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5.0 out of 5 stars
Top Notch Tip of the Hat to the Past, March 14, 2009
This review is from: Popular Science - Paramount Pictures Cinema Series (The Golden Age of Hollywood) (DVD)
To know where we're at, or where we're going, it helps to know where we've been. And a recent DVD from a new independent DVD company called Shields Pictures accomplishes that quite well, with pretty entertaining results.
It's titled POPULAR SCIENCE, after the still-active long-term magazine of the same name.
From 1935-1949, long before PBS's Nova, the Discovery Channel, Canada's "How It's Made" or "How Stuff Works" series were ever conceived, producer Jerry Fairbanks and Paramount pictures released a series of ten-minute short films for movie theaters, which was everyone's main everyone's main entertainment venues back then. All shot in color, it was common for several short films to be screened before the main feature, a full evening of entertainment, with a little disguised education thrown in for good measure. The POPULAR SCIENCE series was a celebration of new inventions, new ideas, new solutions for old problems, and the bright promise of new technology, presented in the fanciful entertaining non-clinical way of the "newsreel" format.
And so a modern screening of these old films retains their entertainment value, for fresh reasons, even if most of the inventions contained in them have been superseded by technical accomplishments since then.
Some have survived into modern times, now taken for granted, but were new, cutting edge ideas when they were filmed for the POPULAR SCIENCE series. Some are clever, making you wonder why they weren't developed further. Some aren't that clever, and just didn't work out, bordering on ludicrous, even for their time, and obviously included, then and now, for their humorous contribution.
What they all are, still, is fascinating to see, again, as they reflect a time when everything was possible, when so many people were working in both corporate R&D labs and in their basements to at least TRY to make the world a better place, and hopefully create a brighter future, and the films carry a underlying optimism about the potentials and benefits of science and technology that can't help but be charming to experience, even in these troubled modern times we live in. We could use some of that optimism and independent innovation right now, and maybe a viewing of this unique DVD could help along those lines.
Shields Pictures has edited excerpts from dozens of them into four general categories, "Things To Come - Inventions That Changed The World", "Planes, Trains, & Automobiles", "Those Wacky Gizmos & Gadgets", and "The Home of the Future", with optional additional-info introductions for each clip, plus bonus clips, and footage about the original producer of the series.
Purists who want the films presented in their original full-ten-minute form will be disappointed, and hopefully they will be released in their complete forms at some point in the future, along with some other old short films series that Shields Pictures has acquired. But they are presumably more watchable in this edited, compiled form, culling out the weaker sections of the shorts, and leaving only the most historically interesting for modern eyes. (And I wish someone would release the great 1976 feature length movie, "GIZMO", to DVD, which also was a celebration of old newsreel inventions of the past.)
Some favorite POPULAR SCIENCE clips of mine are a look at the Fleischer Brothers innovative 3-D animation effects on their early POPEYE films, three-wheeled cars that can park in tight spaces, and, probably the strangest, a pretty goofy looking and funny vacuum hat that supposedly grows hair. (Watch it working speeded up for an additional laugh.)
Women will likely enjoy seeing the oddities that comprise various "homes and kitchens of the future", which are also a measuring stick of how attitudes toward women have changed since then. Although most of the overly complex Rube Goldberg kitchen gadgets didn't click in individual homes, variations of many of them found their way into busy restaurants, still being used today.
Shields Pictures has done a good job transferring these old films to video, presumably with access to original negatives, and/or pristine 35mm prints, and almost all the clips are in excellent condition. The soundtracks have been digitally cleaned up also. Most of them haven't been seen since they were first screened, except randomly as occasional "filler" footage on various cable movie channels.
All in all, this first "POPULAR SCIENCE" DVD is worth seeking out and buying for anyone seeking something unusual and unique from some of the best that historic cinema has to offer. Hopefully we'll see more of this and other short film series (and "'GIZMO"?) from Shields Pictures in the future.
Dan Fiebiger
Portland, Oregon.
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