The Best Yet....1950's

[Bolero]

http ://safeshare.tv/w/FEDEwZH Z Xu

 

[vitanola]

How is an advertisement for walk in bath tubs related to the Era, let alone the "best yet"of anything?

 

[HanauMan]

Nice video for sure, but it also could have been for my generation, the kids growing up in the 1970s.

 

[BlueTrain]

The fifties sure went by fast, didn't they?

 

[vitanola]

Ah! I see!

On an Android device the video was entirely overshadowed by advertising.

 

[Edward]

Interesting selection of images, particularly the segretationists at the start. Would be interesting to know more about why / how these were all selected.

 

[MisterCairo]

Interesting selection of images, particularly the segretationists at the start. Would be interesting to know more about why / how these were all selected.

And why they were included as part of the "fabulous" fifties! How about "parts of the fifties that stank"?

 

[vitanola]

And why they were included as part of the "fabulous" fifties! How about "parts of the fifties that stank"?

Well, this sort of nostalgia often has certain "overtones", particularly amongst some country music fans. Of course these deplorable sentiments are not relegated to my friends and neighbors here in the hinterlands, as witness the folks who, forty years ago, un-ironically applauded the opening theme of "All In the Family".

In all fairness one must note that both sides of that issue were pictured in the video, and one could charitably assume that the point of the inclusion of the images was the progress which we made in the 'Fifties, which can seem all the more attractive when compared to the strife which followed. I think it best that, absent overt displays of malignant intent, we always assume the best about any given post. There is a lot to be nostalgic about, I suppose, though my personal nostalgia is more akin to those who were well on their way to dotage in 1955.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Imagining a similar video for one who came of age in the 1930s...

Hooverville
Rudy Vallee
The dead body of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr.
The BEF
Amos 'n' Andy -- the originals
FDR, with cigarette holder bravely tilted
Apple sellers on the corner
The Blue Eagle rampant
Eddie Cantor
Mickey Mouse
Huey Long
Father Coughlin
Dick Tracy
The Scottsboro Boys
Bruno Richard Hauptmann
Bing Crosby
Clark Gable
Babe Ruth, fat and old, in a Boston Braves uniform
The "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" movement
An Okie car heading west
Jean Harlow
Little Orphan Annie
A 1934 Ford V-8
The Toledo Auto-Lite Strike
John Dillinger
Jack Benny
Kate Smith
Shirley Temple
Joe DiMaggio
The Women's Emergency Batallion defending the Flint Sit-Down Strikers.
Richard Frankensteen and Walter Reuther being beaten bloody by Ford goons.
A WPA sign
Benny Goodman
Mayor LaGuardia
"Live Alone And Like It"
The Ohio River Flood
CCC workers with their shirts off
"World's Highest Standard Of Living"
Joe Louis
Alice Faye
Tommy Dorsey
The Memorial Day Massacre
Earl Browder
H. V. Kaltenborn
Fred Allen
The Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce burning "The Grapes Of Wrath"
Grover Whalen
The Trylon and Perisphere

...All to a musical setting of Al Jolson's 1939 broadcast version of "Brother Can You Spare A Dime."

 

[BlueTrain]

Sometimes I define nostalgia as a selective memory of things you never experienced at all the first time around. There are plenty of things that you really did experience that you miss to make up for it.

One thing here is that few people actually experience everything. You don't hear every kind of music, see every movie or television show, keep up with the latest celebrities, politics, fashions, fads, floods, wars, rumors of wars, books, social issues and so on. Maybe you can if you don't have to get up in the morning and go to work.

In my case, for example, we could only get one TV station when I was little--after we finally got a TV. So I never saw anything on CBS. I don't remember when I first learned about the Korean War, which was going on when I started grade school. Nobody at home every talking about music or other forms of entertainment, but my father listened to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday night at work. I sometimes went with him. And we had neighbors who were entertainers and had a television show. We got Life and Look magazines, which were neither literary (that was the Saturday Evening Post) or educational (that was National Geographic). Every boy knows how educational the National Geographic was but the photos in Look, especially, were of better pin-up quality.

 

[BlueTrain]

After looking over Miss Lizzie's list of the 1930s again, I think a similar list could be put together for just about any decade. The only thing that would change would be the names. It's like the old newsreels that you used to see in movie theaters. The stories are almost the same from decade to decade, the only differences being in the names. That and the fact that there won't be anything now about hats. But you can count on the Mississippi flooding again sooner or later. Of course, some of the things on the list really span the decades and I associate some of them with the 1950s.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And a 1920s montage --

