Obsolete Forms Of Entertainment

Cafe Society
61

Yeah, for a child of the 80’s, it’s a sad, sad thing, but why pay 75 cents or $1 a game to stand up in an arcade, when you can play virtually the same game, if not better at home on the couch. Thankfully it seems that arcades around here are finding their niche with the gimmicky games with wacky interfaces. Dance Dance Revolution, the skateboarding, jetsking, and racecar driving games, the gun based games. Tokyo Cop, the gun game with the motion sensors where you can move your body to duck behind stuff. That’s the stuff you can’t get at home* and so it’s worth the money to go and have fun at the arcade.

  • I know you can get DDR and other custom interfaces at home, but not many people do, and even if you do, they’re never as sturdy as the arcade version.
62

Ah. You mean, “as an adjunct to an existing business, the shopping mall itself.” Like I said.

BMalion: I feel your pain. Used to stay up half the night on Friday night for the late night horror monster shows. Nowadays… why bother? Every night is horror night, and every morning is cartoons, if you want it… but horror movies and cartoons are hardly dead or dying forms of entertainment. At least, not made-for-TV cartoons.

Governor Quinn: excellent point, and one I wouldn’t have thought of. There used to be revues released in movie format, too; haven’t seen one of those in decades.

scotandrsn, Dogzilla:

Movie Serials: killed largely by television, and the growing cost of motion pictures.

Serial Novels: killed by many of the same factors that killed pulp fiction; many pulps ran novels in serial form. Some novels were released in segments, the most recent example being Stephen King’s The Green Mile, but this process has largely disappeared, for reasons unclear.

63

I don’t think all of the items listed in the OP are dead – although most no longer have the reach they once did. Comics, as has been pointed out, are still around, and are still relatively cheap.

Some other things:

“Penny Dreadfuls” – the precursors to the Pulps, the popular magazines of the 19th century. They were a little more elementary than fiction magazines, but no one had figured out that they could replace most of the text with cheap illustrations, so comic books hadn’t been born yet.

Family and Neighborhood music recitals – before all of recorded ande broadcast entertainment, before even the phonograph, this (and music boxes) were the only way to get music in your house. People used to learn to play instruments as a matter of course.

Cheap Paperbacks – Virtually no one publishes inexpensive, thin paperbacks – I mean no more than, say, 200 pages. Back in the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s these were the norm. It wasn’t just a matter of cost – size determines what gets published. You used to have short collections of short stories, short novels, brief humor pieces, and plays. I used to pick up paperback editions of my favorite plays – Fiddler on the Roof, Man of la Mancha, 1776, Equus, Sleuth, etc. Now you either have to go to a drama book store and/or buy collections. Science fiction novels used to be short – look at the slim editions of Heinlein’s Double Star, or Clarke’s Earthlight, or Asimov’s Mysteries, all published in the 50s or 60s, and compare them with the bloated 500-page monsters of their later work. All modern SF writers are composing tracts suitable for propping up the entire side of a table. Brevity is lost.

Pastinella work – I stumbled across this somewhere obscure. It was, the source said, a “bastard art”, in which tiny glass beads are scattered over a fresjly-painted background, transforming it into a retroreflector (like those painted crosswalk lines). I gather that the painting, illuminated from the front, “lit up” astonishingly. I also get the impression that it was sort of paint-by-number, rather than original painting. The combination of mechanical “art” with flashiness doomed this to the basement of tackiness.

64

Surprised no one mentioned this one yet:

Porn Theaters: Once much more prevelant , they now have faded into obscurity due to the rise of home video. The porn market is as strong as ever, but its doubtful a single porn movie was made using film in the past 15 years. Some theaters still operate, heaven knows what their clientelle wants from such an environment. Its uncertain what they use, old films or a large video screen. I really don’t want to find out.

65

They’re getting pushed out, though. They’re often seen as the center of any trouble at the mall. Fights and other problems always seem to start there, even if its not always true.

I went to a lot of Malls in the Philly-New York area and I never saw a new one being built, but a lot were closing.

I seem to remember reading an interview with a guy who used to design upright arcade games stating that the day the Starr report was put on the internet was the day profits in the arcades dropped to 50% of their previous levels. They never recovered.

66

OOoo. Good one. You can also cite the gentrification of Times Square in the late 90s as a prime example of this.

Tijuana Bibles. While this is more properly a subset of “comics” that Master Wang-Ka cited earlier, these earlier vintage comics of a risque and naugthy nature have all but disappeared in printed form, although they are arguably making a comeback on the internet. Typically no larger than a dollar bill in size and a few pages long, they featured an array of popular celebrities and cartoon characters of that era engaged in bawdy situations and pornographic sex.

