There’s a charity shop down the road chock full of old tech, I was thinking of getting a portable DVD player for old time’s sake, but VHS VCR it is!
The horror that is VHS revived for horror movie release
If Alien: Romulus were a zombie movie, The Register could understand why 20th Century Studios has announced that it will release the film on VHS – the video cassette format that hasn't been relevant for two decades and had a crap reputation even in its heyday. Given the flick is (SPOILER ALERT) about aliens, the decision seems …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 24th October 2024 08:37 GMT MJI
Portables
The cameras are format independent, but do have their own plug system.
You could mix and match.
JVC camera and Sony portable was common. I reckon the most common JVC accessory was the 14 pin K adaptor. AFAIR GXN70 and SLF1
I have the Sony portable, an excellent portable and was the best PAL 1/2 inch format one there was.
Camera was quite good, but the tube wore out around 2000. Mine was HVC4000P.
Now to results, I edited together a lot of Video 8 and Beta footage, freshly captured to PC and edited at DV level.
The Beta footage was higher resolution, the old tube camera had slightly better colours, but the Video 8 was much lighter.
Auto focus & white balance not an issue as I could happily focus with a big viewfinder on the 4000, and the WB controls worked well.
I also once did a comparison, same event two people videoing. My 3rd generation copied from edit copy (Beta -> Beta -> Beta) was better quality than the filmed and edited on VHS one.
I also found later Beta -> SuperBeta -> VHS was as good as something first generation VHS.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 13:09 GMT abend0c4
I can give you a LaserDisc player and a shelf full of oxidising discs. I'm pretty sure the local charity shop wouldn't want them! At least at the time the picture quality was pretty good compared with VHS (or at least for NTSC: PAL was always a bit noiser owing to its increased bandwidth).
Amongst my retro tech collection, I previously also had a couple of phonographs and a bunch of cylinders which, in the end, occupied a great deal of space for what was simply curiosity value.
I've belatedly come to the realisation that as historical artefacts they're not that far removed from that jumble of old VGA and SCSI cables that I never quite got around to sorting out.
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Friday 25th October 2024 09:36 GMT Bebu
Pornographs?
I imagine a pornograph is a hollow cylinder with a distorting mirror inside which restore the NSFW anamorphic image printed on the cylinders' inside surface. You view along the cylinders' axis.
An example of an anamorphic image René - Descartes because the other search engine options were KC III and selection of beturbinned potenates. Oddly searching with "bikini" added mostly returned non anamorphic images of Princess Leia and an anamorphic image of the crucifixion. I imagine AI is involved and has joined some extremely peculiar dots.
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Wednesday 23rd October 2024 21:10 GMT Natalie Gritpants Jr
Re: They did it for the publicity
Given that no one in their right mind will go to the trouble of unboxing and playing it, I predict they will just relabel a bunch of old unsold stock.
Who can forget the joy of finishing a kids movie only to find the last 20 minutes of a grumble flick that had been overwritten by the guy at the car boot sale.
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Wednesday 23rd October 2024 21:37 GMT Not Yb
Re: They did it for the publicity
The technology isn't much different from current computer tape drives, so... probably not too hard to find someone willing to accept some amount near "a lot of money" to retool. I suspect "$24.99" will be quite a distance below the recommended sale price for these.
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Wednesday 23rd October 2024 22:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: They did it for the publicity
"I'm just wondering who in the hell is going to manufacture the tapes?"
I would imagine someone from their marketing dept has gone around all the local charity shops and bought up all the second hand pre-recorded VHS tapes that are at least as long (playing time wise) as this new film.
Then a quick clean and stick a new label on the tape and have some printer make some new outer sleeves that the tape can be put inside and then a clingfilm wrap to keep it looking fresh and bobs yer uncle - a NEW FILM on what looks like a NEW VHS tape.
They just have to hope that NO ONE tries to play it and perhaps in 30 years time, when these tapes find their way into the charity shops of the 2050s, there will be even fewer VHS machines around to prove that 20th Century Fox never recorded the film onto these 2nd hand tapes !!
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Wednesday 23rd October 2024 19:40 GMT mark l 2
I suspect when people buy a bands latest album on limited edition coloured vinyl for £35+, it just as a collectors items and a large percentage never actually play it on a record player. So i guess thats the market 20th Century Fox are aiming this VHS release at, for fans of the Aliens movies to buy it to sit along side their Aliens DVD box set.
