In the absence of new episodes of Stargate SG-1 on Friday nights, I have been forced to improvise my own SciFi Fridays. Last week, I spent Friday night geeking out at the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, which as you may have guessed -- if you know who Margaret Mead was (and if you do, yup: you’re a geek) -- is all about science-y stuff in the visual media.
The program I saw last Friday was all about the early days of science on TV, featuring clips from the 1950s shows What in the World? -- a kind of egghead archaeology game show -- and Adventure, which was coproduced by the American Museum of Natural History, where the festival is held. (I saw lots more stuff, too: see my coverage at FlickFilosopher.com for more info.) As cornball as those 50s shows were, I could certainly see how riveting they’d have been had I seen them as a kid, how they’d have gripped me with their focus on ancient artifacts and evolution and exotic musical instruments and the peopling of our planet and all sorts of neat-o stuff like that.
I’d never even heard of these shows before, but there are a few online resouces for learning more: What in the World? was a a production of CBS and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the museum has a site devoted to the series, featuring clips and images and reviews from the time. Classic-TV site Whirligig features clips and such from the British adaptation of What in the World?, called Animal, Vegetable, Mineral.
The funny thing is, I can’t recall any shows similar to What in the World? or Adventure that were on TV when I was a kid. Where was this stuff in the 1970s? I remember lots of TV devoted to pseudoscience, UFOs and alien astronauts and crap like that, and I watched them and got a kick out of them, but that’s not the same thing as real science programming. It’s like cool science TV jumped right over my childhood... though I regressed to watch Beakman’s World in the 1990s.
Looks like I’m not the only one who misses that show...
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