Badphone's Last Stand

 

 To think there was a time I balked at the thought of putting my face on this blog. But here's a little record of my business trip to Praha! for another advert, and catching the mood board for my character at the wardrobe fitting, I see who I have to thank for it...

 

 Thank you, Michael Cera, for giving me a type. 

 In my time off, I revisited many sites still standing from my last trip with Lanna in 2011: the crazy babies crawling up TV Tower – I had forgotten the massive holes in their faces – the weird, giant metronome which replaced the statue of Stalin  – the third AD told me they were thinking of bringing the statue back, but pink this time, of which he approved – and there was, of course, new mad shit too...

   The Giant Prague Museum of Endless Glass Cases of Minerals now boasted other stuff as well! Like a life-sized diorama of "dog-bears" fighting Early Cenozioc ungulents, a complete whale skeleton...

 

 I've played smaller. And those beautiful Šalamoun "Hobbit" illustrations I mentioned last post – here are more...

 There were also harps you could play, suits of armour, skulls, typewriters, and that big, empty room in the video, none of which I remember from 2011, but what I really went to the Museum for of course was the stairs, and they never disappoint...

 

 I also – for the first time – went to the zoo, as recommended, which was huge, its enclosures far less enclosing than those of Regent's Park...

 

 At its centre was a giant statue of Radegast on Mount Radhošť. Not just a guano-soiled wizard played by Sylvester McCoy, Radegast is also it turns out a Slavic Beast God overthrown by Christian missionaries – a deeply disappointing legend. 

 With of all this, Badphone did its best, bless...

 

  But my PR's given me her old phone now, which I didn't take with me, and I think it's time to start taking better pictures.

 

 (Reviewing the video, I notice it's actually shot with a different – and possibly worse – Badphone from the one I took to Bucharest in '22. I fell for Prague just as hard [and indeed for Norwich, when I did Polar Express there {and indeed Croydon, when I went to voice video games there}] but while I did make it to the last two minutes of a band in a cellar playing Watermelon Man, I didn't discover any cool, new music to round off this post with like the Bucharest one.

 So here's Alan.)

 

Election Rabbit Hole

 As America marks Bonfire Night just as we marked Independence Day, let's let it happen and just crawl down a hole, because it's all okay, look into the screen, closer, I found the hole. Come on. Let's go. Just for now. Into the screen...

 

 Once you're out, don't look up how old Kane Pixels is (no relation) or how he shot this. But do look up parts three and one, especially if you're into horror and into general and zillenial definitions of the liminal (thresholds and corridors) because both The Oldest View and its creator are doing something quite firsty. In fact, look up how it was shot as well, and maybe also look at this video about Utopian Botanist Julien Bercheron and the Vally View Mall, Texas, which mysteriously appeared once in my recommendations, and led me to this hole.

In France I've been giving YouTube ads a little longer to run.

 

 

 And I think I may have found my people. Please don't alert them. My French isn't good enough to say for certain whether this advert definitely didn't have to be over three minutes long, but I get it. It's a nice little change, I guess. I leave France tomorrow. I hope I've given you a taste. Here's another.

 

 Apparently the inverting of town signs is nationwide: a protest organised by local farmers. Isn't it suave?

I Demand To Know Who Built This Pig.

 

 

 You may have seen this substantially meme-ified pig before, in its original untouched-up form. Online reactions to the film have been understandably strong but, beyond the fact that it's a 1907 Pathé recording of an old vaudeville act, I can't find much information about what it is I'm actually seeing. Who was the act? How was it being done? What would a cross section of Le Cochon Danseur look like, for example? How many people would we find? Just the one costumed actor, moving his arms in and out of the trotters to swivel the eyeballs? A little child sitting on the main player's shoulders to operate the head bits separately? How does it all look so coordinated?

 

 The dancing pig is shamed.

  

 And how successful was the act? Because, if it was successful, why have I never seen any contemporary imitations? Why would we not see this level of articulation in a puppet again until "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"? If Vaudeville could come up with something this impressive in 1907, why would a Master of Cinema like Fritz Lang, the creator of Metropolis, have such difficulty building a convincing dragon nearly twenty years later? If I was Lang I'd have gone "Get me the dancing pig people, STAT!" Or maybe he did. Maybe they built this dragon too, but it wasn't as good. Who built this pig!

 

 

(Okay, now I've looked it out, it's better than I remember, but it's still no dancing pig.)

 I have a question too about the technology used to clean this clip up – less about the wherewithal, and more about its effect. I assume it's some kind of rougher, off-the-peg version of whatever Ai Peter Jackson used to clean up the Beatles footage in "Get Back". A few other youtube clips suggested by my algorithm use the same tech. Here's the first I saw...

 

 My old workplace, the Trocadero, and the next time I was there I took a photograph, to compare the two...

 

 Because, when I watch these clips I feel – as I felt watching "Get Back" – that I'm somehow being transported in time, and then I have to check why, because documentaries aren't new, and film has been around for long enough for me not to be surprised by it. That's my question.

 

 So I've decided, it's not that the retouching makes footage look more realistic, but that it makes it less immeditaely familiar as "footage", and so the brain reads it more literally. One can – rightly – condemn the artificiality of this, if what's intended is the creation of a more accurate record. But what this technology reminds me is that, from its inception, film has never been just a record, it is also a genuine marvel. 

 

Guise? Guise!

 Using this blog simply to regurgitate videos from the BBC Archive does feel a little lazy, but it keeps putting out such treasure, and I wanted something properly unsettling to post for Hallowe'en weekend. Unfortunately this package delivers so fully that I now want the whole heathen atrocity of a "holiday" banished from the memory of the Earth. What are these poor innocents doing? What have they been taught? What is this programme?

 

 

 Full marks to whoever decided to overlay the subtle howling of wind over footage of children limping through a wood singing about their own ugliness. Until now I had entirely bought into the idea that trick or treating was something we picked up from the States – I blame Fry and Laurie – but I was ten in 1984 and yet I don't remember "guising". Or sticking my head under water to make contact with another world. Or eating apples to learn the future. I knew a little about carving faces into turnips, but only because we had to wear one at the London Dungeon as "Stingy Jack". That was a scary costume. It had nothing on this kid's Licorice Allsorts mascot Bertie Bassett though. Oh God. Oh Jesus Christ.

 

Villains From a Simpler Time: Martin Shkreli

 

 

 "Yeah, I'll be evil, I'll be the Bond villain." I had totally forgotten about Martin Shkreli! Do you remember Martin Shkreli? Something like... he bought the rights to an AIDS drug and immediately made it five hundred times more expensive? I know next to nothing about American Healthcare, but Allie Conti's interview with him for Vice back in January 2016 is a beautiful character study regardless of topic.

 

 The useless hover board, the mismatched wine glasses, the "Sicilian Defense", the globe on the floor. That Wu Tang Clan album. This is what performative villainy looked like before Putin invaded the Ukraine. Before Covid. Before Brexit. Before Trump. Almost before Elon Musk.

 

 I was only reminded of it when watching RedLetterMedia discuss Ben & Arthur as part of their "Best of the Worst" series: an awkward cri de coeur shot in a cheaply furnished flat. Something about that film's combination of bareness and clutter suddenly reminded me of Shkreli, so I looked him up, and it turns out he'd just got out of prison.

 

 I've no idea if the rob-the-rich-to-give-to-Research-and-Development defense he gives in this interview holds any water at all. I just know he's pawned his "prison watch" and is now threatening on instagram to go and bed all our "thot mums". I miss wondering what someone like him will do next, rather than fearing it. I hope he never catches up.

 Here's some Ben & Arthur.

 

BIG Asgardian News!!! (Still Watin' For Lembit)

 

 Speaking of motherhood...

 The Space Parliament of Asgardia (the hard-drive orbiting Earth, chairman: Lembit Öpik) has just had its seventeenth (?!) international cyber-sitting, and put all three days of it up online, as is the Agardian way. I haven't taken minutes of the whole thing as before – because there are hour and hours of it – but looking in on the opening day I did notice a development you might want to hear about.

