News You Can Bruise for 2009 February 28

(2) Sat Feb 28 2009 22:41: I've been digitizing Sumana's collection of old videotapes, a somewhat tedious process that has required me to remaster obsolete technologies such as VCRs and Microsoft Windows. There's some really good stuff in here:

Many episodes of "Square One TV", which is strangely not available on DVD at all.
Obscure Kannada Bollywood movies. Later I'll tell you about the metahumor in "Ganesha's Wedding".
A series of Dan Rather news reports from the first Gulf War.
Non-obscure Hindi and Indian-American movies whose DVDs are out of print and expensive. Such as "American Desi", featuring both Kal Penn and "Uncle Morty's Dub Shack"'s Aladdin Ullah. Fun fact: Aladdin Ullah also voices Hanuman in "Sita Sings the Blues".

But mostly, it's the commercials. Yes, time has worked its mysterious alchemy on these tapes, and the commercials are now more difficult to find, and often more interesting, than the programs they sell. That's what I tell myself when I set a tape full of first-season Star Trek: The Next Generation to record, anyway. Some observations:

It takes about ten years for commercials to undergo this transformation from annoyances to cultural time capsules. Commercials from 1998: starting to be interesting. Commercials from 1999: still boring.
Back in the 90s, it was acceptable to have an ad for a kid's toy in which all the kids were white.
No matter how old they are, car commercials have the same emotional effect as they did when originally aired. Boring ones are still boring, hilariously dumb ones were hilariously dumb at the time. I guess if you went back far enough the cars themselves would start to look funny.

Enough lists. I gotta go to Montreal tomorrow for work, a sprint in preparation for the open sourcing of Launchpad. I suffered severe poutine disappointment last time but maybe this time will be better. Or, it seems, I can just get poutine in Manhattan.