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Friday 25th October 2024 12:34 GMT tiggity
My vinyl gets played (coincidentally, currently deciding whether to upgrade cartridge on my old Pro-Ject* or go all in and get a high end turntable rather than a budget one.
Ironically I gave one of my picture disks away to a friend recently (who is captain of a team I play for & usually drives us to matches with no payment required, so it was a thank you gift).
.. as they do not have a record player, so it won't get played any longer (though I think it will be displayed on the wall - picture disk being used as a picture)
TBF, they are a big fan of that particular band and and have all their music on CD, but like many people these days don't have anything to play vinyl with.
* The old, no frills P1 model
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Wednesday 23rd October 2024 23:53 GMT The Indomitable Gall
Then you're not the target market. They're clearly looking to get a handful of Alien fans excited about completing their VHS collection. Not to mention all the relatively cheap market. How much would they have had to pay to get as much advertising space as this stunt has got them column inches...?
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Friday 25th October 2024 13:53 GMT AIBailey
Betamax was the better format, assuming you were happy with a tape that could only record for an hour, until the Beta I recording mode was dropped.
The vast majority of Beta machines supported only Beta II and Beta III, which were close enough to VHS quality.
The long held myth that Beta was vastly superior to VHS is based on the original technical specifications. The visual advantage that original Beta spec offered came at the price of short recording time. Once Sony moved to the slower tape speed of Beta II (and removed the function to record in Beta I from their machines), that visual advantage was lost.
It seems clear that 99% of the people that go on about how much better Beta was, haven't actually used one.
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Wednesday 23rd October 2024 21:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'm a fan of vinyl because I love old dance tunes that you can't get anywhere else (you can rip them ofc) but VHS? What is the point in that? Back in the day it was great but now? Even if I sourced a VHS player and cleaned the heads and opened it up to set the tracking to it's optimum setting (yeah I did that back in the day) I'm going to get really crap quality regardless unless I get a TV to match but even them it's not going to be good. Bit pointless this really.
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Wednesday 23rd October 2024 22:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: It figures.
"Given that Romulus is the worst movie of the Alien franchise, it's only natural that they'd want to release it in the worst of consumer video formats."
There've been a few video formats that are worse than VHS. Philips might lead the way with N1500 series then the N1700 range and then the flippable V2000 taking the Top 3 "worst VCR" positions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Cassette_Recording
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Wednesday 23rd October 2024 23:17 GMT Martin an gof
Re: It figures.
Didn't V2000 have electronic tracking though, which made it technically superior to the other home formats?
If Video8 (which also had electronic tracking) could have been launched a decade earlier, it would have been a much better format in all regards except runtime, speaking as someone who used a 2-part VHS-C video camera (camera attached by umbilical to a shoulder-slung recorder) at school, and later borrowed a friend's on-the-shoulder all-in-one full size VHS camera which used a Lead-acid battery.
M.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 05:52 GMT Neil Barnes
Re: It figures.
It did indeed, and the pictures were indeed superior. And it was actually (IIRC) a rather nice system, with audio tones superimposed onto the video track so the head knew which way to move (rather than wiggling and trying to centre the wiggle, as the professional video recorders did. (My word, it's a long time since I had to think about that professionally!)
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Wednesday 23rd October 2024 23:25 GMT Martin an gof
VHS could be "ok"
A well-maintained VHS deck with good quality tape gave a not-half-bad picture*, but the only movie I ever bought on VHS was the "last ever release" of the "original cut" (whatever that means) of Star Wars which came out when Lucas announced he was going to re-edit the films and use digital technology to alter and add scenes.
It wasn't the vertical resolution which was the problem, so much, it was the horizontal bandwidth of luminance and particularly chrominance which combined to make slightly eye-crossing images when viewed on a good screen, which is worse with today's huge LCD screens. VHS was never designed to be displayed on a pixel-perfect 50" screen.
S-VHS (and related formats such as Beta-S and Hi8) solved much of the horizontal bandwidth problem though didn't do a huge amount for the colour bandwidth.
And the only VHS deck I ever bought was an S-VHS model which still works to this day. It won't connect directly to the modern TVs I have, not because they don't have composite (or s-video) inputs, but because they just can't lock on to its slightly erratic timebase. No tube TV would have that problem, but it's one easily solved by getting a decent s-video to HDMI adapter (many only do composite) which also has the advantage that the resulting HDMI signal can be fed into the back of my AV amplifier and thus distributed around the house. And on some off-air S-VHS recordings (not many of those; the cassettes were a bit pricey), teletext is still decodable.
