[Syd Thrift]

On an unrelated note I've been watching a decent amount of old baseball games while playing this save, especially the parts I've been doing over Christmas break. In fact, I'm watching the 1969 World Series Game 2 right now. I bring this up because they're playing the Star Spangled Banner right now and the "singer" is... the Suburban High School band. Even baseball, the national pastime in the 60s, was clearly smaller than it is now... or at least much cheaper...

While I'm at it, I'm also getting a bit of a kick out of some of the commercials. I went on a kick of watching old "What's My Line" re-runs from the 1950s and the spots they ran back then were far, far different from what you see nowadays. They didn't really have the medium down, exactly, and a lot of the spots were just a minute of someone lecturing you about why you should purchase their product, or some Announcer Guy extolling the virtues of (product) in Announcer Voice. There's a fair bit of that in 1969 but there's also a clear move towards what you see now, where there's a clear need to entertain the audience while selling the product. There's this series of Right Guard commercials for instance that feature a two-way medicine cabinet where one guy opens it and talks to his neighbor and, like, hijinx ensue... it's not *quite* what you'd see today, maybe - the selling aspect is still way too heavy-handed - but it's a whole hell of a lot closer than the "What's My Line" attempts.