Photography Latests Posts in Pictures...But when he wrapped me up in Prime Wrap…!!!January 21, 2019blog / photographyI am new to the hobby of buying and scanning slides and negatives, so while it’s not surprising that I learned a thing to two after my first purchase, it was a little surprising just what I learned. First of all, buying negatives online can be hilariously expensive. You’d think getting junk negatives would be cheap, but that’s apparently only if you do your own legwork. On ebay, everyone’s pricing their shit like they guarantee the vintage shot of the century will pop up in that particular lot of lightly sorted family vacation photos. And if you ever need $5 to $15, try finding old negatives of your grandmother when she was young and stylish. Make sure to point out how attractive she is in your listing. So I jumped on a lot of reasonably priced Goodyear slides. It seemed relevant: I had already been scanning a lot of vintage factory prints and negatives from my dad’s collection, and Goodyear’s headquarters were in Akron, OH, near where I went to college. Until the 70s or even later, the whole city smelled like burning rubber and this was both an air quality issue and a point of local pride; surely there would be some local historical gold in that lot. Instead what I got was several hundred slides from presentations concerning plastic wrap for food packaging. The vast majority were title cards and graphs promising reductions in rewraps, food waste, etc. These were clearly for trade shows for industry professionals who are paid to be very interested optimizing plastic films, but every presentation needs a few wacky slides to liven up the atmosphere. So interspersed with pictures of Goodyear employees on the factory floor and data on the clarity and stretchablity of the new films were these bizarre cartoon slides. Let Goodyear’s products help to make up for the fact that your employees are the worst. A little more research introduced me to the concept of industrial musicals, a genre from a more innocent time. And by innocent time, I mean when corporations had the money and the motivation to commission entire musicals about specific products, some songs of which were basically non-stop sexual innuendo. Seriously, this happened: To give you a taste about how insane that looks from today, when I found that site, I had just returned from an industry conference where one event asked company representatives to be funny and entertaining for three minutes. Just three minutes to present their goods in an amusing manner, with expectations set nice and low because it’s a professional gathering and not a comedy club, and almost everyone failed miserably. Many people didn’t even try, instead simply giving a three-minute presentation. One intrepid group gave 150% by putting together a Fletch parody video, and the crowd was so dry and unresponsive they had a hard time getting this collection of mostly over-50 white professionals to admit they’d heard of Chevy Chase. It was painful to watch people try to let go at a trade show, is what I am saying. So imagine going back to the 50s or 60s and going to the plastic wrap conference to see an entire professional cast sing “my name is (garblegarble anthropomorphized hamburger) and I’m fresh as I can be, but prime wrap keeps the gentlemen from fooling around with me! Whoo!” My mind could not process this idea, and I needed to know more. Fortunately, someone was way ahead of me. Everything’s Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals had recently been released and its companion documentary, Bathtubs Over Broadway, had a showing in Tacoma. Former late night comedy writer Steve Young spent years wrapping his mind around these musicals and his team produced this award-winning documentary that is going to be the best explanation we ever get. It is covered from the artist’s side, though, so we still don’t know exactly why so many corporate executives felt trade-show-muscial-production was such a high priority for so long.... Vintage Scans Into the 80s while plastic is still awesome! Vintage slide & films scans. Sciencey Things Travel