Same trick with the Laserdisc player (though the TVs never had a problem with its timebase) and I can also watch the remastered Star Wars in all their Laserdisc glory.
M.
*sound was still awful though on a deck without HiFi Stereo
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Thursday 24th October 2024 02:10 GMT Marty McFly
Re: VHS could be "ok"
Buried somewhere deep in the attic, and only watched once or twice are my VHS copies of the 'last ever' Star Wars release.
Yeah, I know the deeply seated purist preferences for the original unmolested as-released movie. With that acknowledgement toward 1977 movie quality, the updated versions are a better cinematic experience with improved audio & video.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 09:38 GMT brainwrong
Re: VHS could be "ok"
The problem with VHS was that people didn't generally give a shit about quality. They used cheap tapes in cheap machines, then used the abomination that was Long Play, which doubled the recording time and shat all over the picture and sound. The author claims DVD's were better, they were shit too (lower vertical resolution, terrible banding). S-VHS was the dogs bollocks, though.
Hi-Fi audio on VHS offered better quality sound than compact cassette, and much longer record times. Panasonic machines were able to record audio only, with no video input signal. I used to record John Peel's show off the radio onto VHS, and scan through all the crap to find the gems to put on cassette.
Here in PAL land we got 576 picture lines, because that's what the signal contained. No scalers.
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Friday 25th October 2024 08:46 GMT MJI
Re: VHS could be "ok"
Then some people bought top end Panasonic kit, which was still worse than anything better than a VTC5000.
Bring in a SLC9, SLF1, SLHF100, or a SLHF950 and all bets are off.
SVHS improved the luminensence, but the colour resolution was still very low.
Pity PAL never got ED Beta.
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Monday 28th October 2024 11:12 GMT Martin an gof
Re: VHS could be "ok"
I'm sorry, DVDs absolutely were better than VHS. A lot of the "DVD is no better than Laserdisc / VHS" comments at the time DVD was released came from the 'states where, believe it or not, most TVs did not have RGB or component inputs and so people were connecting DVDs to their TVs using composite cables. In those circumstances no, DVD was basically on a par with Laserdisc for 4:3 content. Connect via RGB however - which European tellies had largely been fitted with since the early 1980s - and the picture (on a decently mastered disc) was superior in many ways, not least of which was that DVDs tended to come as anamorphic for widescreen images, rather than letterboxed which was common on LD (and VHS). No vertical scaling required to fill your widescreen tube.
M.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 00:29 GMT Kevin McMurtrie
The blurry things are screaming
Nobody composes movies for VHS anymore. You need to zoom in tight to faces and the center of attention because the resolution is so low. "480" is the good dimension. Horizontal is 150 to 400, depending on the format. The horizontal color compression is extreme.
The studio would have to pan, scan, zoom, and desaturate the hell out of this for anyone to figure out what they're watching.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 01:31 GMT Tim99
Intermediate technology
Mrs Tim99 had an extensive collection of VHS tapes. I borrowed a VHS/DVD recorder to transfer them to disk. Some time later I transcribed them with an iMac and Handbrake. She can now appreciate them on a 4K screen or an iPad. I like old movies from the 1930s many of which are available as digital files - The 50+ years older movies (often in B/W) are almost invariably better.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 01:35 GMT PRR
Nobody else worked with the FIRST "home" videotape, Sony Reel to Reel VTR VCR?
We had also a 5" reel 'shoulder recorder', and a 'portable' camera with a shoulder/gut brace cuz you could not hold the weight of the camera and the CABLE for very long.
Many-many-many years later we learned this was a stage in Bob Crane's self-amusements. It gave instant feedback and let him avoid bribing a film processor.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 03:13 GMT hoofie2002
No idea
Was this written by someone who never owned a VCR ?
PAL was much better than NTSC [never the same colour twice] and I can remember getting videos with full hi-fi FM encoded stereo sound even with dolby pro logic encoding. I had a really good sound system with full surround in 1993 for my video pleasure.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 05:48 GMT Blue Shirt Guy
Re: No idea
Indeed. VHS hifi stereo sound was so good we used the machines in the recording industry as loggers and for sending out audio demos for people to play at home. It was as close to CD sound as any analogue consumer format ever got and I doubt many people could tell the difference. It was also reliable, with domestic machines recording and playing 24/7 for months without issues.
