In Lively Black and White

[robcat2075]

I do recall seeing "A Hard Day's Night," shown for the first time on US television in 1967.

However, I missed this brief intro added to alert the viewers that NBC, the in-living-color-peacock-network, was about to show a black and white movie.

 

 

 

[Tom]

wow......that's a historic bit of footage!  Great movie also...

[robcat2075]

I'm watching "A Hard Days Night" and when they get to the television studio scene I'm wondering,  how did they shoot these video monitors on film without a big ugly scanning bar crawling through them? These are clearly real video images, not something matted in. The mismatch between 24 fps film and 30 fps video should be immediately apparent.

 

Turns out, it's all 25fps. The UK is a 25fps PAL video country and is common there to shoot film meant for TV broadcast at 25, not 24 fps, just because it is simpler to run that to video than to convert 24 fps footage to 25 fps.

This movie was not made for TV broadcast, but since they have the 25 fps film equipment commonly available , they shot these scenes at 25 fps and cut them into the rest of the 24 fps movie. The down-side-effect of the slowdown is that the music in these scenes is about a half step lower than the record versions of the songs.

[robcat2075]

A contemporary review of "A Hard Day's Night"

 

[Roger]

Neat, I've never seen it I'll have to watch it sometime.   I liked the animated intro, it was cute.

Is that Slugworth from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the newspaper there?   Sure looks like him.

[robcat2075]

10 hours ago, Roger said:

Is that Slugworth from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the newspaper there?   Sure looks like him.

Different actor, different century.

Wilfrid Brambell seems to have already been a well-known TV actor in Britain by 1964 but outside of the UK he's just "that guy in 'A Hard Day's Night'"

According to Wiki he starred in a Broadway play that closed after one performance. Ouch.

[Roger]

I've never heard of this guy, but I'm sure as much British TV as I watch, I must have seen him in something. 

1 hour ago, robcat2075 said:

According to Wiki he starred in a Broadway play that closed after one performance. Ouch.

Now that is unfortunate, lol.

[robcat2075]

If you didn't live through those years, it's probably hard to imagine the hysteria. There hasn't been anything like it since.

In those years I never heard adults discuss pop culture except... they did talk about the Beatles. When my parents would have their adult friends over for dinners, the Beatles would eventually come up. They were baffled it, they were exasperated by it. They could not fathom why anyone liked the Beatles and it was proof to them that kids were just stupid.

"That hair!" and "They just jump around and scream like a bunch of monkeys!" were typical comments that would come up. They were sure it had to be a fad that would go away, but it wasn't going away. Adults found it all to be very alarming.

 

Here is the original 1964 Ed Sullivan appearance.

Four #1 hits in one show!
 

 

Alternate Vimeo link:
 

 

[Roger]

I wonder what they would have thought about Ozzy Osbourne,  Public Enemy or Kiss?   Or Katy Perry or Miley Cyrus, for some slightly more current entertainers.  I'm not sure there are any more super groups or rock bands as we knew them, seems to be mostly solo acts with a backup band that is in the background (if there even is a band).

[robcat2075]

On 2/7/2023 at 11:25 PM, Roger said:

I wonder what they would have thought about Ozzy Osbourne,  Public Enemy or Kiss?   Or Katy Perry or Miley Cyrus, for some slightly more current entertainers.  I'm not sure there are any more super groups or rock bands as we knew them, seems to be mostly solo acts with a backup band that is in the background (if there even is a band).

 

I'm sure those 1960s adults would judge any of those acts as "worse" but none of those acts would have ever entered the serious adult conversation enough that voicing an opinion was even needed.

The jazz age had already been full of figures who were drug addicts and/or crime related but none of that ever seriously penetrated the normal adult daily scene and there was a general consensus that heroin and the mob were bad anyway.

Serious adults talked about Congress and corporations and communism, not the music on the radio or singers' haircuts. But they couldn't avoid the Beatles.

Consider that in the 20 years from 1940 to 1959 Frank Sinatra got 104 mentions in the NY Times. In the six years from 1964-1969, The Beatles were mentioned 552 times. In the 1964-65 Beatlemania period they were averaging a mention every other day. No other entertainment act was getting that sort of recurring attention in serious adult media.

Elvis came close, but after two years he got carted off to the Army and when he came back he was mostly a parody of himself. Not a serious threat anymore.

The Beatles were just four kids, not CEOs or generals or senators... the sort of people adults thought should be getting attention.  The adult standards for what mattered seemed to be getting turned upside down and they couldn't figure it out.

Adults today have grown up with the media treating entertainment figures as if they were significant, but adults back then had not encountered that yet and they were exasperated by it.

 

[Roger]

12 minutes ago, robcat2075 said:

The Beatles were just four kids, not CEOs or generals or senators... the sort of people adults thought should be getting attention.  The adult standards for what mattered seemed to be getting turned upside down and they couldn't figure it out.

Adults today have grown up with the media treating entertainment figures as if they were significant, but adults back then had not encountered that yet and they were exasperated by it.

Good point, I guess I'm so used to the media reporting on celebrity antics that it seems old hat.   I suppose that level of media blitz for any entertainer must have been very unusual for the time. 

[robcat2075]

A typical responsible adult opinion.
 

Apparently not a Three Stooges fan, either.