It ended lighter than air passenger air travel. That was a big deal. Then we had to turn to airplanes,
That episode of WKRP in Cincinnati is like forty years old so I suspect many millenials are unfamiliar with it as well.
Obviously there were worse tragedies from shipwrecks in terms of human lives but that clearly misses the point. For various reasons The Hindenburg is much more famous. It didn’t have to be a disaster. It’s about something very famous fading from memory.
Yes… if it hadnt been repeated over and over and over.
Nitpick: There was no live coverage of the disaster. The recording we have exists because the reporter and his engineer were experimenting with making recordings for delayed broadcast, which was not usual at the time.
Thus many news crews were on-site at the time of the airship exploding, and so there was a significant amount of newsreel coverage and photographs, as well as Herbert Morrison’s eyewitness report for radio station WLS in Chicago, a report that was broadcast the next day.
Radio broadcasts were not routinely recorded at the time, however an audio engineer and Morrison had chosen the arrival of the Hindenburg to experiment with recording for delayed broadcast and thus Morrison’s narration of the disaster was preserved.[11] Parts of Morrison’s broadcast were later dubbed onto newsreel footage. That gave the impression that the words and film were recorded together, but that was not the case.
Then a bunch of people were wondering why everybody else on the laugh track was laughing at this line.
Did it? Airships were slow and expensive to operate, they sometimes had more crew on flights than passengers, and I’m not even sure how profitable they were. Wasn’t Zeppelin subsidized by the German government during the 1930s? I think the days of airships were numbered by the time the Hindenburg went down.
That’s not a nitpick at all. For some reason I thought it was live coverage.
When I mentioned “Oh the humanity” to my friend she said, “Oh, that’s where that came from”.
Maybe. But passenger aircraft of the time, such as the Lockheed Electra carried 10 passengers and had a range of about 800 miles, It was not practical for transatlantic flights, and in fact there were no airplanes who could do it regularly and safely until about a year later. It was flying boats only until really after WW2.
So, yes, with the developments of long range aircraft due to the war, airships may have been made obsolete. But not for nearly a decade.
Umm… this doesn’t surprise me much in terms of recent context.
I was talking with some of my (younger) co-workers, at at least a quarter of them (granted, the least political of them) had nearly no idea why a bunch of us were talking about changes in the world a few days ago. Specifically, about 9/11.
That’s less than three decades ago, but for younger people, it’s well before they’ve been born, and aren’t aware of ever doing things like having people meet you at an airline gate, not having to separate your fluids for air travel, and countless other little things.
Even the ones that did know, knew very little about what actually happened (the Pentagon hit, or the crashed plane) past the loss of the towers. And about 10% knew about it - as a conspiracy theory they treated with about equal weight to various JFK conspiracy theories, ie far too much.
And that’s a lot more recent, and closer to home than the Hindenburg!
If some young people were watching this movie today, they’d be shocked by the surprise ending.
It’s a perfectly reasonable assumption. For most of the lifetimes of most people alive today it has been commonplace to see and hear live coverage of events anywhere in the world, even from very remote locations. Intercontinental TV broadcasts only became feasible in the 1960s with the advent of satellites. Intercontinental radio was possible well before that, but not terribly common.
And most of those broadcasts in the early days originated from well-equipped studios, not remote locations in the field. Remote radio broadcasts before say, 1960, generally required a dedicated telephone land-line connection to a central studio. Back then that was rare and very expensive.
The nazis used hydrogen because they could not get helium from the US.
What do they imagine is on the album cover when they pull out Led Zeppelin I to listen to “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You”?
Clearly, we need James Cameron to make a Hindenburg movie staring Timothée Chalamet and and Cailee Spaeny as star-crossed lovers from different social classes both passengers on the ill-fated dirigible. (At least we’d be spared all of the arguments over why they can’t both fit on a floating door.)
No, but it was inevitable that someone would come up with it.
Stranger
It’s true that TikTok is usually spoken of as a Gen Z phenomenon. But Wired asserted this March:
As for the Hindenburg fading from memory: I agree with others that “oh, the humanity” is relevant enough to pop-culture jokes to linger past knowledge of details of the actual tragedy.
And it did, for decades and decades, but that’s over now.
I’ll alert the comedians and comedy-writers!
But seriously, folks: it has to be tougher and tougher to write comedy, as the concept of ‘a shared culture’ becomes more and more a relic of a past that had fewer entertainment choices.
That’s true and it is especially jarring because our culture was kind of frozen in amber from the 50s until very recently. But as the boomers exit the stage, their culture is going with them.
Yeah, but then you can’t post self important nonsense.
All the people who create pledge-soliciting “specials” for public-television stations, now currently full of Rock-and-Roll artists and Beatles tribute bands, are going to have to transition to making compilations of YouTube videos of skateboarders and Super Mario-playing, Doritos-eating teens.
That’s if public television survives when no one watches television at all, anymore.