Showing posts with label black and white gifs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label black and white gifs. Show all posts

Friday, January 26, 2018

When did clowns get creepy?




When I was a kid, there was no such thing as a creepy clown. ALL clowns were good, ALL clowns were funny, and they provided unquestioningly wholesome entertainment, not to mention big bucks for advertisers. When we look back at them now, we're incredulous. Just seeing Ronald McDonald in his first incarnation with the cardboard box on his head to demonstrate the Happy Meal is pretty macabre. Clarabell, the beloved clown of Howdy Doody (in itself pretty macabre), now looks like something you wouldn't want to face in your darkest nightmares. Milky I've dealt with, or at least I think so, until he comes seeping back into my post-traumatic consciousness like some eerie Renaissance shade. 

The whole concept of a creepy clown is relatively  recent, but now that we've put on those glasses of perception, suddenly they ALL look creepy. John Wayne Gacy has nothing on these guys. Stephen King has been blamed for it, but the awareness started a long time before that. You don't need to creep them up or make them look evil. They're ALL evil, as far as I am concerned, and the farther back you go, the more horrendously creepy they are.

So I just had to make a gif compilation from my vast file. When something is this bad, it somehow morphs into its opposite and becomes sublime.


Sunday, August 31, 2014

A festival of GIFS from the 1950s: "Look! Up in the sky!"





Full marks if you can guess where this came from. I stumbled upon it during my late-night gif-image crawl. Looked like it might lend itself to some experimentation.




I don't have the capacity to do too much here. In fact, it's rare I that see any gifs that have real technical merit, and most are only one or two jerky seconds. (Ahem.) This is the slow-mo version, making me wonder if the animator somehow transferred actual writing to the screen. Well, they must have! I know almost nothing about animation and have to limit myself to 15 seconds max.




This backwards version is also interesting, as the title eats itself. It seems a bit jerky, and faster than you would think at "slow" speed, but it's probably only registering a few frames per second.




All right, this is the last one, at "normal" speed, but it plays very fast. Reminds me of someone sucking up a wet piece of spaghetti.




For some reason I love these. They remind me of the old "fill-ums" we saw in the basement of McKeough School in Chatham, Ontario when I was in Grade 3. These "fill-ums", though paralytically dull (hygiene, geography, National Film Board stuff) were a nice break from classes that were even more paralytically dull. 




I like this, too, a sort of reverse countdown. Countdowns remind me of the astronauts, of course. Gus Grissom and the like. There are a lot of phony countdown headers on YouTube, and you can tell they are phony because they go down to 1, which a real header NEVER does (don't know why). This is from some Paramount thing, and once I slow it down you will be able to see the details.




I think I see "SMPTE UNIVERSAL LEADER" before the countdown. The top one is the hardest, because the brain will more quickly recognize a real word and its meaning. I have no idea what the captions mean, some sort of arcane code. Is it a real header or "leader"? Is it really from Universal Studios, or does this mean it's a sort of generic leader? Now that I look at it again, yes, I think so, though SMPTE makes no sense at all.




There is a reason why it was effortless for me to memorize High Flight for school. I already knew it. Anyone who had ever stayed up past 11:00 p.m. knew it. For reasons which are now completely incomprehensible, many TV channels used it as a signoff before the long "boooooooooop" that ran all night and used to scare the hell out of me. Most things scared the hell out of me then.




This is, in part, an experiment to see how many 15-second gifs I can run in one post. I want to see if the whole thing crashes or what. The opening of The Adventures of Superman also scared the hell out of me. It was intense. Another incomprehensible thing is how George Reeves ever ended up getting the part - a paunchy, not-very-good-looking middle-aged man who couldn't act. Later, he either committed suicide or was murdered by the mob, like Bob Crane who was rumored to have made soft-core porn films in his basement. Bob Crane was better-looking, however.




There were a couple of other things about the intro that scared me. The way Clark Kent morphed into Superman was scary. In this case it's reversed and in slo-mo, so it appears that Superman is morphing into Clark Kent (who, as we all know, was partially inspired by Harold Lloyd. Though how anyone can be "partially inspired" is anyone's guess.)




I was maybe three or four, five tops, when this show would come on, and it was already in syndication. My brother had a Superman costume that he'd put on, and he would lie along the back of the sofa and go "Pssssshhhhhhhhhhhh!" I didn't know it was an American flag flapping behind Superman, in fact I didn't know what the hell it was. The announcer, who turned out to be Bill Kennedy, a B-picture actor and host of a long-running Detroit movie program, had a note of hysteria in his voice that just mounted: "Superman. SU-perman. YES, it's SUUU-per-mannnnn!" Last night when I played the clip over and over again,  looking at the menacing flag flapping around, I was reminded of Nazi Germany: "Is vee not zee Super Race? Super Duper Super Race!"




I think this housewife has had too much coffee. This was a demo of the new television technology: the remote control! It had a cord on it, which is carefully hidden beneath her wrist. I converted a faded color print into b & w for effect, though the announcer, who had the strongest Bronx accent I have ever heard, kept talking about "culluh teck-NAHHH-la-gee".




Very early Disney, in which Walt himself does Mickey's voice. This was so freaky, I had to see what it looked like slowed down.




Good night, all.




(Special Bonus gif. You thought there wouldn't be a Special Bonus Gif? There are literally thousands of snippets on YouTube of completely unknown provenance. I mean: where do people GET all this stuff, old ads, old TV shows and cartoons, and even TV station signoffs from 70 years ago? This one is for WABD, New York's Window on the W(blkphtdbt).  WABD was on the Dumont Television Network, which for some reason reminds me of Milton Berle, whom I never liked. I was two months old at the time. Dumont bit the dust a long time ago, and back in the 1940s its logo was mighty strange, quavering and flashing, with Lady Liberty's torch cut off at the top. No one called it TV then, and it was common to refer to viewing as "looking at television".)





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Thursday, August 7, 2014

Hey, meet the Swinger





Hey, meet the swinger
A '60s kind of girl
Walks like a panther
Smiles like a princess
On the blazing white beach
Her body etched in silver nitrate
Her camera dangling like heavy jewels
shoved in the face of the viewers
This new thing was cool




BAM. And with her mouth open,
Beach girl, girl of the raging sands, the girl we can't reach
Snaps the shot, the snapshot 
with her Love Story hair wisping in ocean breeze
her counterculture eyebrows melting hearts
she snaps   to show us how easy
how almost alive
though you know she's snapping at nothing at all




And now comes the Archieparty
The beach blanket bingo we've all been waiting for
those wholesome young people
splashing each other and doing the boogaloo
but we know what's under those blinding smiles that delirious laughter
There's a reason they call it The Swinger




In nervous clicks
the straight-browed girl is squeezing the button again and again
though taking a picture of air
Her day has not come 
but it will
then as swiftly depart
she's a '60s girl bare feet and long hair and straight black brow
not beautiful but has the Look 
her moment on the beach




Again and again she tosses her tresses
in that stoned and blurry way
and for the first time we see
her dangling earrings gypsylike
her careless carelessness
her throwaway look so carefully composed




and Chaplinlike, our lovers proceed into the ocean
a march a brisk step and when seen over and over, how it becomes so clear
they have nothing to do with each other




and how would they ever know it would fade so quickly
yet last forever
broken into bits on a woman's computer
played with like a toy
a sliver of memory seen over and over
"hey, I want to get one of those"
even though "nineteen dollars
and ninety-five" was way beyond my reach
what I wanted was those eyebrows
those thighs
the windswept hair, the earrings, the boy friend
and all that comes between ourselves and time.