Desperately seeking sound filmstrips to preserve! Nobody in America is preserving them but me, and most have already been thrown away. E-mail uncommon.ephemera@gmail.com if you can help. These videos cannot be monetized. Any ads are being run by YouTube. If you want to help me keep preserving media, become a patron at https://patreon.com/uncommonephemera, or buy me a cup of coffee at https://venmo.com/u/uncommonephemera. Long before people were content to amuse themselves solely by scrolling an infinite feed of hate-tweets in front of a 75" smart TV that is likely not playing Uncommon Ephemera videos, they would go outside. And sometimes, while outside, they would happen upon mechanical amusement rides such as a carousel, a unique experience usually consisting of wooden horses or animals affixed to posts on a circular platform; a rider would ride atop an animal, the animal would move up and down as the platform turned. Many carousels played music from a "carousel organ" installed in the open center of the platform. Operating on pneumatic pressure, a carousel organ functions similarly to a player piano, reproducing notes from a punched paper roll or pinned barrel, but autonomously operated wind and percussion instruments instead. The music produced by such a machine is the subject of this album. This album was produced and released in a suburb of Binghamton, NY in upstate New York, and for good reason - Binghamton is known as the "Carousel Capital of the World." George F. Johnson, who put the region on the map when he opened the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company (today just a name owned by Rocky Shoes & Boots), is said to have been too poor to ride the carousel as a child growing up in Milford, MA in the 1860s; he vowed that when he was successful this would never happen to another child again. He commissioned six carousels to be built and donated to the Binghamton, NY area, forever free to ride. He didn't foresee YouTube and hate tweets, but his carousels were apparently very popular up until then. For people of a certain age, the sounds of the carousel organ brings back a nostalgic feeling. (For this preservationist, who had occasion to ride Johnson's carousels as a child in the 80s when the organs had fell into disrepair and the operators just blasted the local rock station on a boom-box, not so much. The organs were fully restored later.) But one must appreciate the work that went into this album: First of all, from a purely technical standpoint, there is more high-end on this tape than any this preservationist has personally ever touched. The tape says "Dolby System," which in 1994 should say "Dolby B" or "Dolby C," and could mean anything; playback was muffled and unquestionably wrong with Dolby B engaged, and did not sound incorrect with Dolby ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxz4b8ZQVAw

Desperately seeking sound filmstrips to preserve! Nobody in America is preserving them but me, and most have already been thrown away. E-mail uncommon.ephemera@gmail.com if you can help. These videos cannot be monetized. If you want to help me keep preserving media, become a patron at https://patreon.com/uncommonephemera, or buy me a cup of coffee at https://venmo.com/u/uncommonephemera. Whoever said imitation is the sincerest form of flattery certainly didn't anticipate the breadth of terrible off-brand electronics products Amazon imports from China, nor records like "Christmas with the Happy Crickets." Undoubtedly a simple rip-off of Ross Bagdasarian's gold- and platinum-selling Alvin and the Chipmunks albums (Bagdasarian did not invent the technique, but the Christmas theme makes an undeniable reference), the Crickets are clearly happy with whatever residual profit they can make by simply being adjacent. The "Chipmunk effect" is relatively simple - the backing track is recorded and then played back at half speed while the vocalists sing to it. When played back at normal speed, the vocalists are playing back twice as fast, and an octave higher. Of course, if the vocalists are not careful to control their vibrato, as they are not on this recording, their vibrato also plays back twice as fast, producing an unnerving effect throughout that sounds like they're singing into an electric fan - or, perhaps (I do try to keep this project family-friendly, I really do) with... ahem... "personal massagers" pressed against their necks. The heavy-duty ones that plug into the wall. The ones that aren't for your neck. Ironically - or, perhaps, on the advice of counsel - the only track on the album where the Chipmunk vocal effect is not employed is their cover of Bagdasarian's own "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)," the vocalists instead opting to use cartoonish falsetto that sounds more like drunken surrender than bold artistic statement. Endemic of a culture with no sense of humor who frequently tells this preservationist "some things don't deserve to be preserved" and "some media should remain lost," there is nearly no information about this album anywhere, even on the album itself. No release year, no credits, just a fake-sounding label - "International Award Series" - and in small type on the back, "K. M. Corp. -- Freeport, L. I." Discogs provides the only clue, indicating that "K. M." is Keel Manufacturing Corporation, a Long Island-based subsidiary of Pickwick records that ceased operations in 1981. This album, however, is from many years prior, as it appears to have been released in both a mono and a stereo version, which is an artifact of the early 1960s, this particular specimen being the former. In a world searching for a sliver of norma ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_firu9qCNo

