You might be stunned to learn that mainstream watchmaker Seiko still manufactures affordable mechanical wristwatches.
The Stylophone Beatbox has just been released, 40 years after the original Stylophone took the world by storm.
It's hard to believe gadgets like radio watches were once virtually impossible experiments in miniaturization.
"Who We Were" is a squarish book befitting the square snapshots within. The authors are collectors of black and white snapshots, or “vernacular photography” as the fancy set likes to say. I've come to know Nicholas Osborn through our mutual fondness of home movies. He's displayed his curated collection of photos at museums, galleries, and on his website at www.squareamerica.com. He and his co-authors have chosen 350 amateur photos spanning some 80 years to tell the story of America in "Who We Were".
Spanning the decades from about 1890 through the 70's, "Who We Were" is a collection of amateur anthropology. These random snapshots found at thrift stores and flea markets could be our relatives doing all the important stuff in life; waving to airplanes, drinking a beer... and of course taking pictures of it all. It's doubtful that the original photographers sought to create art, but somehow when collected together these private yet shared memories take on the qualities of art photography.
The photos capture regular people being themselves, and the book wisely lets the photos speak for themselves too. Most pages feature a single picture annotated with anecdotes from the
original photographers, or a reproduction of text written on the back
of the picture. It only takes a few pages to travel silently between the finer moments of family life and some of the most unfortunate and shameful times in our history.
I'm sure no one thought taking a picture of yet another doughy guy soaking up 50's leisure would be important in the future. I'm grateful to both the photographer for taking the picture, and to the authors of "Who We Were" for doing such a good job of keeping these little bits of history alive.
We live in a time where it's cheaper and easier than ever to take loads of digital photos. The problem is that few people print out pictures anymore. That means no artifacts for future generations (even our own families) to find. "The Way We Were" shows the continued historic value of physical media. Years from now will amateur historians dig through the piles of discarded cell phones to try to dig out grainy low res pictures of life today? I hope so. This book reminds us of what we owe the future - inadvertent art
Here's some great news... The authors gave us an autographed copy of their book to give away to one lucky Retro Thing reader. All readers are eligible to enter. All you have to do is add a comment to this post talking about your favorite snapshot. If you'd like, you can even upload a little version of it to share with all of our readers. Just say a few words about what makes it special to you. On February 7th, we'll pick one comment at random to win the book.
One additional note. Just like our last giveaway, if you're from outside the US or Canada we welcome your entry, but require that you cover the shipping costs to your country. Thanks for understanding, and good luck to all of you!
Bring a little piece of square America home by purchasing "Who We Were" at ten dollars off the cover price. As a bonus you'll receive a genuine vintage snapshot and a DVD of some of Nick's home movie collection.
You can also find the book at Amazon.com
For years I have been a huge fan of home movies. I've researched and collected them for years and have become well versed in the many forms a home movie might take: the “Up and Down the Christmas Tree Movie”, the “Panning Wildly over Scenery Movie”, the “Standing Still Even Though It's A Movie Movie”, and the like. Home films are great for family nostalgia, but amateur movie gear also empowered backyard movie moguls. Though the years many amateurs have tried their hand at remakes and re-imaginings of the adventures of their favorite sci-fi and fantasy characters.
Homemade Hollywood is a new book by Clive Young chronicles the fan film from its earliest days. The author traced the first fan film to 1922 - astonishing! It's a great story of a pair of barnstorming scheisters that hoodwink the folks of a South Carolina town into paying the ersatz filmmakers to shooting an Our Gang comedy in their city. They did actually create the film and have a screening before skipping town, and fortunately a few reels of footage from the movie still exists today.
With the introduction of Super 8 & home video decades later, even more amateurs tried their hand at creating a fan film. In 1992 Dan Poole heard the rumblings of a 
James Cameron helmed film starring Spider-Man. Poole beat Spidey to the screen by a decade with “The Green Goblin's Last Stand” (it's even based on the same issue of the comic that inspired the eventual 2002 movie). This flick is a must-see as they filmed a foolish spectacular stunt with a costumed wall crawler swinging on a rope between buildings 35 feet up in the air – with no safety net!
