It's useful sometimes to see history play itself out as it was happening. In this case, the news coverage of Rock Hudson's "mystery illness." As we now know, he had AIDS, but you can see the hedging that goes on about it.
Outside the New York City Apple store, Fox News reporter Laura Ingle interviews people waiting on the line, and Steven Levy, a tech writer who was lucky enough to have an Iphone to demonstrate before its official on-sale time. The interview is interrupted by the attempted theft, not of the iPhone, but of Laura's microphone.
Weird Al Yankovic live at the North Fork Theater, Westbury, NY, June 2, 2007. Amazing video and audio considering it was taken with a tiny little digital camera (Sony Cybershot DSC-W70, movie mode, 3x zoom). Also, notice Al moving slightly from left to right on the screen. The North Fork has an in-the-round stage, so all during the show the band was rotating!
Behold the future! And you can tell it's the future, because the Ginsu Knife has the number 2000 in the LED font. All it lacked was a grid for extra future-icity.
From the National Historical Society of Gettysburg, the commercial claims, the original Civil War Chess Set. If it really was as detailed as it appears to be, it looks like it was a nice set to own if you're into that sort of thing. I looked around and most of the other similar sets these days don't look as detailed.
One of the original Calvin Klein's Obsession perfume ads that went on to be parodied so well on Saturday Night Live in their commercial for "Compulsion."
Beat the heat! One of the legendary Crazy Eddie commercials, and it can never be emphasized enough that this guy is not, in fact, Crazy Eddie. He's Jerry Carroll.
You knew him, you loved him, you learned to live without him, but let's give a twentieth-anniversar y shoutout anyway to the man who gave the Isuzu I-Mark car its moment in the ad sun, David Leisure, a.k.a. Joe Isuzu.
There are two ways to recover from a major gossip scandal; pretend it never happened or make fun of yourself. Milli Vanilli took the latter course, and in this case it worked.
One of a wonderful, wonderful series of ads from Levis for their assorted jeans variants. The music was always pleasant, the people were always pretty in a good way, and the look, even more than twenty years later, shows why Levis should rightfully be considered a fashion classic.
Yes, this is one of the famous TV commercials for Ayds, a simple diet candy that was supposed to help satisfy your cravings for something sweet long enough to keep you from raiding the fridge and eating higher-calorie items. Unfortunately for the company's marketing department, AIDS was starting to become a name known to the public and, well...
Some unknown entrepreneur invented this brilliant new transporation device back in 2001, going by the date stamp on the file I stumbled across on my hard drive recently. Who knows where it came from? Who knows who made it? All I know is that, right before the Segway was launched, some people felt the need to mock the very idea of such a thing. Go figure.
Sometimes it isn't a good idea to try and sell a product by taking its own name literally, as in this effort to dress a man up in blue vinyl, put some tap shoes on him, and have him execute a choreographed routine on a car hood.