Sunday, April 10, 2005

If you do not know what a Scopitone is, you should. From the Scopitone blog, a clip of an article from a 1964 issue of Time Magazine:

"In some 500 bars, restaurants and servicemen's clubs throughout the U.S., the center of attention these days is a monstrous new machine called Scopitone. It is a cross between a jukebox and TV. For $.25 a throw, Scopitone projects any one of 36 musical movies on a 26-in. screen, flooding the premises with delirious color and hi-fi scooby-ooby-doo for three whole minutes. It makes a sobering combination."

The films themselves are also called Scopitones. They're low-budget and creative and strange. There are a bunch of websites about them, many in French (they started in France - go figure) some of which have the actual films online. One of these is Bedazzled, which is a sister site to the scopitone blog, and has lots of other amazing bits of film and music ephemera (just click back to the main site).

Here's an excellent representative, as is this one.

P.S. Even though this one may not be a Scopitone, it is glorious: Oh, yes.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

oh my God! My Mom had that leopard print bathing suit (Trapped in the Web of Love! - wow!) I used to try it on as a kid, but I was too little - but my sister could fit into it. I was so jealous!

coolness. thanks - did not know about those.

Penny

Anonymous said...

They weren't all so self-parodying. If you excuse the mandatory cheesecake shots, this one is a reasonably modern MTV-style music video about 20 years before they existed. Plus, it's a great pop song.