A cartoon of John Barleycorn being banished by a stern-visaged woman dressed in black.
Women voting.
The S. S. Buford sailing eastward.
Emile Coue
Roscoe Arbuckle, in handcuffs
Babe Ruth crashing a home run and piddling around the bases on his little legs.
Warren Gamaliel Harding
Douglas Fairbanks
Mary Pickford
Andy Gump
Women playing mah-jongg
The front cover of "Babbitt"
A teenage boy sitting before an inscrutable device, while wearing headphones
Model T's rolling off the line
Charlie Chaplin
Mae Murray
Lillian Gish
Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock
Paul Whiteman
Walter Johnson, pitching in the rain
Red Grange tearing across the field
Calvin Coolidge wearing an Indian chief's headdress
Graham McNamee spieling into a microphone
Rudolph Valentino
The Chicago Tribune's "Pink Powder Puff" headline
The 100 Percent American Ku Klux Klan marching thru a small city in full regalia
Prohibition agents smashing kegs.
Al Capone
Dancers dancing the Charleston
The Ipana Troubadours
The Clicquot Club Eskimos
Al Smith wearing a brown derby
Jimmie Walker greeting a dignitary
Charles A. Lindbergh taking off
"Woof Woof! Don't Be a Goof!"
Ruth Snyder in the electric chair
Shipwreck Kelly atop a flagpole
Al Jolson in blackface down on one knee
Felix the Cat
Herbert Hoover
Times Square alight with advertising
A woman in a cloche hat and a dress just at knee length
"Painting The Clouds With Sunshine."
A man holding a pistol to his head, with a broker's letter on the table.

All to the tune of Roger Wolfe Kahn's recording of "Crazy Rhythm."

 

[MisterCairo]

Not sure if anyone outside Canada can view this, but the CBC show Baroness von Sketch Show, season two episode two, has a great take on our view of "vintage" imagery.

This is a link to the whole episode, but go in to 2:50 or so:

http://watch.cbc.ca/baroness-von-sketch-show/season-2/episode-2/38e815a-00c8e0396f1

 

[MisterCairo]

The whole nostalgic, rose-coloured glasses thing reminds me of my parents' recollections of the fifties.

My dad spent the decade in Canada, and he recalled it as it was, life. He worked, raised two boys on his own, had good times and bad. His fond memories were based on things of any age - camping, backyard barbecues, travelling with my brothers, watching the Leafs. He knew people in poverty and regarded "life" on tv shows as what it was - fake for entertainment.

He never regarded it as any kind of golden age, it just was.

My mum spent the first eight years of the fifties in Scotland. While the UK was still under rationing part of that time, to her it was, again, a time. She worked, helped out at home, dated. Life was not rosy, they were what would be called "working class" economically (they were a Tory family in all other ways however, and this was Paisley Scotland!). They emigrated to Canada in '57, and it was, life. They worked, cooked meals, and got on.

Her only vivid memories were on arriving in Canada, and finding that everyone had a car (they never owned on back home) and they were in fact HUGE.

Also, ordering "pie and chips" in Toronto does not get you what you think you had ordered, had you been in Glasgow, Manchester or London...

 

[BlueTrain]

I never knew anyone when I was growing up who ever expressed any sentimentality about the past in any way. In fact, one expression I heard more than once was "coming up the hard way." Incredibly enough, I've even heard it applied to Buck Owens.

 

[Edward]

And a 1920s montage --

A cartoon of John Barleycorn being banished by a stern-visaged woman dressed in black.
Women voting.
The S. S. Buford sailing eastward.
Emile Coue
Roscoe Arbuckle, in handcuffs
Babe Ruth crashing a home run and piddling around the bases on his little legs.
Warren Gamaliel Harding
Douglas Fairbanks
Mary Pickford
Andy Gump
Women playing mah-jongg
The front cover of "Babbitt"
A teenage boy sitting before an inscrutable device, while wearing headphones
Model T's rolling off the line
Charlie Chaplin
Mae Murray
Lillian Gish
Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock
Paul Whiteman
Walter Johnson, pitching in the rain
Red Grange tearing across the field
Calvin Coolidge wearing an Indian chief's headdress
Graham McNamee spieling into a microphone
Rudolph Valentino
The Chicago Tribune's "Pink Powder Puff" headline
The 100 Percent American Ku Klux Klan marching thru a small city in full regalia
Prohibition agents smashing kegs.
Al Capone
Dancers dancing the Charleston
The Ipana Troubadours
The Clicquot Club Eskimos
Al Smith wearing a brown derby
Jimmie Walker greeting a dignitary
Charles A. Lindbergh taking off
"Woof Woof! Don't Be a Goof!"
Ruth Snyder in the electric chair
Shipwreck Kelly atop a flagpole
Al Jolson in blackface down on one knee
Felix the Cat
Herbert Hoover
Times Square alight with advertising
A woman in a cloche hat and a dress just at knee length
"Painting The Clouds With Sunshine."
A man holding a pistol to his head, with a broker's letter on the table.

All to the tune of Roger Wolfe Kahn's recording of "Crazy Rhythm."