 We're seventeen minutes into the first day, Lembit's late again, and someone's just complimented the Minister of Manufacturing Jacob Mulder's presentation skills, suggesting he should get his own radio show, which is nice, but just everyone's basically hanging around. Then Egbert Edelbrœk asks if he should play a commercial, and Jacob laughs, but no, Egbert's not joking, he's made a presentational video which was going to be played later so they might as well play it now. 

 And to my enormous surprise we then see... well, firstly, this:

 Because it's always nice to get a glimpse of someone's wallpaper for a split second (this looks A LOT dirtier when only glimpsed) but then the video...

 

 Is this Asgardia?! Is this what's up there, the hard-drive? Or just a plan for what to send up next?

 "Is there sound?" someone asks. 

 Interesting shape too. I don't really know what a butt plug looks like, but it does look like something you might use to plug a butt. And what does "Spaceborn United" mean?

 Then we get a cross section...

 

 And it takes me a moment to realise what I'm looking at...

 

 Oh wow, that's...

 

  ... 

 And then it ends. 

 By which point Lembit has joined us to start proceedings, munching on something, crisps? "Bon appetit, Mr. Chairman," to quote Ariadne Gallardo. Voting is about to start, Lembit explains: "You can vote Yes, No, or I don't know"...

Dream City Catch Up

 Grey skies as I write this. Finally. The kind of darkness visible that turns all light golden. Here are a couple of frames from Ian Hubert's Dynamo Dream. 

 I've saved this post for a rainy day. Two years ago I shared Hubert's glorious, minute-long tutorials in how to conjure a city out of nothing, but this is the proper fruit of his time and talents. In the year since Episode One : Salad Mug went out, television shows with bottomless pockets like The Sandman, Foundation and Rings of Power have produced similarly breath-taking scenery for characters to stand around and talk slowly in – and maybe in another year it will seem quaint I was so blown away by this – but I don't think any of the big shows has yet managed to match for imagination, care, or life, the twenty-one and a half minutes of this solo passion project. Isn't it amazing what they can do these days? Hasn't it always has been? That's also part of the thrill of it. Put this on the biggest screen you've got.

 

Of Course, the Very First British TV Drama Was Filmed in Total Darkness.

 Almost as surprisingly, it was filmed in portrait mode. 

 A single camera/projector shot a pinwheel of light at the subject, and changes of angle were achieved by raising a chequered card behind which actors had to feel their way around with the lights off, using only the panel below for guidance.

 

 "These used to light up as required."

 

 Accompanying music and sound effects were, as far as I can work out, provided by a mixture of pre-recorded 77's and, if you count a second's worth of chimes played out on the guts of a musical top by producer Lance Sieveking, live performance.

 

"This is my signature tune."

 

 And here's Lance with the rest of the original team extant behind that 1930 drama, The Man With the Flower in His Mouth – an adaptation of a short play by Pirandello about oral herpes – recreating their original publicity shot for a recreation broadcast forty years later.

 

 That's "special effects man" George Inns on the far left with his checquered card, and on the far right Mary Eversley the prompter, holding a script, so I guess there must have been some light to see by after all, although probably not as much as in the 1970 reconstruction below from which these images are all taken.

 

 

 I did not know neon was pink.

 I really recommend subscribing to that BBC Archive channnel. I couldn't find a recording of the 1930 original, but given that the means of both recording and broadcasting it were entirely analogue that's not surprising. I did however find another very convincing, fuller restaging made by Granada Television in 1968 made by Radio Rentals for the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1967, so here's that too. It's horrible. What were they thinking?

 

Badphone Does Bucharest

 Last month I spent three nights in Bucharest. Beyond the flight times in my diary and the self tape I'd made pretending to look sad at a dog, I knew nothing about either the job or the city that I was heading to. It was only on the plane that I looked up which country I'd even be in, but I didn't know anything about Romania either. Something to do with vampires? I just knew everything would be taken of, which it was. And Vlad the Impaler was on a mural outside the hotel, so yeah, something to do with vampires.

