Oh, and one I’ve always wanted to know the background of. In every documentary about the history of engine-powered flight, there is a grainy silent black and white clip of some weird helicopter-like craft (basically a chair with a rotary blade attached above) bouncing spastically up and down, but never actually achieving flight.
Anybody know the who, what, when, where of this craft?
Sir Rhosis
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech
Lou Gehrig’s echoing “Today (today) I consider myself (I consider myself) the luckiest man (the luckiest man) on the face of the Earth (on the face of the Earth)” farewell at Yankee Stadium
Humphrey Bogart’s “Here’s looking at you, kid” speech from Casablanca
And a special nomination: The film most shown in American school classrooms when I was growing up (mid-60’s to mid-70’s) had to be Hemo the Magnificent.
Nazi stormtroopers goose-stepping in parade, plus Hitler giving the Nazi salute.
The fleet burning at Pearl Harbor.
Footage of kamikaze planes being shot down by or crashing into US warships.
You obviously don’t have basic cable.
*When Harry Met Sally
The Birdcage
As Good As It Gets
*Any of *The Godfather *movies
Any of the *James Bond *movies
The Chinese guy stopping the tank in Tianenman Square
The clip from FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech
People running from the cloud of rubble on 9/11
Nixon’s “Checkers” speech (“I am not a crook”)
The girl screaming over her friend’s body at Kent State
The pile of bodies at a concentration camp
The New Year’s Eve ball at Times Square
“This is your brain on drugs.”
It’s the “Sky Car” made by a W.P. Kindree. That’s included in the aforementioned wacky aircraft montage, along with the plane that looks like a set of Venetian blinds that crumples, and the guy with rocket skates.
I don’t recall the name of the Venetian Blind aircraft, but both it and the Kindree Sky Car were made in the Ohio or Michigan area. I have this information at work, having received it as the result of a query to one of the Smithsonian Institution museums.
^^^Thanks so much.
Sir Rhosis
Strangely enough, three of the four films on this list are owned by Turner Entertainment. It’s A Wonderful Life became a public domain film in the 1970s and soon became a Christmas mainstay of local stations across the country. (It was determined the film’s soundtrack was still copyrighted, however, and the film rights are now owned by Viacom.)
I was thinking about this clip of stock footage about the same time as I was thinking of the cannonball one, but I didn’t post it for some reason. On the DVD commentary for two Season Seven episodes of The Simpsons- “Homerpalooza” and “Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming”- they comment about these two stock footage clips. The cannonball one is parodied in “Homerpalooza,” and since “Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming” starts at an air show, they wrote this whole history about the wacky airplane which never made it into the show. W.P. Kindree’s Skycar, eh? I prefer the would-be Simpsons name- Absalom P. Sanguinet’s Vibrella.
Burning Yule Log?
Mao announcing the formal start of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949.
If not the most aired, it might be the most seen.
The stopwatch from 60 Minutes.
It might just be me, but freaking {b]Road House** (aka Mullets Over Missouri) is on cable every other time I turn on the TV.
As opposed to the lesser seen Chinese guy catching the tree in the Great Hinggan Forest
Heeere’s Johnny - Tonight Show.
That was going to be my contrabution.
Were those ads for FoxSports or ESPN?
I loved those series of ads.
I’d just like to say that I’ve never seen Steel Magnolias nor Fried Green Tomatoes. I think I’ve seen all of The Shawshank Redemption, but not all at one sitting. That said, whenever 19th century immigration of Ellis Island are brought up on television, they seem to drag out one bit of footage: a man in a cap holding a baby and furiously waving a tiny American flag. I’ve seen that one dozens of times.
OK, more on the wacky aircraft:
The “Venetian Blinds” aircraft was the “Cycleplane” designed by a W. Frederick Gerhardt (sometimes spelled “Gerhart”). He was a former aeronautics professor at Michigan State University. It was flown by a “John J. Fox” of St. Louis, MO. The accompanying article also dates the attempted flight at 1923. They suspect that it occurred at McCook Field in Dayton, OH, but have not been able to prove that. At the time of my correspondence (2000), they sent me the entire available archival material (their words) on it–which amounted to one photograph, and one newspaper clipping.
W.P. Kindree was from Detroit, MI. According to my letter from the “Air and Space Museum,”
That set of clips of weird aircraft is on an old newsreel, “Aeronautical Oddities” - and you can buy it on DVD from the EAA for US$9.99:
http://shop.eaa.org/html/04_videos_special.html