back when people used the phone to connect

Before the days of incessant Twittering and status updates --
Before there was anything like Facebook chat or Skype --
Way before the dawn of texting and even the now-obsolete chatrooms --

We used the telephone, now called the "land phone". It was the choice device for bonding with a friend or with someone you wished to become more than just a friend.

I love this scene from Daria where Trent calls our female antagonistic protagonist. It's hilarious because that sort of thing really used to happen.




Just as teens today are known for obsessive texting, teens back then were scorned for talking on the phone too much. There could be all-night talkathons over nothing in particular, which, unless there was more than one line at home, rob everyone else in the household of phone usage until the next day. I knew a girl who talked to a guy for almost 24 hours straight. My own personal record is a mere 17.

To the disappointment of our grandparents who rue the demise of the handwritten loveletter, courtships and breakups could happen without having to see each other face-to-face. Guy calls girl, guy asks girl, girl says yes, they go out. It was cheap and despicable, right Nana? But what Nana didn't know and couldn't have possibly imagined was that people could even have sex over the phone. As tasteless as that was, it seems pretty tame now compared to sexting and cybersex, eh?
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back when there was the betamax

This week I've been having a mini-flimfest at home, thanks to a friend who lent me a loaded external hard drive. It's even got some hard-to find classics and art films - stuff that I've long been looking for at various video shops but haven't been able to.

I muse about how easy it is to acquire movies and entire seasons of television series now, even ones that just recently showed. Thanks to streaming or stealing file-sharing. Really easy. Tech-savvy teens swapping USBs could put movie pirates out of business, and the Optical Media Board can't really go after them.

Not that I'm an advocate - though I do admit I also enjoy the convenience. ^_^

Before the rise of digital media, we employed the use of a Japanese inventions called the Betamax. Beta for short.

The first Betamax I befriended was the machine in my Grandfather's house. Our then-new electronic acquaintance supplied us with weekend entertainment, and I was sure it was going to be a big part of our lives. Except that there a few major considerations: First of all, it wasn't our machine to abuse. And secondly, there were no Beta tapes for children at my Grandfather's house.

Eventually, my Dad bought a Betamax for us. It was a promise of less-boring weekends and possibly funner summers. He had it installed in their bedroom in no time and it was used mostly by my brother and I.

Luckily we discovered two video rental shops just outside our village (They were near enough to walk, but we weren't exactly allowed to walk there so weren't able to visit them as often as we wanted to). Naturally, we had to rely on the selections offered to us by the shops. Choices were very limited, and we had to find new shops every few months.

We also had to make do with the generalized write-ups on the inner labels - "action", "drama", "comedy", "cartoons" and so on. It was a gamble; we had to choose based on the sound of the title and the less-than-useful inner sticker. We often found really enjoyable stuff like Labyrinth and Legend, though we sometimes ended up with something we didn't like. Every now and then we unknowingly borrowed stuff that wasn't for kids at all (Like, how were we supposed to know that titles like Hot Bubblegum and Lemon Popsicle were R-rated? Those titles seemed quite kiddie to me!) Of course, why would the video shop people care about screening what the neighbor children took home if it made them easy money, right?

But we soon encountered another problem: The tapes we borrowed were usually not re-wound. Be kind, Rewind wasn't yet a known adage, and unfortunate renters had to go through the hassle. Initially, my brother would rewind entire tapes using the Betamax player just so we could watch them, but we were later told that this damaged both the tape and the player. I remember attempting to wind the tapes by hand.

The stress led to my Dad's next purchase: a video casette tape rewinder. Our first one looked like a little red race car.

The next Beta-related acquisition was a tape head cleaner. Betamax players were very prone to accumulating dust, which affected its performance. A cleaner looked exactly like a Beta tape, except that it didn't have any real tape in it. You put a few drops of cleaning solution on specified spots on the cartridge, stick it into the player, hit play and let it go run a few seconds to clean the inside parts.

By the time I was in high school, Betamax lost popularity due to the supposedly better-quality VHS (though it was common for homes to have both a Betamax and a VHS player at that time; well-to-do families also had LaserDisc players, which were wrongly perceived as futuristic). By the time Y2k rolled in, the VHS had also already faded into the background because of video compact discs and digital video discs.

When the Hubby and I cleaned out the house a couple of months ago, we discovered a stash of old tapes inherited from my Mom's old place - some even had good titles I would have loved to keep in our movie collection. But we don't have a Betamax or VHS player anywhere, and we don't know anyone who still does. We tried selling the tapes at a garage sale, but no one showed the slightest bit of interest - even the tricycle drivers laughed at those tapes!