 

  As I hint or mumble in the video above, heading out onto the streets that first evening after a heavy make-up test – (I'm not sure I can say too much about the job, but it was my first professional experience of waiting two hours for glue to dry: proper acting) – felt pleasantly like taking pot luck through a portal, except the changes this multiverse threw up weren't just that the traffic lights are a different colour now and there are more trees, although there were more trees. God, one month on, does that reference make any sense? Did "Multiverse of Madness" even happen?

 

  It's not just my bad phone's fault that this shoddily-ratioed video is so inadequate a record of how thrilling I remember the place. Also partly to blame was my lack of confidence at filming stangers, and the fact that I was normally out after midnight, so of course some of the city was "surreally deserted". For every empty street I trained my camera on though, there were equally cobbled quarters still bustling and pumping with colour, fresh techno and al fresco you name it, down which I idled avoiding eye contact, and enaged in perhaps that most subconscious-baring of games: making up new titles for Bond films.

 

I still know very little about Romania. I don't know whose any of those heads are in Cismigiu Gardens for example. But I do know the country's a member of the EU, and that the victory mentioned in the place names was over former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, which might explain all the trees – I was thinking of something Helen Czerski had tweeted about an aspect of twentieth century totalitarian civics I'd never considered.

 

 Also, I can now say "Oh, I discovered this DJ in Bucharest," which sounds cool, doesn't it? Why not bung this in your ears next time you fancy a strut?

 

Seth Meyers and John Oliver Talking About Empty Rooms Is So Lovely.

 We've all learnt to laugh into our arms. 

 

 I've adored John Oliver on here before, but never been able to squeeze in how much I've grown to love and really value Seth Meyers. When he first took over the orange and teal chat show Late Night, all he really wanted to do it seemed was talk about Saturday Night Live, where he'd hosted "Weekend Update". But somewhere along the line, a second topical segment was introduced on top of the opening run of one-liners, "A Closer Look", and by the time Trump took office, this segment had grown from a four-minute bit, to a nightly monologue running sometimes to a quarter of an hour, more topical material than even Jon Stewart's Daily Show. "Closer Look" became how I get my news from America. It kept up, and backed by extraordinary research, it still rings with the clarity of a closing argument, while the real News seems oddly committed to propitiating contextless insanity. I don't think Britain has anything like it, it is all up on youtube, and it's a frankly invaluable resource.

 

 When the pandemic hit, my admiration for Meyers grew even more. 

 I'd always thought he'd had the best writers – who, like Fallon in the seat before him, he seemed happy to foreground – but no late-night host adjusted better to performing in isolation: Meyers moved to his attic, and then to his in-laws, populating both new workplaces with a background head canon of talking portraits, mysterious small doors, and self-replicating copies of Colleen McCullough's "The Thorn Birds". More crucially, he didn't wait for laughs that never came. His entire delivery changed to please only himself, and you can still see this change now he's back in the studio performing to a crew of ten. "A Closer Look", whose punchlines Meyers now powers through, is as great as ever, if not greater. Here's last night's on Matt Gaetz, featuring gorgeous footage of Trump repeatedly calling him "Rick", but included below is the chat Meyers had afterwards with John Oliver, about what might happen next, and how empty the rooms were when they started out – two comedians who've kept track having an absolute blast. I was howling.

 

 

"Stay safe. Wear a mask. We love you."

The Plague Year One Plague Year On

 

 April the Second marks one year since I decided to start reading aloud Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" on Youtube, and I don't know how I feel about this anniverary, which I suppose means I don't particularly feel anything. I remember thinking at the time that the idea of a "Plague Year" was a good thing to seed though: there seemed no way this would be over by Christmas, let alone the Summer. I probably didn't imagine so many would be vaccinated by now, however. I probably didn't think about it. Actually: yes, reading Defoe was my way of not thinking about it, immersing myself in the knowns of 1722 instead of worrying about the unknowns of 2020. 

 Here it all is again anyway, for anyone who missed it (in either sense of the word). In further Youtubing news, April the Second also saw my friend Barbara bequeath her old iPad mini to me today, in the hope that its editing software would prove less petulant than my old version of iMovie, so maybe I'll start Youtubing again. Let's see. I know many, many people have had a far worse plague year than me. I hope you're all doing tremendously. 

"The ceiling would have to be so high, and the light would have to be so bright."