Harold Lloyd hanging off that clock is an image indelibly burned on my mind from childhood. I remember being about six years old and watching BBC2 from 6pm in the evening (because who wanted to watch the news!! especially a kid in Northern Ireland with the troubles still raging). I saw a lot of Laurel and Hardy, King Kong, old Godzilla Movies, the original Mighty Joe Young..... but the one I really remember the most was watching Harold Lloyd. It was a series where they'd added a fast-talking commentary over the top of the original films (it wasn't until some years later I discovered that they were originally silents). I loved them, both the visual humour and the wordplay in the commentary. The clock-climbing scene is, of course, one of the very most memorable.

Did Amercian women play Majong in the thirties? I first discovered the game on, I think, Windows 2000.... or XP, maybe.... When I went to China for the first time in 2006, I saw my first Mahjong set; after that, I discovered the history of the bracelets.

He never regarded it as any kind of golden age, it just was.

It's interesting, having been a 'fan' of 'the past' for so long to reach an age where a time I remember is culturally fetishized by kids who didn't live through it. I feel entirely this sense of "it just was" about the eighties, though this is not shared by all my peers.

 

[BlueTrain]

Somehow, it almost feels like I skipped over a few decades, going straight from the 1960s to the present. But only when I'm on this forum. No doubt there are other forums dedicated to the 1970s or 1980s.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Harold Lloyd hanging off that clock is an image indelibly burned on my mind from childhood. I remember being about six years old and watching BBC2 from 6pm in the evening (because who wanted to watch the news!! especially a kid in Northern Ireland with the troubles still raging). I saw a lot of Laurel and Hardy, King Kong, old Godzilla Movies, the original Mighty Joe Young..... but the one I really remember the most was watching Harold Lloyd. It was a series where they'd added a fast-talking commentary over the top of the original films (it wasn't until some years later I discovered that they were originally silents). I loved them, both the visual humour and the wordplay in the commentary. The clock-climbing scene is, of course, one of the very most memorable.

That particular series of Lloyd releases was put together by Time-Life Films in the early 1970s, just after Lloyd himself passed away. Lloyd had always resisted releasing his pictures to television because he feared they'd get the "Fractured Flickers" treatment, but as a result of that his films had become very hard to see -- and he himself largely dropped out of the public consciousness. His heirs, wanting to reverse that trend, put together the Time-Life deal, with an eye toward marketing it toward kids, hence the rickety-tickety music scores and the voice-over commentary. The series also had a ra-ta-ta-ta-ta theme song composed by trumpeter Neil Hefti in the same campy sensibility as his "Batman" theme. All this was done just as the twenties-thirties nostalgia craze was peaking, and the series was widely shown in the US on PBS stations, and ran for a very long time on BBC2. For a long while, these edits were the only editions of the Lloyd films to be widely available.

Did Amercian women play Majong in the thirties? I first discovered the game on, I think, Windows 2000.... or XP, maybe.... When I went to China for the first time in 2006, I saw my first Mahjong set; after that, I discovered the history of the bracelets.

The mah-jongg fad had cooled by the thirties -- contract bridge was the big craze of the early thirties, supplanted in 1935-36 by Monopoly. But no doubt there plenty of lingering mah-jongg enthusiasts holding on from that game's American heyday in 1920-1923. Its following was overwhelmingly middle-class female -- during the fad, it was very much the thing for "Wednesday womens' clubs" to do, and Chinese-themed clothing and decorations were often part of the whole experience.

 

[vitanola]

That particular series of Lloyd releases was put together by Time-Life Films in the early 1970s, just after Lloyd himself passed away. Lloyd had always resisted releasing his pictures to television because he feared they'd get the "Fractured Flickers" treatment, but as a result of that his films had become very hard to see -- and he himself largely dropped out of the public consciousness. His heirs, wanting to reverse that trend, put together the Time-Life deal, with an eye toward marketing it toward kids, hence the rickety-tickety music scores and the voice-over commentary. The series also had a ra-ta-ta-ta-ta theme song composed by trumpeter Neil Hefti in the same campy sensibility as his "Batman" theme. All this was done just as the twenties-thirties nostalgia craze was peaking, and the series was widely shown in the US on PBS stations, and ran for a very long time on BBC2. For a long while, these edits were the only editions of the Lloyd films to be widely available.



The mah-jongg fad had cooled by the thirties -- contract bridge was the big craze of the early thirties, supplanted in 1935-36 by Monopoly. But no doubt there plenty of lingering mah-jongg enthusiasts holding on from that game's American heyday in 1920-1923. Its following was overwhelmingly middle-class female -- during the fad, it was very much the thing for "Wednesday womens' clubs" to do, and Chinese-themed clothing and decorations were often part of the whole experience.

Mah-Jongg's popularity persisted well through the 1960's amongst older women in some heavily Jewish neighborhoods in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. The women who were most active playing would generally have been teen-aged girls during the Mah-Jongg craze of the early 'Twenties. For them it seemed to replace penny-ante poker or Pinochle as a pass time. Gambling was usual in these groups, but generally only for nominal stakes.

 

[MisterCairo]

the series was widely shown in the US on PBS stations

I loved watching those, and remember fondly the sound of the narrator's voice. They were fun, and otherwise I would never have known about Harold.