I was watching Good Morning America this morning and saw that New York City's last public payphone station...the enclosed booths disappeared long ago...has been removed, to be placed in a museum. I remember in the old Superman fifties TV series how the Man of Steel would use telephone booths as a convenient changing station from his alter ego Clark Kent whenever a need for his superhuman heroics arose. Then, in the 1978 Superman movie starring Christopher Reeve the first time Kent needed a phone booth he looked at an open-air phone station...like the one they just removed...and realized that it just wasn't going to work. The old movies are full of folks using those good old phone booths...Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest and The Birds, James Bond's Doctor No, and the classic spoof Airplane! instantly come to mind. Oh, and the 2002 Colin Farrell thriller Phone Booth naturally puts the outmoded old structure center stage. And there's that old Gomer Pyle episode where Jim Nabors tries to put coins back into the phone that had earlier released them all...and gets arrested for theft. Just think, back in those primitive bygone years people used to actually go outside without any phones to serve as a lifeline to whatever services they might need to access...scary times, scary times. I guess it's our era's version of the old cliché where the wise old man would tell the spoiled young'uns that, in his day, he used to have to walk five miles in the snow to school. Sadly, a smartphone is nowadays often deemed so crucially essential that some even feel hesitant to leave it behind them when they go into another room in their own home. It's the real-world version of Bilbo Baggin's "precious" ring when one day he realizes he misplaced it and goes into a panic...
Showing posts with label Telephone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Telephone. Show all posts
Saturday, May 28, 2022
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