Much of the post-Super Bowl hoopla has focused on the controversial halftime show, but what struck me most about the whole broadcast was the astonishing improvements that have been made in video technology. The cameras and TVs have gotten so advanced that, from a sideline camera, you could see the expression on the quarterbacks' faces. The picture is so sharp that you could lip-read what the coaches uttered when a call went against them (my mother is a genius at such interpretation). If you really wanted to, you could watch the sweaty players chatting on the sidelines or inhaling oxygen.
The technology was especially noticeable when, for nostalgia purposes, they showed clips from early football games, some in black-and-white and recorded for posterity with what seemed like a single, fixed camera. I remember such broadcasts.
I was also reminded of the changing technology -- and our changing tastes -- while listening to a skit on the radio by Elaine May and Mike Nichols, a comedy duo popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this sketch Nichols played Kaplan, a frantic fellow who used his last dime to call the operator from a phone booth (remember them?), searching for a phone number. May played the unsympathetic, by-the-book operator who first told him the number was listed in the directory and he should just look it up, then assured him that his dime would be returned, even though he knew gotten stuck in the coin mechanism. There were some funny moments (he was spelling his name for the operator and said, "K, as in knife"), but it went on for eight minutes! Maybe my attention span has gotten shorter or maybe I've internalized today's faster-paced comedy style.
No comments:
Post a Comment