Gay Bath Houses Evolving over the late 19th and 20th centuries as first, cladestine meeting places for gay men, then later as focal points for the gay community in metropolitan cities – were all but eradicated after the explosion of the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s. Shut down by health authorities in cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco – with much of their client base literally dying off in a few years, and increased awareness of the transmission of sexual diseases making previous levels of debauchery impossible to recreate, these popular clubs have all but disappeared as they existed prior to 1983.

Westerns While others genres have enjoyed their eras of vogue and nostalgia, one of the oldest genres in film, radio and television has all but disappeared in popular culture: the western. Once a staple of broadcast entertainment – Hollywood studios merely had to travel less than 100 miles to gain access to scenic, authentic locations – the romanticism of the genre has been hit hard by an increasing public awareness of the actual lawlessness, native American genocide and blatant lies amd mythmaking in stories told. Public tastes changed, and the cowboy has been left behind, The classic stars of yesteryear – Autry, Ford, Wayne, Rogers – are all dead, and devotees and fans get smaller every year. Though some would argue that rodeo shows are still going strong, and a resurgance of the genre is underway, it’s unlikely we’ll see a return of the Western heyday that once dominated the airwaves.

67

I have a vic! I love it – I live way out in the country, and when we have a power loss, it can be 2-5 days, depending (ice storms, heavy windstorms, random air molecules, it doesn’t matter – the lights flicker, they are gone for days.)

I’ve got 50s rock records for it as well as all the 40s jitterbug and boogie woogie 78s that were my mum’s and dance music that was my great-aunt’s (from the teens and 20s). Fantastic guitar work on some of these old records…

I’m hoping one of these days to snag a cylinder-playing victrola…

68

I’ve seen at least three books that are collections of these. Two were in comic book specialty stores (in the “adult” section), but the third was in a respectable bookstore. In the “Humor” section, no less!

69

I wouldn’t say “slowly.” Now you can’t really see one at all. I was lucky, though, to go to the one at Coney Island a few days ago. No genetic freaks, but it did have a fire-eater, rubber man, blockhead, and other staples. Good hour of entertainment for $5. I don’t know where else you can see one other than there (and I’ve looked).

70

Porn Theatres: largely destroyed by the “adult video arcade/bookstore” and the rising cost of filmmaking, theatres specializing in adult films began dying as actual pornographic films ceased production (replaced by cheaper shot-on-video pornography). Many adult arcades featured theatres which were simply rooms with large-screen video projection equipment.

Tijuana Bibles: destroyed by the rise of cheap, easily obtained pornography, these tiny, badly-drawn pornographic comics (often featuring celebrities and cartoon characters) are now highly collectible.

I tend to regard the Victrola as “dead tech” rather than “obsolete entertainment.” Recorded music is still very popular… it’s just that very few Americans listen to it on Victrolas any more. Weirdly enough, though “dead tech” is often given temporary rebirth, for nostalgia reasons; I recently bought a little gadget that resembles the joystick for an Atari 2600 Home Video Game system, that came preprogrammed with ten different old Atari cartridge games; you simply plug the thing into your TV, turn it on, and go to town…

Gay Bath Houses: The statement made about these is basically accurate. I wouldn’t have thought to include them, though, as it never occurred to me; they ain’t exactly what most of us would think of when we pondered “entertainment,” I think.

Malls do seem to be on the wane, gradually replaced by strip malls and shopping centers. I’m not sure why; anyone got a clue?

What was the Starr Report?

Westerns: I think of this as a “dormant genre” rather than a form of entertainment. Movies and television are as popular as ever; it’s just that the genres and forms have changed. You’re quite right, though – used to be that westerns accounted for upwards of 75% of films released and non-news, non-commercial TV programming. Now the percentage is closer to zero, except on channels specializing in rebroadcasting old stuff.

Cheap, thin paperbacks: I hadn’t noticed, but actually, you’re right. “Quick reads” are rapidly becoming a thing of the past, and it seems that most fantasy novels being published these days are not contained in one book, but extend over trilogies, quadrilogies, and extended series.

Music recitals are still fairly common, actually, at least in this part of the country.

Pastinella art: I’ve never actually heard of this until now.

71

You didn’t include the “shopping mall” part, though. :slight_smile:

Quite right. There’s one mall around here that still has an arcade, I hadn’t been in the arcade since I started suspecting them of rigging the pinball tables. They had moved the arcade from the food court up to the third floor, around the corner from the movie theater. I’m not usually in that part of mall except for the theater itself so I was surprised to see the arcade. This arcade tries to keep fights to a minimum by refusing entrance to students during school hours and security keeps a tight watch at all other times.

My arcade days are behind me, it’s nearly impossible to find one with pinball tables and any coin-op video game made during the past 10 years probably plays too fast for me to keep up. Some console games are the same way; I have to use a slowdown cheat on my SNES MK3 to play the thing. I found an great arcade full of old machines (Dig Dug, Ms. Pac Man, Elevator Action, etc.) once and spent a lot of time (and quarters) there. It’s gone now, of course.

