This is one of my long-time favorite sites, that I really enjoy to visit
from time to time: a site full of music videos, old music videos.
This site, is dedicated to the origins of music videos presented in a kind of jukebox. The Scopitone Machine was invented in the early 1960ies in France using surplus World War II airplane parts. There
was some forerunner of those ``color sound film viewers'' invented in Italy shortly before that.
You can still buy a scopitones machine at ebay for ca. $1,200.00 ...
Or download some of the clips from scopitones.com (is this legal?) and play them back using your laptop and a beamer
on your next 60ies party.
The funny thing about this video jukebox is that the players in those movies had to act in a rather restrained way because of the very narrow visual boundary of the video format. They are obviously not supported by nowadays professional choreographers ... even though those are also funny from a certain perspective.
In the end, the machine was arranged in a corner of a bar with a little display on the top, not comparable with today's MTV productions (multiple cuts per seconds, fast moving cameras). After all, this is exactly the appeal of those old clips fanning your addiction to trash. I don't want to say that those clips are really trash. They are, but in a charming way. There's good trash and bad trash. Bad trash is one that you
can't stand because it is so trashy. Good trash is cult. Maybe today's MTV trash will be cult in 40 years from now on. I don't know.
Well, go ahead and give it a try and see for how long you can stand it.