Help me continue to bring you audiovisual gems like this one by supporting me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/uncommonephemera (This is an improved version of a previous upload.) PLEASE NOTE: Uncommon Ephemera is a forgotten media preservation project. While the media presented may have originally been intended for children, its presentation herein is for the purpose of preservation and is not intended to be a presentation directed only toward children. YouTube's flawed implementation of COPPA does not allow this video to be marked correctly as intended for "general audiences." Therefore, this video is NOT intended for, nor directed toward children under 13 years of age, and should not be watched by nor shown to them. For someone with a twisted sense of humor like this author, the jokes about this album practically write themselves. Not that there’s anything actually funny about the sexual abuse allegations against the late King Of Pop (tm) - not that anyone’s even allowed to be funny anymore in 2019 no matter the subject. Let’s just say that the passage of time makes it just a little unnerving to hear Michael Jackson telling a story about the adventures of a little boy to other children. Irony (or is it coincidence? Alanis Morissette doesn’t return my texts) aside, this narrated summary of the 1982 blockbuster “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” is still a cringe-worthy album for a few reasons. Let’s start with the not-so-obvious: It’s not easy to condense a 2-hour movie into 30 minutes - you have to account for Jackson’s performance AND reprise of his song “Someone In The Dark” - and add narration on top of it. From a purely narrative standpoint, this fails, leaving unexplained holes in the story and gaps in continuity. This was likely a non-issue since the film was the highest-grossing of all time after its release; anybody buying this record either knew the story cold, or didn’t care. On the technical side, this album has an unusually wide dynamic range for what was essentially a high-budget children’s album (I haven’t changed it, lest some vinyl purist make my life miserable). Jackson’s narration - which, inexplicably, is drenched in reverb - is significantly too high in volume, and adjusting your listening volume for Jackson leaves you struggling to hear quiet passages. Apparently someone expected the average Reagan-era six-year-old to just crank up her 2,000-watt home theater system and let Jackson’s voiceover turn her living room into a Maxell-branded wind tunnel. On first listen it seemed like the record itself was noisier or dirtier than normal; in fact it was because the quiet passages are film-soundtrack quiet, and you don’t press a high dynamic range record on cheap mass-market vinyl (nor play it near ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPIfnrg7yvs

Desperately seeking sound filmstrips to preserve! Nobody in America is preserving them but me, and most have already been thrown away. E-mail uncommon.ephemera@gmail.com if you can help. Ask me about high-quality videos of your old home-recorded cassettes or short-run custom records. E-mail uncommon.ephemera@gmail.com for a quote. These videos cannot be monetized. Any ads are being run by YouTube. If you want to help me keep preserving media, become a patron at https://patreon.com/uncommonephemera. Ah, Richard Simmons. The flamboyant Jack La Lanne for the Baby Boomer generation. He always starts off so sincere and then it all goes so wrong. After "Sweatin' to the Oldies" but before he fully became a real-life meme, with David Letterman routinely spraying him with a fire extinguisher, and with his Deal-a-Meal business in full swing, Simmons released this cassette. With the portable cassette player arguably at the height of its ubiquity in 1990, a tape designed to offer a half-hour walking workout with guided instructions seemed like a can't-miss idea. Simmons even put it on a 60-minute cassette and repeated the same program on both sides so the listener didn't have to rewind the tape to do the workout again; she simply flipped the tape over and pressed Play. (The copy on Side B is preserved here, as on this particular cassette it is in much better shape than Side A.) But the workout... oh, the workout. How much can one say about a half-hour walk? "Place one foot in front of the other; repeat" is all this preservationist can personally think of. And it seems that Simmons wasn't too far behind. The tape quickly devolves into shouting, bad puns, hallucinations, and dad jokes. At the end of the day, it's a half-hour of cheesy late-80s library music over which a guy shouts a stream of consciousness. But that's kind of what we do here, so, moving on... It's not that Simmons isn't a competent and intelligent fitness guru.It's that when he gets going, he can't help himself. In between completely reasonable instructions to the listener, he tries to let his freak flag fly. but it's all dad jokes and boomer humor. "Ladies and gentlemen," he emotes over a piece of royalty-free library music from Manhattan Production Music, "Mr. John Horton on the sax!" A canned sound effect of applause plays. He improvises fitness-related lyrics at several moments, singing along. "Look at all the people out here walking!" he says at one point, which is relatively reasonable. Then, immediately thereafter, "Oh my g-- look! It's Oprah! Hi Oprah!! And - and look over there! It's Liz! Hi Liz! And over there by the bushes! It's Jane! Oh, Jane! Jane, hi! God, she looks great." One assumes the latter are Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda. I thought you wanted me to walk, Richard, no ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5IRvl574xo