A copy of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s movie titled Vampyr, stored on laser-disk format.
Category: Ephemera
Miscellaneous artifacts that the lab owns.
When you look at it head on, it says “POW!”. When you look at it from the sides, it says “WHAM!”. Simple but effective. Not sure where this piece originated from; our faculty sponsor, Professor Balsamo, just brought it in one day as an interesting art piece.
Images like these are an example of Lenticular printing, which involves the interlacing of two or more images where each image has its light refracted in a different direction, resulting in the illusion of the image “changing” as you view it from different angles. I was not able to quickly find any particularly interesting articles, but the Wikipedia page for Lenticular printing is still a pretty good read if you are interested in how it works. This type of printing is also responsible for the “3D” props you sometimes see at illusionist exhibitions or for movie advertisements at the theatre, where they’ve interlaced many images to achieve the effect of the image “moving” as you view it from different angles. Our POW! WHAM! sign has only two different images interlaced, but there is a lot you can do with this kind of technique. 😊
Did you know that this film is free to borrow and watch on the Internet Archive? Almost 70 years old this year, this movie still holds up as an excellent watch. It is a lot more somber than you would expect. Most people nowadays associate Godzilla with tacky merchandise and an epic scale of destruction, but originally Godzilla was posed as a very frightening consequence of nuclear war. If you have only seen Godzilla, King of Monsters!, I would still recommend giving the original version a watch-through; the ending has a noticeably different tone.
There is quite a lot of interesting retro technology featured in the film. Old telephones, antenna TVs, and automobiles, it is a fascinating movie for media archeology purposes. This movie epitomizes our lab’s motto “We dig culture.”
Of course, the copy we have in the lab is not the original Golden Record, which was made in 1977 and is currently on the Voyager traveling through interstellar space. This record was designed to attempt to educate any recipients that could discover the voyager about earth, the surrounding solar system, the human species, and other similar information. It contains images and audio (transcribed onto the disk) of nature, music, speech, and a message from Jimmy Carter, the U.S. president at the time. If you want to learn more, I recommend this page from NASA on the contents of the record, as well as this page from NASA explaining the images on front of the disk.
During the late 90s, these creatures were everywhere. Did you know they were, in part, influenced by the Tamagotchi? According to this article (which is a fascinating read), one of the big inspirations for the Furby was because the main architect of the toy, David Hampton, was disappointed that you “couldn’t pet” a Tamagotchi. Another part of what made Furbies such a hit was the innovative approach taken during their development; in order to stand out among many of the electronic toys of the time, the creators of the Furby decided to make it seem as if it had a life of its own, which, as Peters explains in the linked Bustle article, is also why they can also be seen as creepy. They are supposed to learn, adapt, and talk to each other.
We are big fans of the Furby here at the lab; we think they are ugly in an endearing way, which is why we have at least three of them. We have positioned them to guard our Laserdisc collection. They don’t quite work, so we don’t know what their personal opinions on our multitude of different movies and vinyl records are, but perhaps, in the future… 😉