Obsolete Forms Of Entertainment

Cafe Society
1

I was watching the Three Stooges biopic on AMC last night. The Stooges got started in vaudeville, and converted over to motion pictures… were huge during the depression and war years, but got dumped by Columbia as the Age of Shorts began to decline… then found a whole new career in television, an entertainment form that hadn’t existed when they got started in showbiz!

The Stooges escaped Vaudeville for Shorts… died when Shorts began to decline… and relaunched successfully in Television (making some feature films in the process!). Made me kind of wonder who else has managed that kind of flexibility in our changing society. It also put me in mind of what forms of entertainment have come and gone in just the last century…

VAUDEVILLE: killed by cheap, ubiquitous motion pictures, far as I can tell.

SHORTS: killed by television. I was astonished to find that Columbia Pictures could push a bad movie by insisting that a theatre rent the bad movie if they wanted to show the new Three Stooges short! Unfortunately, “a night at the movies” soon ceased to mean “two cartoons, a short, a newsreel, and a movie.” When I was a kid, you were lucky to get a cartoon and a movie, and the last time I saw a cartoon with a movie was with Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, where they included a Roger Rabbit cartoon with it… Shorts still survive as an Oscars category, but it seems like very few are made every year.

ANIMATED CARTOONS: Originally intended as a sidebar to motion pictures, cartoons for movies are, frankly, simply no longer made. In the 1930s, everyone thought Walt Disney was insane for making a full-length animated feature; nowadays, that’s the only kind of animated feature being made, and now it’s gone digital, for the most part, with the closing of Disney’s animation studio. Animation for television is still going strong, but computers are doing a slow takeover there, too. The Asians are still going strong, though, for the time being…

DRIVE-IN CINEMA: killed by rising film costs and rising real estate prices; a hunk of land is worth more as a subdivision or strip mall than as a parking lot with a movie screen on one end. Barely survives in rural areas.

PULP FICTION: killed by wartime paper shortages, changes in the magazine distribution system, and shifts in American culture and entertainments of choice. Still hangs on, but barely, in the form of things like Weird Tales, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and so forth.

TEXT-BASED COMPUTER GAMES: killed by the rapid rise of computers powerful enough to handle complex graphics. Still barely kept alive by a handful of diehards.

COMIC BOOKS: killed by rising costs and distribution woes. Comics, in their original form, were considered a cheap, disposeable form of entertainment; you dropped a dime, you read the comic, you threw it away or gave it to someone else. Comics’ ephemeral nature led to collectibility, but their high labor costs and slim profit margin, combined with the ever-escalating cost of paper and distribution would have killed them by now, if they hadn’t mostly shifted to a direct-distribution system (unlike most other magazines). Comics now seem to hold a stable portion of the market (comic shops and specialty stores), but are difficult to find in ordinary retail outlets; most children do not read comics, due to their scarcity in grocery stores and high prices. Superhero icons are kept alive largely through television, movies, and video games.

Any others I’m missin’? Any comments?

2

Your basic animal-violence sports: bear baiting, cockfighting, bullfighting. Here in the US, at any rate.

Slapping contests.

3

I have a two year old daughter and another on the way. I wonder if my kids will have any interest in board games and/or RPGs, with the prevalence of video-based entertainment today?

4

True, to some extent.

COCKFIGHTING: killed by other forms of entertainment, and a growing social trend towards empathy, I guess; still hanging on in some parts of the south.

BULLFIGHTING: never big in the States, it is still very much alive in Mexico, and likely to remain so. I notice that PETA activists don’t often go and protest these things in Mexico…

…there was a national thing for slapping contests? Jeez, I’m glad I missed THAT one.

Considering that all toy outlets still sell board games, I’m inclined to think that those will hang on for a while. Card games are still quite popular, too.

RPGs… I dunno. They were never huge to begin with, and computers have made quite a dent in the demographic that played 'em to begin with…

5

Spoken like a man who’s not seen the release schedule for d20 System supplements. RPGing isn’t as ubiquitous a hobby as it was in the late 70’s to mid 80’s, but it’s alive and well and very healthy still.

6

As a comic reader and RPGer, I’m biased … but … that said, I think the hobbies are more prevalent than you’re giving them credit for. While it’s true most grocery and convenience stores no longer carry a comics rack, comic books were still relevant enough a few years back to merit big headlines for the Death of Superman … and with the rising profile of superhero films and TV shows, they do all right. Mainstream book retailers like Waldenbooks and Books-a-Million do carry them.

As for the RPGs… there was a big decline from the 70’s, but I’m to understand the introduction of White Wolf’s World of Darkness line shocked the industry back into fruitfulness in the early 90’s - the allied hobby of collectible card games (which have begun to shrink back into the background) probably helped the RPG rise… and now, the d20 system, while reviled by a lot of die-hard RPG enthusiasts, is making the hobby more accessible than ever.

7

You left out a big one: LIVE RADIO DRAMA/COMEDY. Killed by the rise of movies and especially television, which usurped radio’s role as the all-around family entertainment center. Vestiges of it still live on at NPR and local “readers’ theater” groups.

8

Staged Train Crashes: killed by cinema (which is really too bad because it’d be such a cool thing to see)

Crash at Crush

Actually. most of those big event travelling shows died off with the event of cinema. You know, shows like the girl diving the horse into the water off a high platfom. Billboard Magazine originally tracked the popularity of these shows. Then as entertainment forms changed, it’s coverage changed until it became the music magazine it is today.

(bolding mine)

There’s a good list of now obsolete entertainment forms. (except maybe opera, I dunno, seems to me I might have heard something about it :slight_smile: )

9

Commercial broadcast radio.

10

Oh, I know this story! The year was nineteen-ought-six. The President is the divine Miss Sarah Bernhardt. And all over America, people were doin’ a dance called the “Funky Grandpa”! [sings] Oh… I’m…the…[falls asleep standing up]

11

Of course, there’s been a burlesque revival at some strip clubs. Check out the Suicide Girls thread for more info.

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Erector Sets: Who needs these when you’ve got Sim Megalopolis?

(plus, the name is likely to get you in trouble these days)

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Barnstorming. Haven’t been to one of those in a month of Sundays.

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Initially, vaudeville would incorporate movies into an evening’s live entertainment. Then gradually, the live acts got replaced by shorter film features, resulting in the newsreel, short, cartoon, main picture evening in days of yore.

My input:

MAGIC LANTERN SHOWS- exhibitions of changeable translucent paintings on glass, superceded by motion pictures.

One European variety of this was

PHANTASMAGORIA- Magic Lantern shows projected onto a column of smoke or water to lend the illusion of depth and motion. Revived by Disneyland in recent years in their end-of-the-evening show “Phantasmic”, which projected clips from old Disney cartoons onto a thick fountain of water. Great effect.

CHEWING FLAVORED PARAFFIN WAX- superceded by gum.

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Public Executions.

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Tableaux vivant, stereopticons, “slumming,” Dumb Crambo, Forfeits . . .

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Playboy: Does anyone actually buy/subscribe to this mag anymore? With the vast supply of porn available for mere pennies on the 'net, my guess is gentlemen’s girly mags are going the way of the Dodo fast.

18

Then there’s always FEEDING ENEMIES OF THE EMPEROR TO CARNIVORES IN PUBLIC.

19

Nope. The modern equivalent is “lad mags” like FHM and Maxim.

20

Minstrel shows?