Perhaps children's TV is more policed now or kids viewing habits more understood and surveyed, but it seems that gone are the days when we were plonked in front of the goggle-box and subjected to horrifying material.
You know the culprits. Jigsaw had Nosey Bonk, who looks now like a surrealist heist movie character - or maybe there's something of the lone anarchist bomber about him. Back then he was just plain scary.
Little children with impressionable minds watched the BBC's Words & Pictures in the 70s to learn their ABCs usually on tellys at school. This featured "Wordy", a disembodied head that floated that still haunts me today.
Currently showing at the
Bradford 1 Gallery is the terrific Space Age exhibition. It charts our love of space exploration expressed in children's toys and bric-a-brak from the 1950s Japanese robots to more recent electronic games like an original (playable) Space Invaders machine that occupies the entrance to the exibition.
Open untill 1 November 2009
There's lead in that there paint
Recently opened in Salford, Manchester is an education/leisure exhibition called Street Play. Organised by Play England, it is aimed at recreating a street scene from what looks to be the 60/70s where children were free to play out, enjoying the sunshine and scraping knees to their heart's content.
The exhibition which includes washing lines complete with real wooden clothes peggs, aims to create a throw-back to a time when British kids could play out unsupervised in the streets.
There's not a lot to lament about Macs. It even looks as though the matte screen option is back on the 15" MacBook Pros (
Macrumours.com). Apart from maybe the switch away from the beautiful Apple Garamond font used in old Apple ads.
The Old Magazine adverts seemed to be more wordy too, with the text flowing around the products. Apple no longer use the font in their ads which tend to be more simplistic in design.
Apple Mac ad from 1984, complete with the now ubiquitous reflections.
The latest iMacs - with the all new Myriad typeface.
Just came across this three-piece from New York. They conjure a mixture of late 80s/early 90s shoegazing from the Creation Records label; Ride, Sweredriver and maybe Spaceman 3 thrown in too.
They have an new LP due in early October.
Taken from the August edition of OMNI magazine, the ad for CompuServe, a kind of information highway before the superhighway we are now accustomed to, is pretty impressive. It reminds me of the way computer games were advertised or indeed the box art for them which usually featured dramatic illustrations on the cover; glimpses of a possible future that we could enjoy today.
Advertising the internet today (or at least the internet providers) seems to concentrate on numbers - Mbit rates, GB download limits rather than going for the emotional response to using their product.
That's the difficulty I suppose in selling such a nebulous service as the internet as each of our experiences will differ from then next.
In anticipation of the new series of V, I have started watching the original mini series - the first time since it was originally broadcast in 1983. The thing that stands out in the re-watch is the overt analogy to the persecution of Jews in Nazi German.
Indeed the Jewish character Abraham, a survivor of the atrocities, watches the visitors arrive with the skepticism that history has tought him while others around him celebrate their arrival and some even sign up to join the "Friends of the Visitors", a sort of Nazi Youth movement.
The lizard-face reveal was just as good as watching it for the first time - it's a hugely influential scene.
The mini series was followed by V (The Final Battle) which told the story of the rise of the resistance movement and the ultimate overthrow of the Visitors.
One other thing. I always thought that V stood for Visitors, but watching the scene when Abraham catches young kids spaying graffiti on the alien recruitment posters, it clearly stands for Victory.
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