Surveying the Gen X landscape and the origins of geek
The journey was once part of the vacation. Hell, the journey might have been the vacation.
There’s an arcade cabinet in the game room of the last postcard, but I can’t identify it. Paging Brad Conrad!
UPDATE (11/12/15) Tom at Garage Sale Finds nailed it. The game is Midway’s Stunt Pilot from 1971. The copyright date on the postcard is 1981, but clearly the photos are from the early ’70s.
Also called the BC25 Capsule, Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower was designed by Kisho Kurokawa and completed in 1972. Although the tower is still letting rooms, it is reportedly endangered by developers who want to build over the architectural marvel, and many of the capsules look like the one below.
I’ll be celebrating physical spaces and the design thereof all week, because there are some things the internet can’t replace. To wit, an abode that combines wood paneling, deep orange and red highlights, and a bloody pole as a means of entrance. The latter was the ideal method of travel before helicopter parents and the American legal system killed everything that was fun.
Suggested changes include replacing the butterflies (?) with a Star Wars poster, and I’m taking requests for ways to better use the space currently occupied by the wall gym (?). Bookshelf? Toy shelf? Wet bar?
The image is from the Flickr collection of Glen.H, one of the things that makes the internet irreplaceable.
There are more, thankfully, and I’ll do a follow-up post when I have better images. The transfers were probably meant to coincide with the 1980 release of Remco’s massive Universal Monster toy line.
Lots more iron-ons and Roach Studios here.
The photos are from the 1978 World Book Encyclopedia entry on Library, courtesy of John Ronald/Flickr. If you care to read my cynical remarks on a culture that believes it no longer needs libraries, try here (and here, in much longer form).
I mistakenly dated two of these designs (Darth and the Falcon) as 1977 in a previous post. I still like Lando the best. More Empire transfers here.
The Star Trek Club and the Middle Earth Club of Mira Loma High School merged in 1979 to form the Science Fiction Club, and the Order of Excalibur Club was added in 1980 “to congress around Dungeon and Dragons and other board games revolving around wizards and magic.”
The graphic on the D&D shirt appears to be the same one the kid in this D&D Club is wearing. The letters are iron-on affairs, so my guess is there was a generic dragon shirt on the market at the time, and the kids had mom press on the letters. Another homegrown D&D shirt here. Lots more D&D Clubs here.
(Image and background via Mira Loma Alumni and Friends)
Thank you, internet. Thank you so much.
The first photo is from Mira Loma High School in Sacramento, California, courtesy of Mira Loma Alumni and Friends. The guy on the bottom left is doing a pretty good Spock impersonation. The second photo is from Tumblr, and I couldn’t find any details when I traced it back to the source. It’s the same year or damn close. Note that the kid in the front row is holding a Tribble.
2 Warps to Neptune 