Do you watch the old black and white Sci Fi shows?

Good ol' Chips, eh.

When I was teaching the computing curriculum to my class of Year 10 girls, in particular the intelligent systems lobe, I was required to introduce them to robots as portrayed in film and literature.

I found a silent B/W movie by Fritz Lang, released in 1927 and watched it at home. For its time the cinematography was outstanding.

You can see it here
 
Warrigal said:
Good ol' Chips, eh.

When I was teaching the computing curriculum to my class of Year 10 girls, in particular the intelligent systems lobe, I was required to introduce them to robots as portrayed in film and literature.

I found a silent B/W movie by Fritz Lang, released in 1927 and watched it at home. For its time the cinematography was outstanding.

You can see it here
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Thank you for posting this. Over the years I have of heard this movie many times.
Never watched it.
 

I cut my teeth on those, as primitive as they were. My very young friends and I would discuss them the way adults could discuss classics like Gone with the Wind. We would imagine possibilities together. They were meaningful at the time. Now they're just old, but now that you mention it, they are probably worth a revisit. They recall a time in my life when intelligent beings on Mars seemed like a real possibility. They foresaw the coming of technology with computers too big to fit in a living room, and of course the most absurd thing of all, artificial intelligence.
 
JustDave said:
They foresaw the coming of technology with computers too big to fit in a living room
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This seems kind of funny to me.

I was working on computers far larger than this in the 1970s through the 2000s. With time, the greater proportion of the occupied space was mass storage and networking because they both exploded as the "computers themselves" shrank a bit faster than they grew in capabilities.

The amount of storage there in the 1990s can fit in your pocket today. However the big iron storage was redundant for resiliency to failures and had faster and much more parallel simultaneous access.

We supported about 1000 users of our own, and were networked with 70 other sites similar to ours with their own large user bases. Some of those were even further networked internationally. All of this made use of secure private networks, not the Internet. But by 1992 we began to add very limited and locked down access via the Internet as well. The WWW came along soon after.

PCs and LANs were a sideshow to that.

Living room? Try gymnasium.

These facilities never did shrink in size. They morphed into server farms. More dense, less efficient, more power hungry with larger cooling requirements, but more powerful and fewer of these facilities as 2010 approached.
 
Paladin1950 said:
One of my all time favorite black and white science fiction shows is the original The Outer Limits, that ran for 2 seasons on ABC in the 1960's. I have all the episodes on DVD.
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Oh! Outer limits. Was that in the 70s? If so l probably never watched them. Oh the 1960's. Now l'm not sure.
 
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There was a sci fi movie from the 1950s that played maybe once a month on a weekend afternoon by one of the Chicago stations. The Lost Continent, where a small group of men are climbing a mountain on a recently discovered Island where they encounter man eating dinosaurs. My playmates and I would alert each other when it was on. I must have watched it 5 or 6 times. I thought it was top notch. I bought the dvd from ebay last year, even though I looked it up on RT where it was unmercifully trashed. OK, not as good as I remembered, but it was an interesting visit to my childhood tastes in cinema.

I just sent for the 1951 first version of The Thing. I would have been 7 years old when my friend and I went to the theater, and it was my first introduction to Sci Fi Horror. It kept me awake at nights for a month. Years later I found out James Arness of Gunsmoke played the monster in that film. They needed someone really tall for the role, which required very little acting and required no skill at remembering lines.
 
My all time favorite Science Fiction TV show started in Black and White, "Fireball XL5".
A series from the early 60', with characters named 'Steve Zodiac, Venus, Professor Matic and Robert the Robot.
Kind of a Puppet thing, but I never failed to watch every episode.

Best movie was 'Creature from the Black Lagoon'.
 
JustDave said:
There was a sci fi movie from the 1950s that played maybe once a month on a weekend afternoon by one of the Chicago stations. The Lost Continent, where a small group of men are climbing a mountain on a recently discovered Island where they encounter man eating dinosaurs. My playmates and I would alert each other when it was on. I must have watched it 5 or 6 times. I thought it was top notch. I bought the dvd from ebay last year, even though I looked it up on RT where it was unmercifully trashed. OK, not as good as I remembered, but it was an interesting visit to my childhood tastes in cinema.

I just sent for the 1951 first version of The Thing. I would have been 7 years old when my friend and I went to the theater, and it was my first introduction to Sci Fi Horror. It kept me awake at nights for a month. Years later I found out James Arness of Gunsmoke played the monster in that film. They needed someone really tall for the role, which required very little acting and required no skill at remembering lines.
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Oh, yeah! The Lost Continent (1951) scared the tweet out of me. Looking back it was pretty good stop motion photography for it's time-- supposedly by Jay Baylor and Henry Lion. We must be about the same age. I was 7 in '51 too.

