TV

Hello Dave

The whole family went to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with Dick Van Dyke and we all thought it was one of his best movies ever.  I particularly liked the flying car. The family also went to see Funny Girl which I thought was good for a musical which I didn’t care much for.    There was the World War II movie Where Eagles Dare with Clint Eastwood, but it was the science fiction movies I liked best. There was Planet of the Apes in which Charlton Heston, in the classic scene, sees the top half of the Statue of Liberty rising up out of the sand in front of him, falls to his knees in despair, condemning humanity for destroying Earth.  Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women came out and sounded like an interesting science fiction move as released but I never did see it.  But then there was one of the most classic science fiction movies every made, 2001: A Space Odyssey written by one of my favorite authors, Arthur C. Clark.  The thing that amazed me most about 2001 was the technology which seem like it was just a few years into the future, unlike Star Trek with its super futuristic warp engines powered by dilithium crystals, phasers, and transporter beam, 2001 had technology that looked like an extension of the current space program, something that I could image could happen in 33 years in the future.  The graphics were so real, I could imagine myself there walking on the space station and walking on the moon.  I really liked the struggle between the astronauts and the intelligent computer HAL who was shown as an always watching though panels throughout the spaceship with a pulsating red eyeball, when HAL goes crazy and decides to kill the astronauts.  I always thought, “They should have programed HAL with Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics and it would not have happened.”

Radio

There were many good songs on the radio that year, "Sittin' On The Dock of the Bay", "Hello, I Love You", "Born to Be Wild", "I've Gotta Get a Message to You", "Lady Madonna", "Hurdy Gurdy Man", "Magic Carpet Ride", "Sky Pilot", and many others.  "You Keep Me Hangin' On" by the Vanilla Fudge which in 1971 became one of my favorites a few years later when the album was in Uncle Corky’s album collection that he left with me when he got drafted into the army. Corky had numbered each of his albums with a piece of tape with a number and I think he had a list somewhere listing each album. When he got out of the army….  I’m getting ahead of myself, that part of the story will come in its time.

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Updated: 05-29-2023

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