The quality is very poor, something like you'd get from a multi-generational VHS copy -- it doesn't appear rotted as far as I can tell. It opens with a series of what appear to be French animated short cartoons, just a minute or two each. After several of these play in succession, there's a commercial for an old magazine called "Technology Illustrated". Following that comes a news story about the launch of a new satellite. The news presenter is cut off as the recording switches to a video of the launch as recorded from the ground as the shuttle ignites engines and takes off into the sky.
Following this is a slide show, meant to be stepped through using the remote. There are thousands of images here, all of them roughly grouped into different categories: photographs of nature, works of art, pictures of wild animals, what look like candid shots from a college campus (one with references to the Dartmouth College Glee Club), bits of technology, faces of a whole slew of people I don't recognize (faculty/staff at MIT?), and it just keeps going from there into what look like someone's own personal vacation pictures, still frames captured from the video from an old handheld movie camera, and even a few, uh, 'candid' shots of somebody's wife/girlfriend that she'd probably prefer remained out of the public's eye, if you catch my drift.
Side B is even stranger: an array of video clips, each with a short title card, identifying where the material came from and what it's intended usage is. The first is a clip from the TV show "All In the Family", from the episode, "Archie and the Computer." The second is a video from England showing how to assemble the fuel pump for a Jaguar. From there it just gets stranger: a juggling demonstration which starts off using balls but progresses to using laserdiscs(!), a sales promotional video from the Avon corporation entitled "Avon Goes Disco At MIT" presented by the Avon Success Network, a video from AT&T, and more. |