 For April the First, my favourite accidental physicists "The Corridor Crew" loose their visual-effects-dissecting acumen on the moon landing, providing typically conclusive, keen and concise insights into its unfakeability. Watch and learn why this shot from 2001 couldn't possibly have taken place inside a vacuum, and why moonwalk footage from Apollo 11 couldn't possibly have taken place outside of one.

 

 

 (And further confirmation, of course, can be found here.)

A Short, Fun History of Policing London from American Gaming Channel "Extra Credits"

... in five chapters. While the Government attempts to ban protests that make noise and historians who teach history, here's fifty minutes of stuff I wish I'd been taught:

 

 

 Episode 1 takes us to the beginning of the eighteenth century, a huge boom in personal property, new laws, no prisons, a subsequent boom in death sentences (proving no deterrent), citizen's arrests, bounty hunters, and teflon-coated gang-lord and "Thief-Taker General" Jonathan Wild.

 

 

 Episode 2 sees Wild and his growing Gangland Empire brought down by the popularity of renegade street rat and escape artist Jack "He went that-a-way" Sheppard, who plugged his own biography on the scaffold.
 

 

 Episode 3 sees novelist and banned-playwright-turned-lawyer Henry Fielding rustle up both the country's first state-funded court, open to the public, and the city's first police force, assembled surreptitiously from parish constables bearing batons stuffed with arrest warrants.

 

 

 Episode 4 sees Fielding's Bow Street model of law enforcement become acknowledged – if not adopted – nationwide, Henry's brother John starts to tackle the causes of crime, Elizabeth Fry attempts prison reform, and, facing an age of revolution, Home Secretary Robert Peele considers instituting a force trained to arrest people without killing them.

 

 Finally, despite a strong popular distaste for the very foreign idea of a salaried police force, Episode 5 sees Peele gets his wish in 1829... 

"Parliament was even ready to fund the police force directly through taxes, which was the single largest thing that had held the establishment of a force back. They were also starting to get an inkling that some things could simply not be outsourced or made to pay for themselves – an ethos that had ceated Jonathan Wild. It was that same ethos, by the way, that had led to the colonial taxes that lost Britain the American Colonies, allowed the East India Company to run amok in India, and would later hobble efforts to combat the 'Irish Potato Famine'. A lot of problems in this era arose from British Parliament just flat out not wanting to pay for stuff while still reaping whatever benefits it gave them."

 Imagine being taught that.

 And how is it that, despite an A Level in History, I only heard about the South Sea Bubble from Not The Nine O'Clock News, "The Great Hunger" from The Pogues and the East India Company from a joke in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, ?

 I mean, I know why.

The Terrible Trivium Interviewed

 

"I would describe myself as nicely dressed, and pretty evil."

 

 I'm not sure I've ever written anything that wasn't a little like The Phantom Tollbooth (when I wasn't moving sand from one side to the other with tweezers). But, in the best way, The Phantom Tollbooth was a little like a lot of things worth copying, so maybe I copied its copying too. Milo was a child's Danté, lost in the forest of his life at the prodigious age of ten. Like Wonderland, the world he found on the other side of the Tollbooth was packed with unapologetically academic silliness, and momentous thought experiments. And like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz – and I suppose Everyman from Everyman ("Everymun"?) – his way through that world was a handy quest. This Christmas just gone, my sister gave me a beautiful annotated edition of it.

 

 So thanks, Norton Juster, for writing The Phantom Tollbooth, and for teaching me the names of some of the demons, and I'm sorry you're gone. 

Wet And Forget

 Here's a little film I really love, originally made for Door Number 5 of Gemma Brockis' now absent Oddvent Calendar. Like all contributions to the calendar, Shamira's behindery is a study and pause – breath-restoring, rather than breath-taking. It features the voice of our friend Tom Lyall, and just enough special effects to help one lose one's footing in reality. I've put it up because the film I put off putting up on Friday was its opposite: bloated and failing and disengaging. I'll probably put that up next, because it's still of interest; but I wanted to present something I liked first. 

 By the way, my youtube algorithms uncouthly autofollow Reindeer Lichen with this; I wonder where yours will take you. It's still winter in the corner of some gardens. Apologies again for the delay in posting. I have been meeting for walks this week, and it's possible I am exhausted. 