And these days, the only "betamax" around here are these:

Some people have now discontinued buying DVDs since it's easy (albeit "illegal") to download movies and TV series for free. There are even those who have begun to give away their space-consuming DVD collection and opted to store films in hard drives.

You know, the word "film" is a major misnomer now, since the stuff we watch aren't even in film anymore (I learned to be very discriminating with words like "film", "movie", "cinema" and "video" when I was a film major, back when we used real, actual film). They aren't exactly "movies" either; everything is just video now.

back when 'tron' was cutting-edge sci-fi

I've heard some rumors about it since last year, but I wasn't really sure until today when I finally saw the preview. Tron Legacy, the sequel to the 1982 Disney cult classic Tron, will be coming in December 2010 (So that means it'll show in Manila sometime January due to the annual Film Fest. Arrrgh).



Interesting that this sequel maintains not just the original characters but much of the original cast.

Seeing the Legacy trailer stoked my childhood memories. I told my brother that Legacy was coming in December, and he likewise got excited. I suggested that he torrent the original Tron so we could revisit it before Legacy comes out. Naturally he found comments from several gen-X geeks who were downloading Tron and were pretty much thinking the same thing.

Tron was all the rage for a while. I recall being in kindergarten when it came out. There was so much noise about it because it was so high-tech and was the first ever of its kind. I never saw it on the big screen, but I watched it with my brother several times on Betamax.

Tron '82 poster

It had quite an amazing story: a computer hacker got transmitted into an electronic world threatened to be ruled by a Master Control Program gone wrong. In his quest to defeat the MCP and save his own skin, he interacted with personified programs and took part in digital gladiator games. Back then, that was unique and edgy, served in what was considered to be a fast pace.

The predominantly electric blue animation was considered top-grade, visually stunning effects; the most unforgettable scene must have been the lightcycle battle. The innovative, cutting-edge graphics laid foundations for visual effects in movies and video games to come.

Trivia: Wiki says that Tron was denied an Oscar for visual effects, because it "cut corners" by using computers. Imagine that. That of course sounds ludicrous now since any and every movie with a hint of fantasy these days is expected to use CGI. I mean, there just isn't any other way to do it anymore.

For some reason, Tron was forgotten and buried within a few years. Possibly because computer-generated visual effects rapidly developed, leaving Tron far behind in such a short time. Still the film was held valuable by fans and geeks and movie lovers.

Almost thirty years later, the lightcycle race doesn't seem too impressive anymore - it's essentially a basic 2-d game with 4 directions and 90-degree turns, pretty much like a two-player game of Snake. The pace previously perceived as fast is now considered leisurely - even boring - in comparison to what crowds are used to these days. I won't even have to get into how primitive the animation already is.

1982 lightcycles (top) and a 2010 one (bottom)

In the Legacy trailer, I see that lightcycles and the light walls are still around - but with a wyckid, multilayered, 3-dimensional twist.

It's apparently an altogether different game by now. And oh - it seems darker, more sinister and not-so Disney pixie-dust family-fare.

I'm still curious though how the conflict would work, I mean without seeming too simple. It may not even be helped for viewers to identify its concepts with those in The Matrix (e.g., users getting sucked in and out, the personified programs, the quest to destroy a megalomanic electronic entity, and so on). I wonder of course how it would turn out - what's new, what's different, how would Disney repackage a very dated classic, what would be the kickarse gladiator game this time. I guess I'll have to wait until December to evaluate it for myself. The geek in me is pretty excited. I hope the movie won't disappoint.

Just another bit of trivia: The animators of the original Tron snuck a hidden Mickey in the background terrain. It wasn't that obvious since it went on for only a fraction of a second. Image from here.

back when it wasn't so easy to be a music fan

photo from this blog

Seeing kids these days with their tiny, candy-colored MP3 players, I can't help but appreciate how much easier it is to be a music fan today. Things used to be a lot more complicated, and er, primitive when I was young.

The main source of music back then was mainstream radio. If you felt like being cooler, you plugged into the alternative stations so you knew tunes that not many people have heard yet.

If you carried around a huge boom box, that was an inconvenience but still considered pretty cool.

The Sony Walkman was a more clever invention.

Back then, you didn't have Frostwire or iTunes. You didn't have the convenience of buying music online or downloading shareware. You listened to the radio and waited for your favorite songs to come up, and when that happened, you cranked up the volume to enjoy it. You had to suffer the random selection of the disk jockey though - an odd hodge-podge of NKOTB, Garth Brooks, Bon Jovi, Megadeth, Paula Abdul and Boyz II Men in one hour.

The only way you could affect the line-up on radio was to phone, page or fax the station. The convenience of SMS sending was yet unheard of.