The newest shopping center around here is full of about a dozen “anchor” stores. Shopper’s Food Warehouse, Target, Petsmart, Sports Authority, 16-screen stadium-style movie theater, etc.

That reminds me, we’re beginning to see the demise of the non-stadium multiplex. There was a six-screen in a mall close to work, presumably driven out of business by that 16-screen one a couple of miles away even though tickets for the newer theater cost about twice as much. There had been a 12-screen theater in a mall near home, the entire mall and presumably the theater is being replaced by a Target. The nearest stadium-style theater is a 12-screen four miles away, in a mall that didn’t even have a theater until a couple of years ago.

72

anu-la1979, what’s a ‘trousseau trip’? It sounds wedding-related.

Speaking of Victrolas and new music, I’m sure I recently saw mention of a device that recorded on vinyl. You loaded the machine with a blank smooth vinyl disc, plugged in your analogue signal source, hit RECORD, and the machine put grooves in the disc. Would that be compatible with a Victrola? I seem to recall that Victrolas need a harder, more durable disc than vinyl.

73

Pulp Magazines–short fiction, usually sensationalistic or adventure-oriented, published monthly in a magazine. Digest sized, it was printed on cheap pulp paper.

Doc Savage, the Shadow, Conan The Barbarian, Cthulhu—all of these started in the Pulps.

There were also Romance pulps.

Gone–killed by radio/TV/movies, along with American literacy.

74

I respectfully submit the following games and toys as obsolete, as I rarely see/hear children playing them anymore.

Spinning Tops. When was the last time you saw a child playing with one? 1990s? 1980s? 1970s?

Jacks. Hopscotch is still seen occasionally, and jumping rope is going strong, but… do little girls still play with jacks?

Marbles. I haven’t seen children play with marbles since damn near 25 years ago.

Counting Out Rhymes. “Eeny Meeny Miney Moe?” How so very 19th century and Un-PC of you. “Engine Engine Number Nine?” What are you, a terrorist?

Schoolyard Chants. Remember this one? “Hoola, Hoola, Hoola, Hoola / Teacher hit me with a ruler / Went behind the door / With a loaded .44 / Now there ain’t no teacher no more.”
Sing THAT little ditty these days and you’re apt to get hit with a school DISTRICT expulsion and conspiracy charges.

Cowboy and Indians. Although children may still occassionally dress up as cowboys and indians for recreational and educational purposes, I do not see children cghoosing up sides and playing shoot-outs and the Indi-- I mean, Native Americans – cast as the presumptive villains.

75

I mentioned pulps earlier. What’s worse, some of the reprints are starting to get hard to find, too. Tried to find any Doc Savage lately? (sigh)

Tops are still around; they’ve just mutated. Try googling “Beyblade” and see what you get.

Marbles are still sold here and there, and therefore I assume kids must be playin’ with 'em. You can still buy a sack of 'em at the convenience store around the corner from my house, along with rubber balls and a cap pistol.

Cowboys and Indians, I think, went the way of the western, obviously, and for the same reason. When kids play “Let’s Pretend,” nowadays, what DO they pretend to be? Batman? Aliens Vs. Predator? Cops and District Attorneys and Special Victims Unit?

76

I can’t remember ever playing Cowboys & Indians in my childhood, which was in the 80’s. When we played pretend it was usually based on some tv show or another, or a movie. GI Joe, Transformers, Voltron, Star Wars, E.T., You can’t do that on television… I assume current tastes run toward whatever cartoons or movies are hot now. Teen Titans? Justice League? LOTR? Harry Potter? Powerpuff Girls?

77

As far as arcades go, how about Dave & Busters? It is an arcade with an adult bent. The game are great and they have bars in them. Booze and games can really pass the time away.

When was the last time anyone saw a Punch and Judy show? It seems to me that they really only died out in the 1980’s- pretty amazing longevity.

78

Marbles - we played these at school as late as the late 1980s.

Thin paperback books - the only replacement I can think of for these is the proliferation of dirt-cheap brand new reprints of copyright-expired work, like Austen/Dickens/Shakespears, for example the “Wordsworth Classics” series.

RPG - I don’t remember (UK at least) this being any more or less prevalent 10-20 years ago than it is now, dice-rolling D&D was always a somewhat niche-market activity. If you include computer-based and internet RPGs, then it’s arguably even more mainstream now. I wouldn’t say obsolete - more evolved: from dice, to online text-based MUDs, to MMORPGs, to graphical multiplayer stuff, to Xbox Live, etc.

Some things also become a fad again - yo-yos seem to pop up every few years as a “new” exciting craze. Ditto knuckle-bones, there were some collectible plastic monster ones doing the rounds a while back that kids seemed to go mad over.

It might be interesting to distinguish between what has really become obsolete, and what has just evolved into a new form.