PICTURE POST II!
- Thread starter Mary Ann
- Start date
West, Craig, Nimoy.
Aren't there like four or five different versions of Fantasy Island now? 
I'm intrigued by the Malcolm McDowell version, I gotta be honest...
I'm intrigued by the Malcolm McDowell version, I gotta be honest...
Malcolm was wonderfully creepy, but that was about all it had to recommend it IIRC.
Not so!
They were 8-Tracks.
They were 8-Tracks.
Explain "8-Tracks"? I'll take a stab. From memory. (I'm a software guy, so please note that hardware is magic to me.) They were designed for automobile audio use: home players existed, but were rare.
The 8-Track cartridge was a cube, measuring something like an inch thick, and maybe three by five inches in the other dimensions, with one end open to expose the tape on rollers.
Inside was a loop of 1/4 inch audio tape. Amazingly (or maybe just crazily), said tape was a continuous loop, yes, with the ends joined via a sticky tape splice (said splice often turned out to be not stong enough or entirely too gummy -- but more on that later).
Instead of two spindles, the 8-track used one spindle. Yes, one (1). The mechanism within the cartridge pulled the tape out from the center of the hub, played it against the magnetic heads, and wound it back onto the outside of the same (only one, remember) spinning spindle.
What's that you say? You mean that it plays out and back onto the same reel? What's up with that? No, it was distilled brilliance, or insanity. One reel. And it worked. Most of the time. Much of the time. Okay, half the time. The tape actually slithered over another section of itself. So long as the lubrication held out, it was an engineering marvel, all that slipping and sliding going on even as you listened.
None of that two-reel crap, with the tape going in one direction, as used in ... oh, film, and old tape recorders, and tape cassettes, and later in VCRs. One reel!
Why eight (8) tracks? I shall explain. This allowed for four (4) separate programs in stereo (2 tracks each), hence 4 x 2 = 8. The player would switch to Track 2 once Track 1 has finished playing. So, once you popped an 8-track into the player, it would happily play the program in four parts forevermore, for 45-60 minutes.
Now, this meant that the contents of the piece had to be divided into four separate programs of roughly equal length, with the roughness spaced out. I guess that a concert with relatively short "numbers" could be accommodated nonviolently, but stage musicals and film soundtracks in this format took a beating. They'd have to break long numbers in half to allow for the track breaks, or repeat things to fill in gaps. And rearrange things, dramatic chronology be damned. So, for example, Eiza Doolittle might sing in perfectly-acquired English and then briefly revert to Cockney due to the restructuring of the plot of My Fair Lady to fit the four quarters.
Now, for the downside ...
When one of these tapes gave you trouble, it was pretty difficult to address. With two reels involved, you have to tighten two each reel and let the tape go from left to right. Not so with one-reel 8-tracks. Remember, the tape that is streaming out of one gap in the casing has to go back into another hole, and it really doesn't want to do so. There was supposedly some artful way of jabbing some aperture with a pencil eraser to coax it into tugging the slack back out and the tape back in, but I doubt that this worked very often. I used to see discarded (and flattened) 8-track tapes in the street quite often. I only know that I had to discard any tape that became so unwound.
In summary, 8-Track audio was contrivedly simple to load, but had some massive drawbacks.
The 8-Track cartridge was a cube, measuring something like an inch thick, and maybe three by five inches in the other dimensions, with one end open to expose the tape on rollers.
Inside was a loop of 1/4 inch audio tape. Amazingly (or maybe just crazily), said tape was a continuous loop, yes, with the ends joined via a sticky tape splice (said splice often turned out to be not stong enough or entirely too gummy -- but more on that later).
Instead of two spindles, the 8-track used one spindle. Yes, one (1). The mechanism within the cartridge pulled the tape out from the center of the hub, played it against the magnetic heads, and wound it back onto the outside of the same (only one, remember) spinning spindle.
What's that you say? You mean that it plays out and back onto the same reel? What's up with that? No, it was distilled brilliance, or insanity. One reel. And it worked. Most of the time. Much of the time. Okay, half the time. The tape actually slithered over another section of itself. So long as the lubrication held out, it was an engineering marvel, all that slipping and sliding going on even as you listened.