 

Blessed

 I've just rewatched this video to confirm that Richard Herring's interview here with Brian Blessed may be the greatest one-man show I've seen. It's a hell of an act, really – literally death-defying – and, while often threatening to disintegrate into whatever the louder version of waffle is, every unprompted digression ultimately leads to a vista. You might find yourself, like me, crying honest tears of joy several times at the beauty of the view. 

 

 

 "Exploration is not a discovery.... it is a Remembrance!"

 

 These last twelve months have proved something of a procrastinator's paradise, and I know I haven't been alone in approaching the end of the virus with some dread at the idea of being asked once again "So what's next for you?" But Brian Blessed's been training to climb Olympus Mons, which is four times the height of Everest, and on Mars. So maybe what I'll do next is fuck Death up the arse, live forever, and learn to sing like Pavarotti. Thank you, Brian, can't wait.

Incontrovertible Evidence That Nobody Is Boring

 "I am very interested in lifts. I love original old relay logic lifts, especially the very advanced relay systems which can contain hundreds of relays"  – from the introduction to Beno's youtube channel.

 

 Little now remains of Robert Popper's blog post from 2010 which first introduced me to "Benobve" as he was then – "EXCLUSIVE: Sneak preview of Pixar's next movie" – but a process of elimination has led me to conclude that the video above is the one he was talking about: "The premise: a man (I think it’s a man) gets in a lift*. He/she goes up in the lift, then down in the lift, then, well I wouldn’t want to spoil the ending for you… Oh Benobve, I think I love you." It's something of a departure for Beno, whose other output at the time – about which Robert Popper was equally enthusiastic – looks a lot more verité, being, almost exclusively, live-action, often narrationless footage of real lift journeys such as this:

 

 Moved by Popper's enthusiasm for Beno's enthusiasm, I had subscribed to his channel back in 2010, but years would pass before I bothered to check in again, and when I did, I was surprised to see that his videos now came with a disclaimer not to copy what he was doing. This is how I learnt that Beno's undiminished love of lifts, in these intervening years, had grown now to incorporate an enthusiam for their exteriors, and for what lay at their top. Beno wasn't just riding in lifts now, he was hacking them. He was riding their rooves. He was recording something glorious and straight out of Judge Dredd, like the adventure below (referenced in my first zoom quiz). 

 I'd love to know if Robert Popper knows what Beno's up to these days. I hope he wouldn't be disappointed.

 

 

 "All of the activity in my videos is completely legal, I have checked this with my lawyers. I know the law and I do not break laws with my videos" – again, from the introduction to Beno's youtube channel.

 

 There's another fun old Beno blog recommendation here.

Untitled ContraPoints Share

  

"who'll have you."

 

 

 I have so many takeaways from this video – I always have takeaways from Natalie Wynn's work, they're more like solo shows than youtube videos, a full evening's watch requiring a wind-down – but trying to express those takeways in neat little titles, like most bigotry is actually backlash, or projection isn't empathy, won't do this fantastic piece justice, because the reason ContraPoints' pieces are so long is Wynn refuses to pretend anything is simple, or anyone an abstract. Also she likes to bathe in milk and take cocktail breaks, but that's all part of the care package. Backlash is always making a push for respectability, in the guise of "debate", but the idea that liberation must be earnt by argument, rather than simply granted, is surely one of the crappiest our culture has clung to. Argument's not how you understand something, understanding requires love and study. Not that love and understanding need go hand in hand; if you don't understand something, just send love on ahead. But Wynn – both a trans woman, and the receiver of sustained abuse from trans twitter herself – tries harder than most to understand, and she does it with love and opulence.

  

"When you dehumanise the villains, you become unable... to recognise... the villain... within...

How is she though? She needs a hot toddy is what she needs." 

 

 P.S. You might want to help out with this.

To all who come to this happy Round: welcome!

