My friend sent me the most wonderful link I've gotten in a very long time. Most things that people send are of marginal interest to us who receive it, but opening this was like hitting the jackpot. All the old images that gave me wanderlust as a kid were there. I've linked the first one I opened at the top of the page, "Colorful Ports of Call," with that wonderfully hideous voice of James A. Fitzpatrick narrating. Happy, childlike, colorful natives abound. As a boy, "Adventures in Paradise" provided the soundtrack to my youthful dreams. All I wanted to do was get out and go.
"See the world the way it was." I love that. I try to provide for you a version of that every day. Or rather, "See the world the way it never was." That is what I mean to say. That's the world for which I longed. It is the world I have travelled to see. And I will tell you the absolute truth--I've been there. I've seen it. I've seen the world just as it was presented in those travelogues and novels. I will not lie to you. I have seen the world the way it never was. It lived in the hearts and minds of "colorful" people.
But all that has been corrected now in the new Information Age. Even the Chinese will not be able to stop the internet. And that, my friends, is a good thing.
Watch the video if you can stand it. Be forewarned, though. Such visions have no place in the contemporary world.
Oh. That narrator reminds me of the even-then-very-old-and-out-o-date movies they would show us in "assemblies" in school. When all of a certain grade (sometimes the whole school) would gather by carrying our chairs to the gymnasium and line them up in rows to watch a "special movie" on the big screen.
ReplyDeleteNational Geographic Magazine was my downfall though I think. I remember it "happier" than it is now though. Jane Goodall helped. And so did Merlin Perkins Wild Kingdom and Born Free.
No more links for you.
Plous.
Yes, he was the original and all others copied him, I think. There is a little W.C. Fields in the way he'll trail off a final syllable.
ReplyDeleteI watched a bunch of those little movies last night. I want to use those phrases in my speech. "People of all creeds and colors. . . . "