None of that two-reel crap, with the tape going in one direction, as used in ... oh, film, and old tape recorders, and tape cassettes, and later in VCRs. One reel!
Why eight (8) tracks? I shall explain. This allowed for four (4) separate programs in stereo (2 tracks each), hence 4 x 2 = 8. The player would switch to Track 2 once Track 1 has finished playing. So, once you popped an 8-track into the player, it would happily play the program in four parts forevermore, for 45-60 minutes.
Now, this meant that the contents of the piece had to be divided into four separate programs of roughly equal length, with the roughness spaced out. I guess that a concert with relatively short "numbers" could be accommodated nonviolently, but stage musicals and film soundtracks in this format took a beating. They'd have to break long numbers in half to allow for the track breaks, or repeat things to fill in gaps. And rearrange things, dramatic chronology be damned. So, for example, Eiza Doolittle might sing in perfectly-acquired English and then briefly revert to Cockney due to the restructuring of the plot of My Fair Lady to fit the four quarters.
Now, for the downside ...
When one of these tapes gave you trouble, it was pretty difficult to address. With two reels involved, you have to tighten two each reel and let the tape go from left to right. Not so with one-reel 8-tracks. Remember, the tape that is streaming out of one gap in the casing has to go back into another hole, and it really doesn't want to do so. There was supposedly some artful way of jabbing some aperture with a pencil eraser to coax it into tugging the slack back out and the tape back in, but I doubt that this worked very often. I used to see discarded (and flattened) 8-track tapes in the street quite often. I only know that I had to discard any tape that became so unwound.
In summary, 8-Track audio was contrivedly simple to load, but had some massive drawbacks.
The tape was also lubricated to facilitate it coming off the interior of the one reel, which tended to build up on the playback head which meant you had to really clean that playback head.
My dad had one of those players on the work bench in the garage when I was little. I don't think I've seen one since. I think at some point his had an accident with a hammer.
I once threaded the tape from a busted 8-track on standard reels and played it on my tape recorder. It worked, but it played two quite different tracks simultaneously (and necessarily cacophonously), because standard tape recorders used four tracks to get stereo in both directions of tape passing.
With an 8-track player, you could shift from Track 1 to Track 2, or 3 or 4 with simple button presses. I know that when a bad song came up, I could switch to another track, though it was unlikely I'd hit the beginning of the number on any other track. Crazy!
(This behavior did lend itself to some interesting interactive uses. I found a novelty tape that would ask you a question at points and have you select an answer, then vary the rest of the story depending upon your choice.
Or, a tape could quiz you, prompt for an answer, and either say that you were right, or else tell you the correct answer and direct you elsewhere. Good for children's learning applications.
(Mind you, in the last two cases, the tape player didn't make any decisions: it just played on mindlessly, though the listener heard what he or she had chosen.)
You might find this film description interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Movie
The "soundtrack" listing clearly has the numbers divided up into four "sides" rather than the usual two, which suggests that it was derived from an 8-Track release ... which is entirely proper for a lowbrow film posing as classic operetta!
With an 8-track player, you could shift from Track 1 to Track 2, or 3 or 4 with simple button presses. I know that when a bad song came up, I could switch to another track, though it was unlikely I'd hit the beginning of the number on any other track. Crazy!
(This behavior did lend itself to some interesting interactive uses. I found a novelty tape that would ask you a question at points and have you select an answer, then vary the rest of the story depending upon your choice.
Or, a tape could quiz you, prompt for an answer, and either say that you were right, or else tell you the correct answer and direct you elsewhere. Good for children's learning applications.
(Mind you, in the last two cases, the tape player didn't make any decisions: it just played on mindlessly, though the listener heard what he or she had chosen.)
You might find this film description interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Movie
The "soundtrack" listing clearly has the numbers divided up into four "sides" rather than the usual two, which suggests that it was derived from an 8-Track release ... which is entirely proper for a lowbrow film posing as classic operetta!
And you get post #10000 in the thread!! Congratulations!!
Unfortunately, there's no money in the budget for a prize, but please enjoy this ephemeral sense of accomplishment!
Yay!! I'll chug this imaginaryAnd you get post #10000 in the thread!! Congratulations!!
Unfortunately, there's no money in the budget for a prize, but please enjoy this ephemeral sense of accomplishment!
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