The picture was far from perfect compared to broadcast TV but fine on TVs of the time. The early linear audio recorders (mono and stereo) did have bad sound but that was fixed in the 80s when they added the hifi stereo track. SVHS also vastly improved the picture for camcorders, though Hi8 was better.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 11:19 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: No idea
Yep, it was slightly worse than what was broadcast (assuming the original was live or film, because U-Matic was truely awful) but generally watched at a distance from a small screen where the resolution didn't matter.
For most of the world, it was cheap and convenient and allowed the binge watching of favourite shows before these became endless repeats. I didn't get into DVDs until these became significantly cheaper and, even then, it was only a couple of years before their digital files found other forms of distribution. On a modern screen, upscaled MPEG-2 (DVD) isn't much better than upscaled VHS because the quantising of colour gradients in MPEG-2 is fucking awful, though understandable given the technology at the time of the specification but still awful. And people still confuse resolution with other aspects of digital encoding: yes 1080p is better than 720p but you have to look hard to spot the differences.
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Friday 25th October 2024 09:27 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: No idea
Well, there's no doubt that DVD is better than VHS both in resolution and handling of detail, but I always found the artefacts very annoying. But my point is that, as long as we were watching on CRT screens with a diagonal of less than 80cm, which was the standard until well into the new millenium, at the distance of 2 - 3 metres, the visual differences were marginal. What DVDs did offer was convenience: skipping through chapters, and easier access to "bonus" material.
Anecdotally, people I knew tended to buy more box sets of TV shows than they did films.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 08:43 GMT xanadu42
Don't forget Vinyl
The soundtrack will be available on Vinyl from November
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien:_Romulus_(soundtrack)
https://variety.com/2024/music/news/alien-romulus-score-benjamin-wallfisch-vinyl-1236106988/
Luckily brand new record player's are still widely available - I have seen many listed at less than AUD$100 which will play at 33⅓, 45 and 78 rpm (not that I would pay that little if I were in the market)
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Thursday 24th October 2024 09:06 GMT anonanonanonanonanon
Dookie Demastered
You must have missed Green Days Dookie Demastered . https://www.dookiedemastered.com/
They rereleased the album for the 30th anniversery with the songs on obsolete and mostly terrible formats, like a Piano Roll, a Floppy Disk, and a Big Mout Billie Bass among others.
I think there is a general trend for this, there are video game demakes/demasters
And personally I can see the appeal, I was a huge fan of Alien and Aliens, and if I knew someone with an old tv and vhs, I might be tempted to watch it in this format.
I went to watch Romulus in the cinema, it might not be for everyone, but I loved it.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 13:57 GMT Russell Chapman Esq.
Why am I reading about ancient tech I don't want to own?
VHS tape, like audio cassette tape, was horrible. Some things are best left in the past.
As for vinyl, back in the day, did sound more spacious than CD but with HIRes audio today, one doesn't need to deal with the snap crackle and pop, but still gets the sense of space in the music.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 14:29 GMT Marty McFly
Re: Why am I reading about ancient tech I don't want to own?
>VHS was horrible
Quit comparing it to modern tech. Compare it to what existed at the time.
If you wanted to watch a movie, you probably saw it in a theater. During that same era movie theaters were evolving from carbon arc lights & manually changed reels to platters with high intensity bulbs. Not to mention mono sound coming from some loudspeakers hidden behind the screen - no Dolby Stereo, much less THX.
Or you waited for it to be broadcast 'over the air' (after being heavily edited and "Modified to fit your screen"). You didn't get the big screen resolution from film projection, but you didn't have to go somewhere to watch it either. You could stay in the luxury and privacy of your own home.
What VHS (and Betamax) really did was time shifting. Now instead of watching entertainment on someone else's schedule, I could watch it on demand and on my schedule. And I could do it without leaving home. I could even record live broadcasts for later viewing when my time permits.
VHS was far from horrible. It was revolutionary. What we enjoy today in 4K on-demand streaming is only evolutionary.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 15:03 GMT Jason Bloomberg
Bring back VCD
I have a fair bit of VHS and related tat from when I used to be a non-pro videographer. I gave that up when the police became too eager to imagine battery harnesses and cables were suicide vests.
