On a 50-year delay ...
On a 50-year delay ...
Watched it the first time.
I was somewhat older. I'd been married just about two years earlier and was living in California at the time. Later that year my wife and I drove back East for Christmas and took the southern route. What was truly memorable was the strip across Mississippi, Alabama and Florida when for literally hundreds of miles the road was lined by concrete slabs that showed where just a few months earlier a home had stood before Camille. It was a rough period, the year had started with the Santa Barbara oil spill followed by torrential spring rains and mud slides and then a major wild fire that threatened the town we lived in.
But Christmas was wonderful and we got back to California with time to spare so we would get to experience the 1971 San Fernando earthquake.
Last edited by jar; July 16th, 2019 at 11:03 AM. Reason: appalin spallin
What I found interesting this time round, aside from the main event, was the incidental details: contemporary commercials (Ali McGraw advertising a paper bikini for some reason), optimistic speculation about the future of space exploration, occasional flubs in Cronkite's commentary — and movie references:
e.g., here Cronkite calls the lighting of an angled shot of the crew emerging from the express elevator 'Orson Wellesian' (auto-captioning couldn’t cope)
OrsonWellesian.png
or here, less than 10 minutes before launch, Cronkite tries to get Arthur C. Clarke to explain the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Monolith.png
Paper dresses and bikinis. I had forgotten all about them but yes, they were absolutely the rage at the time; cheap, bright, comfortable my wife said and no laundry. Wear them a few times and throw them away. I had a paper shirt but it only lasted a single wearing before I succeeded in tearing a big gap in the back.
Sounds like today's 'fast fashion'.
That paper bikini ad https://youtu.be/zYnF31el-ik?t=13496
I may never get tired of watching rockets launched into space. Hopefully I'll eventually see one in person.
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