The book continues on into the modern era, crediting 1997's Star Wars fan film “Troops” (a parody of TV's “Cops”) and the introduction of iMovie and miniDV cameras with igniting the fan film phenomenon. Suddenly practically anyone could create movies with credible special effects, and get an audience of tens of thousands via the internet. With that came innumerable “two guys in Jedi PJ's engaged in a random lightsaber fight in the woods” films, but there have been many gems too.
In the days before the internet, fan films were mostly confined to sci-fi conventions and backyard parties – so they were hard to learn about. Many filmmakers also tended to keep their unauthorized productions on the QT. The big companies that own these cherished characters tend to be skittish and litigious about fans making free with their copyrights. 
Some studios have been smart like Paramount, permitting the lavish “New Voyages” Star Trek fan films that have featured actors and writers from the original series.
Clive Young's book does a great job putting together the unknown history of fan films, even going so far as to index dozens of them in the back. It's a relatively quick read that I hard a hard time putting down, and the many threads of the story are drawn together remarkably well. I never got to make a fan film (they frowned on that sort of thing in film school), but after reading Homemade Hollywood I wish I had. Then again it seems like any film project, no matter what the intent, is going to be a source of drama and problems – so maybe I didn't miss out on all that much!
Homemade Hollywood explores the amateur desire to create more adventures with their favorite TV & movie characters. Readers can admire the can-do attitude of these amateur filmmakers, and if you poke around on the internet you can check out a lot of these movies without waiting for the next Trek convention. If some of those big studio lawyers can take a break from sending out reams of “cease & desist” letters, the book can teach them that fan films are a labor of love, and are the sincerest form of flattery.
links:
Pre-order Homemade Hollywood from Amazon
Visit the author's website
Just released this week is this DVD documentary "Pulp Fiction Art: Cheap Thrills & Painted Nightmares". We got an advance copy, so here's our review of the film.
Pulp magazines were a mid 20th century newsstand staple. These exciting anthologies of western yarns, science fiction, and murder mysteries not only launched the careers of many writers, but also served as the canvas for the many painters that created the covers.
Because there were so many pulp magazine titles, the publications relied heavily on the attractive qualities of the cover art. Bold imagery in lurid and murderous colors drew the reader's eye, and hopefully the dimes out of his pocket. The covers featured a woman in peril, a mustache twirling villain, cruel implements of torture - often all at once!
The covers weren't valued as art, the work was considered as disposable as the cheap pulp magazine themselves. Looking at them now, there are many tremendous examples of pop art that have sadly been lost. This documentary introduces us to several of the most famous artists and collectors who have saved some great examples of the art form from permanent obscurity.
The documentary covers a lot of ground, but at under 60 minutes feels more like a tease for a much longer project. Nor are there any extras on the disc which is a little disappointing. There's a nice sense of pace overall, but I was left with the feeling that there are still a lot of areas left to explore.
There were also some weird occasional glitches (probably DVD compressions errors) in the image - there were only a handful, but when the focus of the documentary is on compelling imagery I feel like the visual quality is really important.
Overall, it's a good documentary offering a glimpse into a world of art that hasn't been explored much before. The film has won a number of awards and is a pretty polished presentation. I wish that the few irritating compression glitches had been fixed, but as an indy film producer myself it can be hard to catch those sorts of things when you're crafting a film with a small team. The real enjoyment here is in the rediscovery of a lost art form.
It's a good time to be a casual gamer. Not only do the major consoles have retro collections & downloadable arcade classics, but you can walk into any mainstream discount store to find myriad Plug & Play video game consoles. Jakks Pacific has been a strong supporter of retro arcade titles. Both the Super Pac-Man & Ms. Pac-Man sticks let you play arcade accurate renditions of some of the biggest arcade hits of the 1980's.
It's amazingly simple. Everything that you need is inside the controller, no cartridges or console to buy... just pop in some batteries and plug the unit into the nearest TV set.
The Super Pac-Man stick is all Pac-Man, all the time. You get Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Pac & Pal, and of course Super Pac-Man. Jakks had previously released Pac-Man in another stick, but this version has been remade to be arcade accurate (the original bug that lets you hide from the ghosts still works!)