I'll raise one for every journo and camera crew still in the hot zone and all their murdered colleagues.
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Thursday 24th October 2024 21:09 GMT Blackjack
Hate to burst your bubble but DVDs resilience and durability is worse that VHS. You know how many times I had to replace a damaged VHS tape? Three times in ten years. You know how many times I had to buy again a DVD movie in just one year? Four times, even if it was not the same movie four times.
What DVDs have is both higher quality of audio and video and enough space for have more that 90 minutes of video.
Some times DVD movies even came broken when you bought them. So you better had the box open at the store to check they were not damaged or no refunds.
Oh and lets not forget DVDs infamous regional locking. Sure you can nowadays easily bypass it but that wasn't the case for a while.
VHS may have been crap but it was durable crap that wasn't region locked.
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Friday 25th October 2024 13:02 GMT ThatOne
> You know how many times I had to buy again a DVD movie in just one year?
Nonsense, this is a case of YMMV, and I wonder what you do to your disks. You know how many times I had to buy again a DVD movie in just one year? Never ever. Not even in 10 years. All my DVDs (and I have over 200) are still perfectly working. Go figure.
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Saturday 26th October 2024 03:18 GMT Mark #255
DVD rot
DVD rot is a thing, and I've lost a couple of discs to it.
It's often a manufacturing issue, so one title I have is notoriously prone: both the original disc and its replacement (bought shrink-wrapped from a reputable place) have visible degradation of the metallic layer.
Fortunately I was able to rip the disc using a solution found online: immerse the disc in a detergent solution, dry it and immediately rip, before the water dries out from the metal layer.
This works because the cause of the DVD rot in this case was a lack of sealing at the edge of the disc; over time, the metal layer corrodes. The detergent solution allows water to penetrate, which (briefly) gives sufficient reflection of the laser beam. However, long-term this just accelerates the rot, hence the requirement to rip the disc: the procedure preserves the data, not the physical disc.
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Monday 28th October 2024 13:06 GMT Martin an gof
Re: DVD rot
Or CD rot where the sealing was found to be much, much more important once they switched from (IIRC) gold reflective layers to aluminium.
Related to Laserdisc rot, where the glue used to sandwich the two halves together came out at the perimeter.
Personally? As far as I remember I've only lost one DVD in the 22-ish years since I started buying them, and that was probably a mechanical problem with the way someone (looking at a then-five-year-old) put Toy Story 2 back in the box; the plastic cracked around the hole and it was difficult to get the thing to centre and play. Eventually managed to rip it, despite Disney's best efforts, and there's now a DVD-R in the box for day-to-day use. DVDs are pretty robust on the whole, and that's speaking as someone who allowed his children access as soon as they were physically capable of holding a disc without putting jammy fingerprints all over it.
As explained previously, I didn't tend to buy films on VHS, but we did do a lot of timeshifting (after 15 - 20 re-recordings even good tape wasn't working properly any more) and we bought a lot of children's VHSes. Crinkled bits, snapped tape and (again) after 15 or 20 plays just plain old poor(er) picture quality. At least DVD - so long as it doesn't suffer another failure - doesn't deteriorate with every viewing!
M.
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Monday 28th October 2024 13:17 GMT Martin an gof
VHS was actually only around 250 lines
Apologies if I have misunderstood the comment, but you might be confusing horizontal "video lines" (that is, horizontal bandwidth) with vertical scan lines. To get an image to show on a TV, there must always be the correct number of scan lines, and VHS does indeed provide 2x 312½ lines. Horizontal bandwidth was expressed as "TV Lines" in analogue days and was intended to demonstrate how many individual vertical lines could be discriminated across a properly adjusted display. VHS was indeed capable of about 250 lines. Colour was a different matter of course :-)
M.
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Monday 28th October 2024 22:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Why? Just WHY?
As I sit here with my 43in 4K monitor and a USB DVD player plugged into my 64GB RAM 1TB M2 Quadro A4400 16 core Threadripper Dell workstation, I see below me at street level the plebs, grubbing along on their ticket into nowhere (thanks Ozzy), trying in vain to recreate the wanton videographic fetishes of their youth. And all I can think are the comments from the Greeks about Paul of Tarsus: What are these babblers [20th Century Studios] trying to say?" :)