Nostalgic Wax

This afternoon I was folding laundry and listening to the ‘70s channel of the Dish Network’s satellite music service. The Carpenters song, “We’ve Only Just Begun” came on and I looked at the screen and noticed the name of the CD from which the song played was titled something like, “Greatest Hits, 1969-1981.” Now, I don’t know if I’m a child of the ‘70s or the ‘80s. I don’t really know exactly what that term means. I was a child during the ‘60s and ‘70s. I became a teenager in the ‘70s, and finished high school and reached legal adulthood in the ‘80s. So what the heck am I?

But back to the topic at hand. I thought back to 1981. I turned seventeen that year. I started my senior year in high school. I was a lanky, gawky, geeky, nerdy kid who thought he was the funniest in his class. I thought today about thinking back 25 years back then. Back then, 25 years ago was 1956. I remember thinking that the ‘50s seemed like such a remote, primitive time compared to all the technology we possessed in the heady days of 1981. I thought about all the things we had at the time that hadn’t even been imagined in 1956. Man hadn’t been to the moon. Hell, man hadn’t even been to space! No one had even THOUGHT of going to the moon. Okay, I guess a lot of people had thought about it, but few had ever thought it could or would be done, and certainly not within the next fifteen years.

Personal stereos. The Walkman. Twenty-five years earlier, the transistor radio was still a marvel. And now we had a personal stereo, and it was capable of playing music of our own choosing, on a cassette tape! In two separate high-fidelity channels!! Who in 1956 would have ever thought they could do that? Color TV? Perhaps it was available, but who had it? Who could afford it? Cable TV? It existed, perhaps, but strictly for people in areas where TV signals were blocked by big geography, like mountains. The personal computer. We were learning BASIC language on what came to be not-so-affectionately referred to as “Trash-80s.” (the Tandy-Radio Shack TRS-80.) And I could not, for the life of me, figure out why I had to know this stuff. As it turned out, I never really learned it! I could list thousands of innovations that were in use in 1981 that hadn’t even been dreamed of in 1956 – that is, if I knew all of them – but I’m babbling again.

My point…finally. Twenty-five years of history is not as remote when you’ve lived it as when you only read about it or see it in movies or TV. When I saw “1981” on my TV screen this afternoon, I did sort of a nanosecond flashback that covered the time-span of 24 years and change. I tried to think of the ‘80s as remote and primitive as the ‘50s, but my brain couldn’t do it. I lived there. It didn’t seem remote and primitive at the time, and it doesn’t seem that way now. CRAP! Most of the time it seems like just a few days ago! I tried to picture the thoughts of a 17-year-old today thinking back to what it must have been like to be alive way back in the early ‘80s when his mom and dad were teenagers and, well, I still couldn’t do it.

But I do get it when I see a movie contemporary of the time, or a photo what shows some “new” technology, or the rare home movie (super8, thankyouverymuch!), or the even rarer home video, that can serve as time capsules. That’s when the new, streamlined items of “convenience” just appear absurdly large and cumbersome today.

Picture your average kid doing the average thing today while doing nothing: playing with his/her Game Boy. I don’t remember the year, but I do remember the game: Mattel Electronic Football, perhaps the great-granddaddy to the Game Boy. It was a handheld game, slightly larger than today’s less sleek Palm-style PDAs. It had maybe six buttons on it, four of which were used to maneuver a solitary little LED blip between various arrays of other little LED blips. If you tried to get your blip to occupy the same diode that a “defender” blip occupied, or the “defenders” caught up to your blip, you were tackled. The sound at the tackle, which I can only guess is an electronic rendition of a referee’s whistle, is forever preserved for posterity near the end of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song,” from their “Breakfast In America” album, which came out in 1979, thus dating the game actually before the ‘80s. This game was outclassed a year or two after its debut by Coleco’s version of electronic football. This game allowed a player to “throw” a pass! My best friend’s younger brother had this game, and it made me envious. And even I was shocked at how quickly the fervor for these games spiked (these toys were forever sold out, especially during the holiday shopping season) and then waned. I begged for this toy for a whole year, got it at Christmas, probably 1980, and by March of ‘81 I never played with it again.

I babbled again. These toys were just simply controlling little red blips on a diode array. Twenty-five years later, on a toy essentially the same size, we have highly detailed, highly sophisticated animations that we can control with buttons and maneuver our characters through incredibly intricate mazes and imaginary worlds, and entertain ourselves for hours and hours.

But I cannot allow myself to think of Mattel Electronic Football, or the AM/FM stereo/cassette player Walkman, or the 64Kb computer as 25+ year-old relics, for to admit that they are relics, so must I admit am I.

And I just can’t do that.


dassall