And The Thing From Outer Space from the same year was a doozy as well. In fact it may have scared me more than "Continent". Arness was impressive as the monster, albeit in a small but important part. He was also good in '54 in the picture Them!. Arness played the FBI agent. That movie still holds up, IMO. Good special effects, although not as good as Tarantula (1955). Arness's film career really didn't amount to much. His big claim to fame of course was Gunsmoke.
 
taliovelez said:
House on Haunted Hill 1959
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There was a lot of Vincent Price back then. It may have been House on Haunted Hill. I'm not sure, but one of his films was hyped on the theater marquee as "Filmed with Emergo!" Sounds exciting right? Is it like 3D or Cinerama? Well no, it was a silliest gimmick ever from Hollywood.

There was a scene in the movie where the people in the house were being threatened by a skeleton, but it turns out that Vincent Price was scaring them with a skeleton puppet, which he operated with a huge crank in another room, but before you realized Price was manipulating the skeleton, there was a loud "thrash" at the back of the theater, which caused the viewers in the theater to turn around and be surprised by a life sized skeleton that had been concealed behind a curtain "emerge" above everyone's heads and come jiggling along a cable to the front of the theater.

I think the original "thrash" as the curtain sprung opened may have been a surprise, but nowhere near a jump scare, and the skeleton was some plastic blow up thing with a skeleton painted on it. Rather than scare anyone, people were jumping up trying to grab at it and throwing popcorn boxes at it, some still half full.

And that was Emergo, the latest Hollywood special effect, but as far as I know never used again. Must have been a mess to clean up for the theater owner. God, it was dumb.😱
 
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JustDave said:
There was a lot of Vincent Price back then. It may have been House on Haunted Hill. I'm not sure, but one of his films was hyped on the theater marquee as "Filmed with Emergo!" Sounds exciting right? Is it like 3D or Cinerama? Well no, it was a silliest gimmick ever from Hollywood.

There was a scene in the movie where the people in the house were being threatened by a skeleton, but it turns out that Vincent Price was scaring them with a skeleton puppet, which he operated with a huge crank in another room, but before you realized Price was manipulating the skeleton, there was a loud "thrash" at the back of the theater, which caused the viewers in the theater to turn around and be surprised by a life sized skeleton that had been concealed behind a curtain "emerge" above everyone's heads and come jiggling along a cable to the front of the theater.

I think the original "thrash" as the curtain sprung opened may have been a surprise, but nowhere near a jump scare, and the skeleton was some plastic blow up thing with a skeleton painted on it. Rather than scare anyone, people were jumping up trying to grab at it and throwing popcorn boxes at it, some still half full.

And that was Emergo, the latest Hollywood special effect, but as far as I know never used again. Must have been a mess to clean up for the theater owner. God, it was dumb.😱
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Ha! I think the classic was "Percepto" used in some theaters when showing Vincent Price's The Tingler (1959). Some seats were fitted with a small vibrator device that was activated during several scenes in the movie. Evidently it worked because it reportedly scared the tweet out of some of the audience...😄
 
JustDave said:
There was a lot of Vincent Price back then. It may have been House on Haunted Hill. I'm not sure, but one of his films was hyped on the theater marquee as "Filmed with Emergo!" Sounds exciting right? Is it like 3D or Cinerama? Well no, it was a silliest gimmick ever from Hollywood.

There was a scene in the movie where the people in the house were being threatened by a skeleton, but it turns out that Vincent Price was scaring them with a skeleton puppet, which he operated with a huge crank in another room, but before you realized Price was manipulating the skeleton, there was a loud "thrash" at the back of the theater, which caused the viewers in the theater to turn around and be surprised by a life sized skeleton that had been concealed behind a curtain "emerge" above everyone's heads and come jiggling along a cable to the front of the theater.

I think the original "thrash" as the curtain sprung opened may have been a surprise, but nowhere near a jump scare, and the skeleton was some plastic blow up thing with a skeleton painted on it. Rather than scare anyone, people were jumping up trying to grab at it and throwing popcorn boxes at it, some still half full.

And that was Emergo, the latest Hollywood special effect, but as far as I know never used again. Must have been a mess to clean up for the theater owner. God, it was dumb.😱
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That movie scared the bejeezuts out of me. I was about 11 and talked my grandmother, against her better judgement, to take me to see it. I had nightmares for weeks about the scene where the young woman is looking out a barred window at night and the hanged woman floats up to the window. The rope around her neck snakes through the bars and wraps around the young woman's ankles. I just got the shivers thinking about it. And yes, I remember the skeleton sliding down the cable across the theater. It was pretty hokey.

Remember The Tingler? Some of the seats were rigged with vibrating devices and when The Tingler (that allegedly attached itself to your spine and took over) "got loose" in the theater, they started vibrating. In the movie, the man said that screaming was the only thing that would keep the Tingler from attaching to your spine. So everyone obliged and screamed their heads off.
 
Here in Britain we have a channel which only shows old films and tv programmes. They are all well worth watching, if unrealistic. No bad language, no 'woke ideology'...just good stories and talented acting.
 

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