It’s even better now that it’s in Offtopic.

[quote]I feel like people ignore or forget that film and music existed before the 1960s, and it’s a shame. Especially when actually quite a lot of it exists for people to experience.[/quote] This conversation has come up a lot lately in my circle. Recently watched the original King Kong with my kids (3 and 5) after talking about the origins of modern cinema with some old friends. My kids laughed and laughed at how seemingly ridiculous it was. I tried to explain to my oldest that for the time, it was considered cutting-edge, and the stop motion animation was unparalleled. “People thought this was real?” I told him they didn’t necessarily think it was real, but it scared the -blam!- out of people in terms of how [i]seemingly[/i] real it was back then. The idea that this film actually [i]frightened[/i] people was confounding to him. By the second act of the movie, they’d totally lost interest (as 3 and 5 year olds tend to do). People take for granted that a hundred years ago, there were “civilized” people without electricity, running water and public sanitation. We’d just come out of one of the most brutal periods of warfare in the modern age. By current standards, the entertainment of the age was primitive and crude. But a hundred years before that, even the most advanced people of the time couldn’t have imagined watching moving pictures on a projection screen. On a side note, my favorite film of the silent period has to be Metropolis (cliche, I know). I bought it on VHS at a garage sale for like a quarter when I was about 8-10ish and it blew my mind. Grateful that my parents encouraged my enjoyment of that stuff.