While chatting about the movie Shaker Run with one of our Lucire team (who was not born when the film was made), I noticed that the intersection at Courtenay Place–Taranaki Street–Dixon Street was rather treacherous in 1980s’ fiction (start at 1’56”): Fast forward to 1986 and the Hong Kong film 最佳拍檔千里救差婆 (marketed as Aces […]
Read More… from Wellington’s most dangerous intersection (in fiction)
I still have Adam Curtis’s The Mayfair Set, a TV series charting the decline of British power and the rise of the technocracy, recorded on video cassette somewhere. I consider him someone who can see through the emperor having no clothes, and in The Mayfair Set, he certainly saw through the Empire having no clothes. […]
Read More… from How MG Rover mirrored the developments at Lada
A very good Vista Group luncheon (Jim, Natalie, self), where we discussed: the Gap rebrand; The Hobbit, unions and the BNZ Centre boilermakers’ strike; and my mayoral campaign. On the first topic, we concluded that it was down to a simple cock-up. None of us could see any reason for the Gap to rebrand […]
Read More… from Wellington needs a new brand for a new decade
I can’t let the passing of Bernard Schwartz—a.k.a. Tony Curtis—go without some sort of tribute. I’ve bitten my tongue a few times this year on writing what I wanted to on this website. And with hindsight, I really should have just gone for it, as someone who preaches transparency. Yes, I do indeed have […]
Read More… from A tribute to Bernard Schwartz—that’s Tony Curtis to most of us
I can’t explain why I like the Steve McQueen Ford Puma ad and dislike this one with Audrey Hepburn, even though I think the world of both actors. In terms of tacky, I reckon this one takes the cake as a celebrity endorsement: Come to think of it, this is worse. I believe the original […]
Found on Pete’s Tumblr today. Can you believe it’s been 30 years since the man died? A few weeks later, John Lennon was murdered. Very enjoyable, though I still like the old Ford Puma ad from a decade ago: My American friends prefer a later Steve McQueen ad promoting the Mustang: I still think […]
Read More… from Steve McQueen, advertising spokesman, 1980 to date
I believe we have all the basic Chrysler K-cars of the early 1980s on Autocade as of today. Older readers might remember that at the dawn of the 1980s, Chrysler was in terrible shape and needed loan guarantees—as opposed to a bailout—from the US Government. With Chairman Lee Iacocca at the helm, the company […]
Not hard to see why this series, conceived by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, never took off. According to the YouTube description, The Investigator was a pilot from c. 1973, and no series was ever commissioned. The combination of live action and puppetry do not work nearly as well as in UFO, and the idea of […]