#Newsletter time!
This week in #BetterWorldsTheory, we dip into The Beatles on film, VCR case law, and contemporary crises in the business of art.
Is it weird that The Yellow Submarine represents both an aspirational freedom for artistic expression *and* a tricky history for corporate involvement in the creation of beloved art?
Nah. Not weird. 🙃
Just the price of doing business in our creative fields.
But maybe it's a price we're not as willing to pay anymore?
https://mlclark.substack.com/p/making-all-our-nowhere-plans-for
@MLClark A couple years ago, I invested in old VCRs I found on eBay, to use them for digitizing what I wanted to keep. Some went back to my first VCR in 1980! (With the long-useless time-codes on the label.)
The first TV show I recorded was the Star Wars Holiday Special. 🤮
😂 You got your mistakes out of the way early, I see!
I found it quite striking to rewatch those original broadcasts. There was a Gulf War tickertape that ran at the bottom of my CityTV episodes one year, so you definitely got a sense of the political context in which these visions of a better future were airing.
Kind of painful to revisit them years later for that reason, though; you could *feel* how far we were from our goal at the time, while still striving to dream better.
@MLClark A lot of those old tapes, I moved up to YouTube, including the first Gulf War.
You mention context. I left in the commercials; a few people complain that I should have edited out the commercials, but most people love them because they reflect the era. I think they're important for context.
Agreed. The commercials show a foreign country known as the past.
Some of my favourite commercials from that era were Juan Valdez coffee spots. :) Apparently I was being indoctrinated early on for life in my current digs! 😅
@MLClark Are the good people of Colombia aware of the Juan Valdez stereotype?
The Juan Valdez coffee chain is quite popular here in shopping malls, and equivalent to... not quite a Starbucks, more like a Timothy's in Canada or Peet's in the US. The other prominent but consciously low-cost coffee chain is Tostao, which is like a classier Tim Horton's.
But yes! Folks are aware! :) Juan Valdez is *classic* paisa in manner and attire, and folks are quite fond of the image. (Much better than some Colombian stereotypes that came later!)
@MLClark Okay, thank you for the insight.
@MLClark You reminded me of an old #StarTrek VHS of "The Cage" I bought in the 1980s. It had an introduction by Gene Roddenberry; if memory serves, he described Trek as "a crucible for examining the human condition."
My copy is long ago lost, but I found it used on eBay so I just ordered it.
Notable about this version is that some parts are color, some are B&W. The color parts were from "The Menagerie." The original color prints weren't found until later.
@WordsmithFL
Argh! Crushing defeat! 😂