Videodrome
"Are These Guys Just Having Fun?" Watch This 1990s Video About Hacking
Hackers, the phantoms of the opera of the Internet, have had an enormous impact on the rich narrative of our online reality. The video below, the first episode of "Net Cafe" from 1996, begins by describing "the first time the CIA website got hacked...
Watch Marines Turn Vietnamese Villages Into County Fairs In This 1967 Video
In 1965, the U.S. sent 3,500 Marines into Vietnam to support the Air Force's activities and begin the United States' ground war in a region that had already seen decades of fighting. The surge was cause for General William Westmoreland to infamously...
Salvador Dalí's Bikini Exhibit At the 1939 New York World's Fair, Caught On Home Video
Salvador Dali's career has, over the years, slowly been distilled into posters of melting junk that inspire millions of _whooooaaaaas_ in dorm rooms everywhere, but his surrealist work wasn't limited to the canvas. In fact, he designed an entire...
This Retro Donut Ad Has Some Seriously Dark BDSM Undertones
them toasted, and she wants them right the hell now. I'm not sure what Bird's Eye's ad strategy was in the 60s, but at least someone thought they could hock their doughnut squares -- what the hell is that anyway? A lame-ass version of a Pop Tart...
Americans Have Always Wrecked the Environment, Says Nixon-Era PSA
The 70s were a rough time for environmental efforts. Sure, the Iran oil crisis and smog regulations helped clean up America's roads. But they also pushed Americans into poorly designed, gutless shitboxes of cars for the next two decades. Meanwhile...
Unearthing NASA's Earliest Time-Lapse Flyover Videos
Flying, spinning, falling. Repeat. Going to space in the early days seems even less like some graceful parting ways with gravity and atmosphere than in launch/orbit footage we see now. It looks more like riding an old rickety roller coaster, but the...
This 1974 Secret Service Video about House Raids Shows a Quaint Time Before SWAT
Videodrome is Motherboard’s weekly look at the weird old archival footage lurking around the web. Check out old posts here. It’s Friday, which means it’s party time, right? Only problem is, sometimes you’re sitting there sucking back a ‘grita, with...
Forget Obamacare, This Video Claims the UN Wants to Ban Food
I was digging around Archive.org for some archival healthcare videos — you know, because healthcare is kind of a hot topic today — hoping to find some jolly old PSAs from the early part of 20th century with doctors suggesting you smoke meth for chronic...
San Francisco in 1975: Burn Your TVs at the Cow Palace
In 1975, performance art collective Ant Farm burned a stack of TVs in their piece “Media Burn” because they believed the technology of television produced “hierarchy” and “alienation”. One confident member even predicted that their performance would...
Christopher Lee, the Original Dracula, Was Hunting Witches in the '60s
“Burn witch! Burn witch! BURN WITCH BURN!” That’s a very young Christopher Lee shouting his way through a horrifying witch-burning flashback in the opening to 1960’s Horror Hotel. Lee would go on to make a huge career for himself as the Dracula (as...
"Equating Angels with Transistors": Shatner Spent the 70s Rhapsodizing about Tech for AT&T
In the late 70s, Shatner was waxing poetic about the future of transistors from inside a futuristic TV set.