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Vaporman87
shakin steak wrote :
I do have one friend back there that didn't, in my eyes, lose what we had in high school. Thank goodness for him.
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Well stated. Because it is probable the others feel they have gained more than they lost. I can say that with certainty regarding my own life. However, that fact hasn't doesn't eliminate one's sentimentality for "the good old days". 
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shakin steak
Yes. I am always happy to see my old friends, even if our paths have diverged. Better that than one of my closest, who died of a heroin overdose. (Not to say I've ever touched the stuff myself, or come close to that path.)
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shakin steak
By the way, eddstarr, thank you for sharing those wonderful stories!
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eddstarr
Hey SnS, great to see you again!

Ya know, I've been thinking about all the people I used to know as a little kid. The online world came along just in time for me. You guys will never hear from the countless people who all had a hand in shaping that unique world I grew up in.

I can't begin to tell you guys all the stuff I saw, but Jerry Beck put together video clips from the old cartoon I saw as a 5 year old - 
(Say It Outloud) "Mr. E from Tau Ceti!"


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Vaporman87
I concur with shakin. That story of your Navy kid childhood is a nice bright spot. I am so glad you did not have to face the same trials as so many others from that day and time, at least for a while anyway. Brings a smile to one's face.
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eddstarr
Like many from my generation the real story of black america has never fully been told. My experiences were not bleak at all. My neighborhood and the people who lived there were an amazingly worldly bunch. The US Navy drew to me people from all over America as well as countries around the world. 

Wherever the US has a Navy Base on the globe, locals follow back to my hometown to live the american dream. While my neighborhood was all black by law, just go a few miles in any direction and I could meet kids from every continent. 

The UK influence never waned in the Norfolk area. Many grandparents of my school friends still had a slight British accent and many a "playdate" ended up with us kids taking afternoon tea. Food from Asia, India and Europe were standard fare in my hometown. Some of the most popular dishes when i was a kid were German in origin. 

Like I said many times over at Retro Junk, many of you would be welcomed as my friends iif I could take you back with me in my time machine. Only the absence of electronics would take some getting used to. 

After 30 minutes you wouldn't notice all the black faces surrounding you because you would only see the faces of your new friends.




Now - why did I post that clip, (awful editing due to fragments of episodes out of sequence), of "Mr. E from Tau Ceti"? Like other cartoons i saw as a kid, "Mr. E from Tau Ceti" was a mash up of older Soviet animation with video clips from the Hayden Planetarium to create a television show that was interesting and educational. There were several animated series that were bits of Russian animation spliced together with domestic clips. 

Two men, William Cayton and Fred Ladd used obscure Russian and East German cartoons and combined them with home grown animated clips - and the results were quite interesting. These two men used their connections in Europe and the US Air Force/NASA to create TV shows an entire generation of kids would never forget. Who has time for skin color issues when you've got toons to watch?

Racial segregation disappears when you're on a journey to the moon!!!


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Vaporman87
Who would have thought that Russia could have produced something as creative as these animations? Creative enough to be used (in altered form) to entertain even American kids.
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eddstarr
Stay Tuned.

I'm searching for an East German film that Bill Cayton and Fred Ladd turned into a time travel series. I last saw it in 1965 but I can't remember what it was called.

If it's online, I'll find it!

Edd
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eddstarr
The series name is "Journey to the Beginning of Time". 

It's actually a Czech film from 1955 where four friends go exploring by rowboat along the River of Time. They follow the river as it flows through a cave but when the boys emerge from the other side they discover they have traveled back to the age of dinosaurs.

Lots of clips on YouTube but the full movie is only various sub-links. 


I've only seen this film once and it must have been 1966 or 1967, but in my memory it seems more like 1965. I don't think it was dubbed into English in 1965 but anyway it was a long time ago. If you've ever seen this, by all means let me know.
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Vaporman87
eddstarr wrote :

The series name is "Journey to the Beginning of Time". 

It's actually a Czech film from 1955 where four friends go exploring by rowboat along the River of Time. They follow the river as it flows through a cave but when the boys emerge from the other side they discover they have traveled back to the age of dinosaurs.
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Man, the effects for this film seem far ahead of others from the same period. The blending of the dinosaur in the water with the kids in the boat is seamless. It's only slightly obvious that the head of the dinosaur uses puppeteering, which is far more realistic than the stop-motion animation that was so big at the time. All this from a Czech film??? Crazy! 

EDIT: I just noticed that the reason the kids in the boat looking on when the dinosaur has entered the water looks seamless is because IT IS. The kids in the boat in the background of that shot are also puppets. Something I didn't catch at all the first time I watched, and only just now noticed because I was looking so hard at it. 

EDIT 2: Having checked out a few other scenes from the film, I noticed that there is indeed a great deal of stop-motion animation used in it. Just not in that particular scene above. Even so, the stop-motion seems on par with the great Ray Harryhausen.
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