The stick also has three sequels to Pac-Man. After years of getting hopped up on power-pills, the Yellow Yap reappeared in Pac-Man Plus - a game for determined Pac-Man experts. Pac & Pal is just bizarre, but interesting to see as I don't remember it from the arcade at all.
The showpiece may just be the game the stick is named after. Super Pac-Man is an interesting reinterpretation of the game mechanic of the original game. You still chow power pills, but there are also super pills that double Pac's size and speed.
There was a bug in my game that would sometimes freeze the ghosts for a
moment. While the bug did actually help my gameplay, it seems like a
pretty obvious error that should have been caught. (turns out what I thought was a bug is a feature of the game - the ghosts pause right before they're going to change directions - see the comments) Nonetheless this is
my favorite game out of the collection.
The Super Pac-Man controller is a solid and stable four-way stick, ideal for the Pac family of games. Other Jakks plug & play units (like the Ms. Pac-Man stick below) have games requiring a stick with more motion, making Pac-Man type games harder to navigate. With the Super Pac-Man game, it appears that Jakks have listened to their customers and provided a controller ideally suited to the onboard games.
Continue reading "REVIEW: Super Pac-Man & Ms. Pac-Man Plug & Play Video Games" »
Many genres of DIY lo-fi indie music have blossomed thanks to the internet. One of the most unusual is "chip music"; tunes created by artists using and sometimes modifying 1980's era electronics. Many equip themselves with what looks like the inventory sheet of a thrift store, and all make appearances on this album - Game Boy, Commodore 64, Speak & Spell, Atari 2600, and many others.
These musicians (calling themselves "8 Bit Operators") have come to pay tribute to the fathers of electronic music; Kraftwerk. The pioneering Kraftwerk have been labeled as just about everything; antiseptic, electronica, dance - but no one can dispute their lasting effect on modern music. Also interesting is how their music seems so firmly rooted in the technology used to create it, yet the beauty and the soul of the music has survived many transformations from orchestral to salsa.
It's not enough to merely sequence the same notes as a Kraftwerk song, there is an essence to capture. Thankfully, the artists on ""8 Bit Operators" ply their retro tech sound to capture what Kraftwerks' songs are all about, without getting too caught up in the 8 bit technology.
Standout tracks include Bacalao's version of "The Robots", Role Model's "Showroom Dummies", Nullsleep's "The Model", Receptors "Trans Europe Express", and Bubblyfish's "It's More Fun To Compute". These tracks stay true to the roots of each song, yet bring something of each artists style to the mix; walking the line between rocking out and robo-boogie. The CD has 15 tracks, and would be a great mix for any party, dance, or at work at those times when you need to embrace your inner drone.
It's telling that what started out as an internet project has been picked up by a major label - the same label that Kraftwerk is on! That makes "8 Bit Operators" one of the first chip music albums available at retail and relatively easy to find. There is also a special edition remix tat you can download, or it is also refreshingly available on that classic read-only medium; 12" vinyl.
Congratulations to everyone who was part of the "8-Bit Operators" project, and for showing a major record label that classic 8-bit music still has a lot of surprises left.
In the video gaming wilderness, Nintendo's roots run deepest. 1985's 8-bit NES system yielded thousands of games, and 1991's 16-bit successor was no slouch at some 750 titles. Until the recent release of Nintendo's Wii, the only way to play these older titles was to either buy a re-release for your newer game system, or keep the old hardware around. I'm an old hardware guy myself, but that tends to take up a lot of space.
Flash forward to today. Retro gaming enthusiasts are still playing those great old Nintendo games, but console hardware can be hard to find, and frequently kind of finicky. Enter Yobo's new FC Twin. You may remember the name Yobo from a review we ran a while back about their Neo-Fami NES clone. Now they've returned with a two slotted machine that can play both NES & SNES games in one unit! The nice folks at Pandora's Cube sent us one to test out, so here we go...
Continue reading "REVIEW: FC Twin - Console plays NES & SuperNES" »
We've written about miniaturization before. Back in the day it was a real show of your tech prowess to make a smaller radio/camera/television than the last. Today everything is miniaturized, and it's easy to get kind of blasé about small devices like music players, so it must take something extra special to get music fans to sit up and take notice.
