Let us remember......

We can't forget Bill and Ben! I also used to watch Tales of the Riverbank with Johnny Morris.

 

I had forgotten this one

 

Nobody has mention Monkey yet.

 

OMG....I thought Monkey was just weird
I thought you meant Pipkins at first

 

Admit it. You only thought it was weird because you found Tripitaka strangely attractive even though 'he' was supposed to be a boy.

Its ok. Tripitaka (which incidentally means 'the three baskets' and relates to buddhist scripture) was played by a very hot woman, the late Masako Natsume (gods rest her soul).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masako_Natsume

 

No, I just thought it was weird

 

I suppose it was really. Compared to wooden puppets and creatures that lived in holes on the moon, and rag dolls that came to life when nobody was looking

 

I can say no more....

 

Monkey was classic!!

Captain Scarlet was even better....................

 

Its funny, not so long ago I was just thinking how life as an adult is pretty rubbish compared to when you're a kid, when everything was so clear and sharp, and colour was so sharp and vivid. I figured its just that now I've seen enough that nothing stands out any more, but look at the colour and listen to the clarity in this.



I saw this in black and white by the way, which may or may not explain why as a kid I saw stuff sharper than now.

 

I still like this "episode" of Rainbow........................

 

I always like looking at old video tape, like 70's. The colours always look washed out to me, but the recordings themselves bring back so many memories.

 

That's the technology of the day to blame. The UK system (PAL, Phase Alternate Loop) actually carried no colour information at at all. Just 'luminance' (brightness) info. At the start of a line scan, you get a 'colour burst', a very short signal of high intensity that told the hardware that the luminance was to be split into 'chrominance' (colour) of an intensity signalled by the amplitude of the colour burst. As video tapes (which are just magnetic) decay, they amplitude of the colour burst declines, so the vividness of the colour also declines, this looking washed out. As the magnetic field on the tape decays further, the colour burst becomes insignificant, not enough to exceed the threshold required to indicate colour splitting should happen, but the luminance signal still goes through AGC (Automatic Gain Control) so you still get the picture, only in black and white, which is why decayed tapes often still give reasonable image quality in monochrome. When it decays further still, the line sync signal becomes weak and ambiguous, which is when the picture starts waving, and weaker still, the field sync signal becomes unreliable, which is when the picture starts rolling on the screen.

But anyway, I digress. This is 1980s - 1990s video technology, which reminds me off my youth (I studied electronics at college, specialising in radio and video). It was uber primitive compared to how stuff is done now of course.