Boing Boing » 1960s

The New People: 1969 TV drama à la Lost and Lord of the Flies

David Pescovitz — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:00:59 +0000

The New People was a 1969 TV series about a group of college students whose plane crashed on a small island. The accompanying adults perished, leaving only the young people. Fortuitously, the deserted island had been the planned location for a nuclear test, so the government had left buildings and supplies behind. For the stranded students, this is the start of "Year One" and an opportunity to create a new kind of society. Rod Serling wrote the pilot for the show that was a cross between Lord of the Flies, Lost, and a JG Ballard story dosed with 150ug of 1960s counterculture.

Vintage AT&T ad, 1967: "Your Brain and Our Phone System Are a Lot Alike"

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 22:17:09 +0000

Your Brain is Like a Telephone (1967), AT&T. Lovingly scanned, posted and shared to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by MewDeep.

Pill-popping, jazz-loving Japanese youth in revolt, 1964 (photo)

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:28:27 +0000

LIFE.com has a beautiful gallery of Michael Rougier photographs from Japan in 1964: runaways, rock and rollers, biker gangs, "pill kids" and other Japanese teens. LIFE Magazine published some of these in September, 1964, but some have never before been published.

Above, the original caption from 1964: "Kako, languid from sleeping pills she takes, is lost in a world of her own in a jazz shop in Tokyo."

Psychedelic ad for Peace Corps, 1968 (video)

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 04 May 2012 23:43:48 +0000

Image Link. Boing Boing reader MewDeep, who has an awesome Flickr stream of '60s-'70s ad scans, points to this YouTube clip of a notable television commercial from 1968: it's a promo for the Peace Corps, set to "Age of Aquarius." As MewDeep excerpts here, the ad is mentioned in The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, by Thomas Frank.

"My Favorite Museum Exhibit": Recreating an exhibit that no longer exists

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:53:28 +0000

"My Favorite Museum Exhibit" is a series of posts aimed at giving BoingBoing readers a chance to show off their favorite exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon. I'll be featuring posts in this series all week. Want to see them all? Check out the archive post. I'll update the full list there every morning.

Not every museum exhibit will survive untouched from your childhood to your grandchildrens'. Over time, historic and scientific accuracy, changing mores and aesthetics, and improvements in design will force some exhibits off the main stage and into the dusty storage room of memory.

But you can still love them from afar.

On this, the last day of "My Favorite Museum Exhibit" week, I'd like to include one man's tribute to a long-dismantled museum exhibit. Tom Luthman writes:

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I'd go to the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio (COSI). COSI opened in 1964, in the old Franklin County Memorial Hall, built in 1906. It closed in 1999, or rather, it moved to a new location, and most of the old exhibits didn't make the move.

One of the exhibits was THE TRIUMPH OF MAN, a leftover exhibit from the 1964 World's Fair in New York City, built by the Travelers Insurance Companies. You'd walk down a darkened corridor, and off in alcoves were 14 paper-mache scenes depicting the history of humanity. All accompanied by a recorded narration from the World's Fair. It was also sold in the gift shop as a 33-1/3 record, which we had.

Now, Luthman has put that recording to good use, incorporating it into a Flash-based recreation of THE TRIUMPH OF MAN* that will live online, long after the physical exhibit has decomposed in a landfill somewhere.

This is a really neat project and worth checking out, even if you don't have the emotional connection to THE TRIUMPH OF MAN that Luthman does. Just make sure you're someplace where you can crank up the sound and enjoy that sweet, sweet mid-20th-century triumphalism in stereo.

A virtual recreation of The TRIUMPH OF MAN

*Of course it's in all caps every time. It's THE TRIUMPH OF MAN, for god's sake.