The MobiBlu Cube2 is a full-featured MP3 player housed in a 70's geometric/mod inspired cube, clocking in at less than one cubic inch. There are other players with about the same displacement, but putting it all in a perfect cube is an unexpected touch of elegance. More importantly the MobiBlu sounds good, is easy to use, the controls are a good size, and the screen is terrific (yes iPod Shuffle people, an MP3 player at this size and price point can have a screen).
Even though it's diminutive, the MobiBlu manages to be packed with features. It plays MP3, WMV, and the much vaunted OGG (yay!). It's got podcast subscription software right in the unit, a built in mic, radio - pretty much everything you'd expect from a full featured MP3 player. Unbelievably the color screen can even play video. Yes Mr. Farnsworth, you're looking at a 1 inch cube with a video screen. Folks bandy about the term "iPod killer" all the time, but the MobiBlu is the first MP3 player I've used that I think has a chance to topple Apple's baby.
Continue reading "REVIEW: MobiBlu Cube2 - World's Smallest MP3 Player" »
We've written about Coleco on Retro Thing before; the company brought us some of the first handheld LED games, an awesome 80's video game console, even a series of mini arcade games. Unbelievable as it may seem, in this post we're looking at something new from Coleco. They're back with an ambitous variety of electronic games (which we'll review here at Retro Thing), and at the top of the retro heap is a collection of Sega Classics in a tidy handheld.
The game brings together a collection of 20 Sega Game Gear and Master System titles. Present are Sega standards like Sonic, Ecco the dolphin, Alex Kidd, and Columns. There are also some more obscure titles that were never available on a portable. One special game is "Snail Maze" - if you wonder why you've never heard of it, it's because it was an easter egg in every original Sega Master System console.
I played a lot of these games on the original Sega hardware (I have blurry memories of Sonic on the blurry Game Gear display) back in the day, but the sharp & bright LCD screen on the Coleco handheld makes a considerable difference in bringing these old games to life again.
Continue reading "REVIEW: Sega Classics Handheld by Coleco" »
A while back we wrote about the phenomenon of Paint By Number sets - kits that permitted even the non-artist to create a facsimile of some famous piece of art. In the 1950's Paint By Numbers were a tremendous fad, and you can still get the sets today. Back in their heyday, one firm allowed you to mail in a photo and they would create a custom PBN kit for you, but the product was far too labor intensive to create and was quickly discontinued.
Well it may have taken forty years, but Paint By Numbers 2005 finally makes it possible for you to create your own Paint By Number using your PC. You load in a 1 megapixel or greater photo, and tweak the level of detail you want in the finished painting. Higher levels of detail mean that you'll have smaller areas to paint, and ultimately need more custom-mixed paint.
We live in good times for homebrew videogame developers. Enthusiasts of the Atari 2600, ColecoVision, Odyssey 2 and other classic systems have learned to program new games, and many have spent long nights recreating the look and feel of original cartridges and packaging of their console favorites. "Beggar Prince" is the first homebrew releases to come out on an authentic cartridge for the 16 bit Sega Genesis (Mega Drive), and the first game to be commercially released for that platform in nearly 10 years.
"Beggar Prince" started life as an exclusively Chinese release back in 1996. Flash forward a few years to see American Brandon Cobb and his Super Fighter Team group begin a year-long process of translating and fixing bugs in the game's code leading up to the cartridge's release in May 2006. Super Fighter Team went to impressive lengths to recreate the vibe of a genuine Genesis release. The cartridge, box, and manual all have the look and feel of a game that might have been released by a games publisher back in the 16-bit heyday. Feeling ten years younger, I was ready to plug the game into my Genesis and get started.
The background unfolds through scrolling text and animation telling the story of a Prince who leaves his castle to sample the world of the commonfolk. Deciding to return to regal life, the palace guards refuse to admit the prince - and the plotting Cat Minister (meow?) puts plans into motion to seize the kingdom. As the game begins you play the prince meandering the environs of the kingdom, encountering townsfolk and gaining valuable clues that will hopefully lead to snatching power back from the sly claws of the Cat Minister.
Continue reading "REVIEW: Beggar Prince - Sega Genesis Game" »
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