Zoe Klienman of the BBC, which itself still has archival material on Betamax tapes, writes in "Sony says goodbye to Betamax tapes" (2015) that Sony, which stopped manufacturing the machines some years ago, has now decided to also stop producing Betamax format tape, which was always less popular than the competing VHS format for recording video to play back at any time.
Thankfully, I had no illusions about the artistic or other merits of Adventure Island, so I thought it was probably safe to watch a few seconds of the clip. Although I found the full 30 minute episode on YouTube, I only inserted the one minute excerpt - I'm sure my audience will think that's enough to get the general idea about the sort of rubbish I loved when I was a child. But it was wildly popular with my friends and apparently lots of other primary school kids at the time because it was entertaining, and after a hard day with the nuns, all we wanted was to be entertained. Actually, as I watched the clip, it seemed also to be teaching, or trying to teach, some moral lessons, which certainly wasn't why my classmates and I watched it, but perhaps it had some influence. I really don't know - I certainly did not reflect on the moral implications of the content of the things I watched when I was in school. Or did I?
Another show, also awful in different ways, that I loved, this time in high school, was another Australian series called Number 96. And of course it, too, is on YouTube. This time I chose a slightly longer excerpt, and discovered an amazing thing in the notes on the YouTube information for it - this episode, number 649, broadcast in 1974, was the first one ever in colour! Of course, we didn't have a colour TV at that time, but I guess my mother got one a bit later, some time before I finished high school.
Actually, my mother was a bit naughty by the standards of the time, because Number 96 was pretty revolutionary and showed late at night. I think about 10:00 PM, when all good school children should have been in bed, or at least doing homework, definitely not watching TV shows undermining society's morals by showing nude young women, by presenting gay men as decent people who were not effeminate, and by showing real life as if it were ... real life.
Happily, despite all the warnings from miserable moral guardians and other self-appointed dictators trying to control what Aussies watched on TV, Australian society did not die or become full of sex maniacs. The opposite happened, and scandalous TV shows such as Number 96 probably helped Australian society to move to make moral progress away from the bad old ways of thinking that had strictly controlled, or tried to despotically control, people's thoughts, speech and behaviour.
Australia had not yet got Beta or VHS tapes, but those and other changes were on the way in 1974, and they all made life better. I'll pass on Adventure Island, but I might actually watch a full episode of Number 96 to recall those far off days of my early teenage years when my wonderful mum broke the social rules and let me stay up late watching TV full of sex and other things that reflected life as it was, sort of, in Australia in the 1970s.
I wrote the title for this post, which now seems not very appropriate, because my initial response was to write about how my young nieces nephews have never seen things like music records or cassette tapes, but I rather enjoyed the distractions of old time Aussie TV. LP records, cassette tapes, CDs and DVDs can wait, perhaps they will come up in a comment, along with Michael Jackson's Thriller, taking me back to my late days at university, and which Klienman also mentions.
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Reference
Retrospective topics usually interest me as they
ReplyDeletekind of present me to other aspects I never, or impossible to ,experience it first hand. There is some sense of enjoyment in comparing current technology and that of in the past, considering how far the world have gone. So please write more about the past story.