Super-8!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Last Christmas, Mr. Rilch brought home a buttload of old Super-8 reels from his mom’s house. He took some (not all; he’s doing them about ten at a time) of them to a photo lab and had them transferred onto digital video. Last night, we sat down to watch.

The first few reels were all taken at the beach, circa 1975. It looked so much like Amity Island it wasn’t even funny. There was even a shot of little Mr. Rilch on an inflatable raft! “So where’s the dorsal fin?” Friend wanted to know. And MIL’s swimsuits clearly indicated that it was the '70s, man…Purple, orange, yellow, red…She had every color of the spectrum. FIL had this weird look on his face. His teeth were showing, and the corners of his mouth were kind of turned up…Oh, yeah, that was a smile!

You could tell who was holding the camera by how steady it was. If FIL was filming, it was a smooth pan. If MIL was holding it, it was like the Blair Witch Project.

Shot after shot of little Mr. Rilch running into the surf. Then running out of the surf. And some thrilling takes of him digging in the sand! Then some shots of the IL’s friends sunbathing. Mr. Rilch made an interesting observation. Of the other two couples, both the men are dead now, and the women are still around! Scary.

Finally, we got to the old-school stuff: FIL’s brother’s wedding (man, people really did dress back then!); builders adding a wing to MIL’s family home; and a baseball game.

But the gem of it was MIL’s graduation party, 195[cough]. It was strictly casual: kids in t-shirts and “dungarees” or Bermuda shorts cooking hot dogs over the fire, singing, and smoking!! FIL was wearing an old-school Pittsburgh Pirates shirt, had her hair in a DA, and was absolutely adorable. Even without sound, I could really get a sense that that was the real '50s, not the antiseptic version we’re sold by Hollywood nowadays.

Mr. Rilch pointed out that, back in the day, this is the kind of stuff you would be dragged down to the basement to see, with the screen and the projector, and eventually people would start nodding off. But now it’s pure archival gold!

Anyone else have old-school Super-8 reels?

2

My parents shot stuff on regular-8. I have a 20-minute reel showing my dad’s Shellback initiation (crossing the equator in the Navy). Brutal! It also showed some maneuvers including a Talos missile shoot from dad’s ship, the USS Oklahoma City (CLG-5 – the flagship of the 7th Fleet along with CLG-6 Princeton, dad was the communications officer). Before he joined the Navy, dad was in the Army Signal Corps. At the end of the film he semiphores “T-H-E E-N-D”.

There are also some reels showing relatives; but since I was rather late in coming, I don’t know who they are. There’s some New Year’s Parade footage from the 1950s. My sister, being a bit older than I, is featured in many of the films. I guess that by the time I came along, the novelty of filming the kids had worn off. There is one reel that has me on it, when I was two. IIRC, I’m wearing shorts and a short-sleeve shirt and a little pork pie hat. My hair was white-blonde then.

There is some footage shot before I was born, of Douglas Skyraiders landing on the USS Lexington (CV-18). There’s also some footage of dad landing in a Skyraider in Hong Kong or Japan. (Before he got his commission, he was Combat Aircrew on the AEW version of the “Spad”.) Dad got a new suit from a tailor in Hong Kong. He shows off his new tan togs and mouths, “I love you” to my mom.

There is a reel of Koala Lumpur, and another with the Tiger Balm Gardens. Another reel shows a small Japanese child getting ready to jump into a puddle… But the spring-motor in the camera wound down before the crucial moment.

I have some super-8 in storage. There’s my classic first film, The Walk. Mutliation Maniacs and its out-takes are there as well. I have some unedited footage of a cousin’s wedding. I have some footage of me and my g/f (at the time) skiing in Wrightwood, but the camera was getting a bit old and needed a tune-up. I look a bit slower than I was actually skiing.

3

My parents shot a bit of regular-8 as well. I haven’t seen it, though — the bulb’s out in the projector, and we haven’t bothered to replace it. Also too cheap to have it put on video without watching it first.

Johnny: think I could get a copy of that Skyraider footage? Yet another of the many things that died out long before my time that I’m obsessed with…

4

D’oh! I meant MIL! She didn’t even know FIL at the time!

5

All right, who else here opened this thinking this was going to be about a certain motel chain?

(Sorry, I have no Super-8 films. They sound intriguing, however!)

6

Waitaminut…Did Super-8 have sound? If so, then what I saw wasn’t super-8, just regular-8.

7

Super-8 got its name because it is 8mm wide. Originally 8mm came on 25-foot 16mm reels. You’d shoot one side, then turn it over and shoot the other side. The lab would split it down the middle and splice the film together.

Super-8 uses the same 8mm width film, but the sprocket holes are smaller and in a different position. This allows a larger image than on regular-8. I think it’s about 25% more, but I’d have to look it up.

Super-8 came in silent cartridges and sound cartridges. A silent cartridge can be used in a sound camera, but a sound cartridge would not fit in a silent camera. The sound was nearly always “single-system”. That is, the sound was recorded on the same film as the image (actually, on a magnetic strip; and shifted three inches from the image) and the camera had an attachable microphone. Some cameras offered “double system”, where you would use silent film and a seperate, synched, tape recorder. The lab would “stripe” the film (i.e., put a magnetic stripe on it) and resolve the sound to the image. You couls also have the sound transferred to 8mm “full-coat” and edit the sound and image seperately.

But most super-8 was shot silent, and the sound super-8 was nearly always single-system.

The footage is in storage about 1,300 miles away. But if I remember to have the film transferred to video, I’ll try to remember that you want some footage.

8

I thought it was going to be about the motel chain as well. But ** lel ** has probably already figured that out by now.

9

I see. Thank you!