(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube)
A spectacularly campy "Scopitone" music number featuring Joi Lansing from 1965 which appears to be a cautionary tale about the perils of online dating, or spiders, or both.
Scopitones were basically 1960s video jukeboxes. As Pesco blogged earlier this year on Boing Boing, "Scopitones and Cineboxes were first introduced in Europe in 1959-1960 and came to the US a few years later. The coin-operated machines were quite popular but were swept into the dustbin of dead media by the 1970s."
More required reading, if you're interested in the history of these primordial music video jukeboxen:
* Scopitone Archive
* Wikipedia entry
* NPR: Rise and Fall of the Scopitone Jukebox
* Scopitone of the Day
The video comes to us as a special courtesy of Oddball Film + Video, a San Francisco stock footage company that maintains a truly amazing and extensive archive of weird old moving images. They do regular screenings in San Francisco.
Where to Find Boing Boing Video: boingboingvideo.com. RSS feed for new episodes here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video.
(Thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic, and to Robert Chehoski and Stephen Parr of Oddball Film + Video)
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It would be great for someone to find out if Joi Lansing is still alive and what she did for the 40 years after the video.
I like that big spider web. I think some Showtime show is using that motif for their ads right now. And the Spiderman movies had it. But it always makes me think of a Markus Klinko & Indrani image. (and in trying to find that image I see Bravo is greenlighting a reality show of them)
http://stateoftheart.popphoto.com/blog/2009/03/bravo-greenlights-markus-klinko-and-indrani-reality-show.html
pretty wild
PaulEHoffman, alas she's dead - 1972 from breast cancer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joi_Lansing
Scopitones are actually repurposed interociters.
She likes her metaphors.
I love Joi! Who can forget her in Hillbilly's in a Haunted House?
Will all the awesome Scopitone love you've bene displaying, you guys should do a piece on Soundies, the 1940's video jukebox that predated the Scopitone.
My exposure to Soundies began while a swing dancer in LA. Swing dance historians use Soundies to discover famous old dancers who are otherwise unknown because they didn't dance in major Hollywood productions. Some of these old timers were tracked down and located and are part of the swing dance community today because someone saw their Soundie.
They're especially valuable because the dances are usually unchoreographed; since Soundies were so low budget they'd usually go the night before to a dance hall, pick out the best dancers and invite them to film the next day. The dancers would then just do their own social dance thing, and boom - we now have footage of some of the best LA dancers dancing socially.
But that pales in comparison to the huge number of musical pieces in the Soundies. Only a fraction of the Soundies have dancing in them, most of them are big bands doing a song. Just really cool creative stuff. You might find some good material there.
oh gosh. 2:04 of the video wasnt clever or exotic looking, just kinda creepy. =3
many, many kinks per minute
I have bought a bunch ofscopitone compilations on DVD. They are kitchy in the best way, and a delight at parties!.
It strikes me that this is also a precursor to the literal video meme...