It's the player piano roll, the 8-track cartridge, the Apple Newton, the Microsoft Bob (or Microsoft Sidewalk) of its day -- the 1981 RCA SelectaVision Capacitance Electronic Disc! Basically, it looked like a grooved black vinyl LP in a plastic sleeve, but it played video instead of music: "The magic of the RCA VideoDisc, a simple, affordable record that, like magic, can bring not just sound, but sound and pictures -- clear, beautiful pictures -- right into your living room! A record that can bring you 'Casablanca'... or Miss Piggy... or Woody Allen... or 'The Godfather'..." My favorite moment in the promo above is when Jesus approaches Rod Steiger and the chorus sings: "Bring the magic home -- with R-C-A!" Remember, too, RCA was the company that brought you the [ahem!] miraculous new Dynagroove and Dynaflex long-playing record formats.
Like its flat circular competition, the silvery 12-inch pre-CD/DVD optical storage disc systems known as DiscoVision or LaserDisc, you also had to turn it over to play, say, the "second side" of a feature film. Discs cost $15 and players between $299 and $500. Sans remote, apparently. None of these new LP-sized disc systems quite caught on with the general public. Soon, Compact Discs would set the standard for optical storage at a diameter of 122 mm (about 4.72 inches), which would also be used for CD-ROMs, DVDs, and DVD-Rs. The question of why digital information of any sort should be encoded onto a cumbersome physical object (requiring needlessly complex delivery systems including shipping, packaging, storage space, a player/recorder separate from the media itself...) is the a technological challenge "home entertainment" companies are still trying to figure out.
The above is a six-minute overview ("Bring the Magic Home" -- look for the trademark skip/stutter in the "Lady Sings the Blues clip), archived by databits, who offers quite a collection of ancient technology guides and promos at YouTube. To watch a guided tour of the SelectaVision production process (including a peek inside the lab with a guy in a shower cap), you can (as they used to say in the early days of the World Wide InterWebs), click here (for Part 1) and here (for Part 2).
"To the people behind the scenes, the people at RCA, it begins with raw materials as pure as those used in medicines -- plus a myriad of parts and procedures."
5 Comments
You know, I happened to learn (a little) about CEDs a few years ago when I was tracking down a particular version of A Christmas Carol. (It turned out to be the 1982 Australian version, which I watched as a child and which has since colored my feelings about every other version. If there's no Shrouded Corpse and The Ghost of Christmas Past is a female, I don't wanna know.) But this gave me a good opportunity to really investigate what this old technology was all about.
A Christmas Carol at CED Magic
i remember seeing one of these in Los Angeles 1979 - i was only 7 at the time and i thought if i put my "star wars" soundtrack LP in it, i could watch the movie....i was close...
Raymond: Wow, I'm impressed with those scene-by-scene visual comparisons of various CED versions of "A Christmas Carol."
I always liked Mr. Magoo's best: "LA! LA! La-la la-la la!" I want James Dean to voice Bob Cratchit and to tell Magoo/Scrooge (Jim Backus): "You're tearing me apart!"
My school had two of these players and a bunch of movies in a store room. It seems like they showed us a Disney movie off it one time. I mainly saw it when we had to get something out of the storage shed outdoors and they were all piled up heh. I never got to look at em too closely but read about them online a couple years ago because of those memories.
Being a pretty big fan of learning about old technology (more so than new technology), I was flabbergasted when I saw one of these players in a local antique mall. I had no idea what it was how it worked, nor did I buy it. Instead of great things like Casablanca, Miss Piggy, or Woody Allen, all there were at the booth were about four or five porn and B-movies. If this thing had caught on, we would have been able to go to video stores called The Caddy Shack.
Also, the phrase "Twelve Miles of Grooves" sounds like the best Miles Davis record ever.
I love the sexual innuendo in part 2 of the production video with words like
screw holes, automatic insertion, pick up arm, and distribution pipeline. I hope when I lose my virginity that I can "perform at optimum levels expected."
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