTube is changing our experience of nostalgia. Everything is accessible (on the lucky side of the digital divide). Like the shift from having to see works of art in person to being able to see reproductions in books, the shift from having to have been alive & glued to the set in a certain era to see TV bits to being able to see them online. (Did I mention here that the other day I saw a high school girl at the library with a giant sketchbook, sketching a work of art on her computer screen as if she were an art student sketching in a museum?)

I wonder what a mid-21st century "Persistence of Memory" might look like.

1 comment:

Stuart Greenhouse said...

"I wonder how many papers are being written out there about how YouTube is changing our experience of nostalgia. Everything is accessible . . ."

A few times recently, remembering something personal incompletely, I've had the urge to google it as a means of recalling more completely. Once this urge is conscious and I recategorize the memory as one not on wikipedia or google (though strange to say, sometimes I qualify that state as 'yet'), it passes. I can't imagine I'm the only one this happens to.