Plenty of people collect
Disneyana, the toys, books, animation cels, and theme-park souvenirs. Then there are those fans who collect information and details on the Disney parks themselves,
collecting official park maps or
drawing up their own ride blueprints,
assembling the design history behind the attractions, and even
collecting vintage tickets and
ticket books.
Yesterland (previously:
1,
2,
3) is an ever-growing collection of Disneyland history, and has
an updated collection of links to similar fan sites and Imagineering blogs, which is a whole collection of rabbit holes of nostalgia and behind-the-scense information. So grab a
riding crop and
pretend like it's the 60s all over again!
posted by filthy light thief
on Mar 15, 2012 -
9 comments
Towards the end of the 1800s, there were three primary American groups competing to invent technology to record and play back audio.
Alexander Graham Bell worked with with Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell in at their
Volta Laboratory in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., while
Thomas A. Edison worked from his
Menlo Park facilities, and
Emile Berliner worked in
his independent laboratory in
his home. To secure the rights to their inventions, the three groups sent samples of their work to the Smithsonian. These recordings became part of the permanent collections, now consisting of 400 of the earliest audio recordings ever made.
But knowledge of their contents was limited to old, short descriptions, as the rubber, beeswax, glass, tin foil and brass recording media are fragile, and playback devices might damage the recordings, if such working devices are even available. That is, until
a collaborative project with the Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory came together to make 2D and 3D optical scanners, capable of
visually recording the patterns marked on discs and cylinders, respectively.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Feb 10, 2012 -
21 comments
Finnish YouTube user
Ishexan has uploaded seven English subtitled movies in parts:
Broken Blossoms (
1919),
Aelita (
1924),
The Gipsy Charmer (
1929),
The Tragedy of Elina (
1938),
The Activists (
1939),
The Wooden Pauper's Bride (
1944), and
Sampo (
1959), which is based on the epic poem
The Kalevala. The films are mostly Finnish, though
Aelita is a silent Russian sci-fi film, and
Sampo was a joint Finnish and Soviet production. More film clips inside (mostly Finnish documentaries and "dorky musical numbers").
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Apr 30, 2011 -
12 comments
Game programmer and designer Mike Dailly has been
making games since he was 14, back in 1984. It was then that he met
David Jones,
Russell Kay and
Steve Hammond at the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club, a group that gathered at Kingsway Technical College in Dundee, Scotland. These four chaps would go on to form
DMA Design, home to
Lemmings and
Grand Theft Auto,
amongst other games. Dailly has been sharing stories and materials from the archives of DMA, including
The Complete History of DMA Design,
The Complete History of Lemmings (
previously),
GTA prototypes,
graphics and
early game design docs (when it was called "Race 'n' Chase"), and more....
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Mar 24, 2011 -
16 comments
Captain Video and his Video Rangers was a television series that was staple of the
DuMont Television Network. The series first aired in the middle of
Golden Age of Science Fiction, and with an initial air date in 1949, it was the first science fiction television series in the United States, complete with
futuristic gadgets. The series was aimed at children, with
public service announcements for kids,
the a special ring (
or three). Recorded and broadcast live five to six days a week, the series had a run of thousands of episodes, though most are now considered lost.
24 episodes are in the
UCLA Film and Television archive, and a few episodes have made their way into public domain compilations, and online (
three random episodes episodes on Internet Archive; and
same three episodes on YouTube). Continue in for more on the good Captain, and the network he called home.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Mar 21, 2011 -
19 comments
The
stories and pictures of the Wild West
commonly feature white men, with little notion of the diversity present in the later half of the 19th century beyond
the various regiments of "buffalo soldiers". In reality,
black cowboys made up a large portion of the cowhand population, possibly a quarter of all cowboys.
Estimations range from 5,000 to
15,000 cowboys being of African heritage. Many have been forgotten in the passing of time, but some of their stories live on. For instance, the cowboy
Nat Love, the outlaw
Cherokee Bill, and (all sorts of awesome)
"Stagecoach" Mary Fields.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Feb 25, 2011 -
21 comments
Dr. Mayme Agnew Clayton was a librarian and collector in Los Angeles who
left behind a collection of remarkable value. Over the course of more than 40 years, she had collected the largest privately held collection of African-American materials,
with over 30,000 rare and out-of-print books, 1,700 films dating back to 1916, as well as more than 75,000 photographs and scores of movie posters, playbills, programs, documents and manuscripts. Her collection, which has been compared to the
Schomburg Collection in the New York City Public Library, was
opened to the public in 2007.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jan 8, 2010 -
6 comments