 They are the best of places. They are the worst of places. They are the realistion of dreams. They are the stuff of nightmares. They are really good. They are really not. They are theme parks, and I love them, so here's the theme-park-themed round I prepared for last night's zoom quiz. Oh, we shared some beautiful stories last night, we London Dungeon veterans... looking for cats, identifying pirates, trying to remember how many films from the nineties Gary Oldman had exploded in... Kevin had just got an article into "Film Stories", about seeing Bad Boys in the cinema when he was fourteen. Peter had got one in print!... We got drunk. It got late. It was great. Answers as ever will be posted in the comments.

 

 1. Here's Vice President Richard Nixon at the opening of the very first Disneyland in 1955. But which of the following attractions was the only one there from the beginning?

 a) The Jungle Cruise?

 b) The Pirates of the Caribbean?

 c) The Haunted Mansion?

 

 

 

2. Arrange these skins in chronological order, earliest to latest:

 

 a)

 

 b)

 

 

 c)

                                                                                                                               

 

 

 3. Which of the following phrases was NOT used to describe a rollercoaster before the invention of the word "rollercoaster"?

 a) Pretzel Ride?

 b) Hooligan Slide?

 c) Flip Flap Railway?

 

 

4. Nicknamed the "Electric Eden", Luna Park opened on Coney Island in 1903. Which of the following attractions did it NOT boast?

 a) "A Trip to the Moon", in which patrons boarded an airship suspended from cables, and were taken to a cave where costumed "Selenites" would try to sell them green cheese.

 b) "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", in which patrons would board a submarine and experience a simulated trip to the North Pole, using refridgeration eqipment, and three miles of spooling canvas.

 c) "The Time Horse", in which couples enjoyed naughtily gripping onto each other, astride a fake horse on a steeplechase through recreations of Ancient Egypt, Jungle Temples, and Dinosaurs.

 

 

 

5. Still in Luna Park – I could have done a whole round on Luna Park, really – in this photo from 1906, you can just make out a sign boasting "INFANT INCUBATORS WITH LIVING INFANTS", but what did the building actually contain?

 a) Exactly what it says – a series of prematurely born babies in incubators?

 b) A funhouse of distorting mirrors?

 c) A variety show, very much of its time, with a cast of little people?

 

6.  Last question from Coney Island – these were all inspired by this jaw-dropping "Defunctland" video, by the way, which I highly recommend – What was most remarkable about the seven-storey brothel that burnt down in 1896 (not pictured)?

 a) It was New York's first fully electrified hotel?

 b) It was the shape of a giant elephant?

 c) It had a boat ride?

 

 

 

7. Where is this? 

 a) Black Gang Chine on the Isle of Wight?

 b) Answers-in-Genesis' "Ark Encounter" in Kentucky?

 c) Ho Thuy Then in Viet Nam? 

 

 

8. Action Park, New Jersey, another great "Defunctland" video about which you can find here: Throughout the 1980's and 90's, its founder Gene Mulivihill would test the safety of his attractions by offering employees a hundred dollars to get in and just see what happened. But which of the following did NOT happen at Action Park? 

 a) A ride involving an enclosed ball covered in casters, and large enough to hold one passenger, was pushed down a PVC track which had melted, missed its mark, left the park, rolled across the freeway and landed in a swamp?

 b) The Action Park wave pool, later nicknamed the "Grave Pool", saw fifteen employees have to be rescued from drowning because of the strength of its wave machine, only to then be hospitalised for consuming human waste?

 c) Employees trying out a "loop-the-loop" waterslide emerged with torn skin as a result of the the broken teeth of previous riders which had become embedded in it?

 

 

 

9. One of the attractions planned by Michael Eisner for the opening of Disney's California Adventure in 2001 was "Superstar Limo". Originally envisioned as a high-speed chase through Hollywood, pursued by the paparazzi, the final, deeply unpopular dark ride turned out to be a much more leisurely affair. Given that there were no safety issues, however, why had Disney decided to slow down the ride? (There are not a multiple choice answers for this one, but there is another excellent "Defunctland" video.)

 

 

10. And finally: The O and T of Disney's Florida attraction, EPCOT, stand for "Of Tomorrow"? But what do the E, P and C stand for? Points will also be awarded for silliness.

 

 (And here are the image sources for the banner, and for questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.)