Sunday, November 21

Ephemeral Films

Ephemeral means "lasting for a very short time." Or at least that's what it's supposed to be.

Years ago, when the technology of multimedia was in its infancy, I'd picked up a CD-ROM chock-full of short films of the instructional variety. Quite literally old-school, they were films shown in schools in the 1940's and 1950's. Obviously before my time, but I seemed to recall seeing some of them even in the 1960's and 1970's. Indeed they were classic, and although quite dated for the current generation, some of the subject matter is relative even today.

OK, so maybe not.

I misplaced that CD long ago, but re-discovered them recently in the On-Demand portion of the cable provider we have here locally. "Something Weird" if you'd like to take a look.

But they only have but a few selections, and you never really know what you're going to get month-to-month.

So rather than waiting for "Shy Guy" with Dick York to come up again, you can see it and more, really on-demand, via the internet.

Available at The Internet Archive - www.archive.org - is the entire "Prelinger Archive", the same outfit that had generated that CD-ROM of long ago.

Take, for example, TV commercials from the 1960's.

Take a look at that, and spend some counter-productive time checking out the other items.

But, being in the archive, it's no longer ephemera.

No comments:

Related Posts with Thumbnails
Google Analytics Alternative