Dial ... busy.
Redial ... still busy.
Redial ...

As you considered the volume of listeners trying to get their requests in, you kept your fingers crossed. If you succeeded in contacting the station, depending on the timing, you might have to join one of their dorky contests. You greeted your friends while you were at it, of course. Afterward, you would put down the phone and wait for your song - only for the DJ to turn over to the next shift. A new DJ would come in and he wouldn'tt even know about your request, so you had to go through the trouble of phoning in again.

You shelled out a hundred bucks or so (which would be around two to four days' worth of allowance for the average, middle-classs kid of the late '80s / early '90s) to buy a cassette tape which probably had only one or two tracks that you liked.

And yeah, I just remembered - they weren't called "tracks" ... I don't even know what they were called.

You couldn't press next track when you got bored with something unbearable; you couldn't shuffle for variety.

If you kinda didn't have that much money to spend on your musical interests (or were just plain cheap), you played your radio, kept a blank tape in the player, and when the DJ cued your song of choice, you pressed rec.

You borrowed a tape from a friend and did some homemade bootlegging with the help of a double-cassette. If you weren't so lucky to have one, you used two separate players - one played your tape of choice, the other recorded on a blank, and you hoped that the other people in your house would keep it down for the next 3:22 minutes.

If you wanted to share tunes with a friend, you couldn't yet transfer data via USB or Bluetooth. You couldn't rip from a CD, much less burn one. CD writers were available only to music and software manufacturers, and not yet to the average joe. Instead, using one ore more of the previously mentioned primitive processes, you a made a compilation called a mix tape.

CDs were kinda pricey then, and you bought only albums that you would consider "special", i.e., worth blowing several hundred bucks for, like Michael Jackson's Dangerous or Miss Saigon. If you had a large collection, you were probably conio.

Since CDs caused considerable damage to your savings, you handled them delicately. You didn't leave your disks lying around naked. Whenever one of your friends made the mistake of making the tiniest smudge on the underside, you threw a fit and immediately polished the disk off. If you were really fussy, you bought this near-useless plastic tong-like implement designed especially for handling CDs.

There was no You Tube. If you wanted to watch a particular music video, you turned your television to something like Video Hit Parade or Video Hot Traxx while you did your homework. You waited until something good came on. Those one-hour shows were usually frustrating in the way they only played - rather, overplayed - Janet, Whitney, Michael Bolton, and that annoying boy band with the monkey. You realize you waited for an hour for nothing.

Not many homes had cable. If you were one of the lucky ones, you tuned in to MTV and again, waited. If you didn't have cable, you hung out at your rich classmate's house just for that purpose.

On the hours that MTV was made partially available on channel 23, you turned it on for some background noise, keeping it on for chunks of hours, hoping something you liked would finally play. That's why everyone, regardless of their musical preference, would have been familiar with George Michael's Too Funky, Madonna's Like A Prayer, the bee girl in Blind Melon's No Rain. Even Rico Suave and Debbie Gibson's Electric Youth.

You couldn't Google for lyrics or tabs. If you needed lyrics but none came on the album sleeve, you acquired them the usual way - play, pause, write, play. The words would sometimes be unintelligible so you often had to make something up, and you hoped that no one noticed when you sang To Be With You at the orientation party.

You bought your tabs from music stores like RJ or Perfect Pitch - that is, whenever you were fortunate enough that they had something in there more recent than Bob Dylan or Don McLean. You went to Filbars and bought yourself a copy of BOP! or Tiger Beat and hope the line-up actually had the ones you wanted, and not just a Whitney Houston collection.

... Or you challenged your own skill and figured the notes out one by one.

There yet weren't many fan sites or official websites of your favorite artists. If you wanted news or gossip about your idols, you got snippets on MTV. You consulted the magazines and trusted that the stuff were up-to-date. If you wanted pictures, you gambled for the glossy spreads in those magazines, hoping after you purchase one and remove the plastic wrapper that the 'zine it isn't all just Vanilla Ice photos.

If you had some talent and wanted to pimp yourself, there were no UUC websites for that purpose - besides, you didn't have the convenience of recording yourself through digital means. You bought a blank tape, put it in the Karaoke and pressed rec while you sang into the mic. Or you got your band-mates together, set up your instruments in your bedroom and played in front of a recording cassette player until your parents complained of your racket. You sent a copy of your demo to your auntie who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a talent scout. Or you just sent one to a show like NU 107's In The Raw and hope you got noticed.

These days, almost everything you need to be a music fan is available via the www. A shot at stardom, even. Download here, listen there, tweak here, upload everywhere - it's so easy to be "musically inclined" without having to spend much.