This film was made in 1940, according to YouTube. For those who are counting, that’s [82] years ago. For some of you, maybe you were just babies. Maybe your parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents were just babies. But the folks who made this film, all the people who starred in it too, are long gone. This film is their legacy. What do we know about them?
We know that people had much longer attention spans in 1940. Can you imagine a 20-minute video on how to use a phone, made today? The mind reels. (see what I did there? Reels?) We know that film actors were taught to use a very specific accent. You might think of it as the “old filmy” accent. At the time they called it a Boston Brahman accent, even though real people from Boston didn’t sound like that. This specific accent, with a tendency toward sharper, crisper pronunciation and higher pitch, reproduced well using the microphones of the day.
We also learn that our fight to understand technology has gone on for many lifetimes. There were no movies or even recordings in the 1740s, 1840s, or whatever, but you can bet that there were struggles with technology back then. It wouldn’t be surprising for me to find out that half the hieroglyphics found in pyramids were actually tech support documents. (Seriously, I made that up. But it’s not impossible.)
Marvel at all of the capabilities of your smartphone in a new light after watching a few minutes of this: