that brings me to Cinerama movies–only 7 movies made from 1952-1968, most notably “How the West Was Won”. Cinerama Dome due to reopen in 2028
That’s a good one. I remember in the aughts when flat panel TVs were first becoming a thing, a plasma TV was the status symbol to have. IIRC LCD TVs existed back then, but their picture quality was considered inferior to plasma. LED backlit LCDs made the quality competitive with plasma in the 2010s, at a lower price point, and lower energy consumption to boot, and plasma TVs went away.
Yeah there where also regular TVs with a flat screen. Not the typically slightly curved screen of a tube TV. Thing is, since it’s a vacum inside that tube, the flat screen had to be very thick glass. Very expensive, and very heavy. And it wasn’t any better than a regular ole TV.
I’ll bet a ton of those suckers were sold to colleges for student centers and dorm common areas. I went to college in the early/mid eighties, and the were all around.
I knew someone in the late 90/2000 with a pretty early consumer plasma. The story was his mother worked for Philips and won it in a company raffle, worth $12k at the time, maybe 32 or 35 inch.
I’ve also observed the decline of windsurfing, which was considered a daredevil sport in the 1980s and 1990s but is now either completely gone or at least has acquired a somewhat antiquated reputation. I think the people who still do it are those who started it back then and stayed put (only that they’re now a few decades older). Weirdly, though, traditional surfing, i.e. waveriding, is still a thing; it gets some competition from kitesurfing and the like, but its still has a vibrant community.
As for hanggliding: I hadn’t noticed its decline, but now that you mentioned it…I took paragliding lessons in the early 2010s and, by virtue of that, got to meet people who were getting into hanggliding. I’m now taking paragliding lessons again (haven’t been doing it for a long time…) and don’t get to see any hanggliders at all.
Racquetball.
I was an enthusiast when it first started, circa 1977. It was a racquet sport that I was not immediately awful at. I played through grad school, and then when I got out in the Real World I joined clubs and participated in regular competitions. And then it just seemed to die away. The club near me (which I’d joined long before I moved near it) close down, as did the others. I played my last games at a military base that still had racquetball courts.
It seems to have been replaced somewhat by pickleball, a game I’ve watched but haven’t yet tried to pick up. I suspect that eventually pickleball will run its course, as well.
Yeah, my wife and I are newly retired. My wife took a pickle ball course at the local college. Huh. She’s teaching me. Sort of like standing on a big ping pong table. Ping pong i know, so i do ok.
Inline skates. When I was a kid there was no such thing (1960s). Starting in the mid-'80s, I started seeing the first iterations of skates with wheels that were lined up, and IIRC the brand was something like “Bi-skate” or something like that, marketed to hockey players for year-round training, with ads in the back of Hockey Digest. Within a few years, Rollerblades were everywhere. Now, not so much. I still see them every now and then, but I’m just as likely to see neighborhood kids on quad skates as inlines. They haven’t gone away, but there are certainly millions of inline skates gathering dust and cobwebs in thrift stores and garages all over.
2001: A Space Odyssey was released in Cinerama in 1968. That’s how I saw it the first two times.
do you also remember handball around that time?
If you have access to Kanopy through your public library all the 3-camera Cinerama movies, except HTWWW, are available in the Smilebox format, which attempts to mimic the curved effect of the three screens.
the only thing about those cinerama movies, you HAD to sit in the middle, otherwise you saw rivers flowing up and down rather than east to west
Handball is still pretty popular among current and former prisoners. All it takes is a ball and a wall.
I remember it was in a scene from one of the Phillip Marlowe movies
Speaking of bygone ball games, tetherball has pretty much disappeared from playgrounds and schoolyards.
Re plasma TVs…
I used to work a lot with corporate security directors and would often attend conferences and expos with them. Many of them would brag endlessly about how they were going “all plasma” for the video monitors in their security operations and monitoring centers. Wrong. Absolutely the worst choice for the application. Burn-in on early plasmas was pretty bad, so static images (e.g., this hallway or that door) ruined them pretty quickly. They were not only expensive, but they had to be regularly replaced due to burn-in. And who needs plasma monitors to tell if Joe is coming in the front door?
Handball was around when I started racquetball. I tried it, and didn’t care for it. It disappeared shgortly after. By the time racquetball faded away, handball was at best a dim memory.
Cinerama? Pshaw!
How about Todd-AO?
Even fewer movies – Oklahoma and Around the World in 80 Days
I was lucky enough to see Around the World in 80 days in Todd-AO at the Rialto threater in New York City, and it blew me away. The movie stretcherd out to the limits of your peripheral vision. If you saw a Todd-AO movie on a regular movie screen, or on even a big TV using the VHS or DVD copy, you really haven’t seen it. There was nothing like it until IMAX came along (aand stretched the viewing area up and down as well as side to side). It’s my hope that someone will convert Todd-AO movies to IMAX format, so they can be seen again the way they should be seen.
I got to meet some of the developers of Todd-AO. The “AO” stood for “American Optical”, and I worked for one of their remaining shards. There’s an exhibit on Todd-AO movies at the Optical Heritage Museum in Southbridge, MA, run by Dick Whitney (who worked for AO for fifty years.)
I remember seeing that and thinking, “Who is Todd Blue?”
(‘ao’ meaning blue in Japanese)