6 Stories That’ll Take You Back in Time

[Music] that's a rarity to go to a roller skating rink and find live music there most other roller rinks have gone digital but head to Southern California and you'll find one of the last remaining rinks to employ a live organ player [Music] my name is Dominic Angelo si and I own the moonlight Roller way I've been playing rollerskating music for 70 years there are only about 10 or 15 roller rink Organists left in the country in the 40s and 50s most of the rinks around the country used live organ music and then when Elvis Presley and the Beatles all came into the picture in the 50s and 60s most of the rinks around the country faced out the live organ to play recorded music but not the moonlight roller way Wednesday through Monday the moonlight roller Way plays recorded music just like most roller rinks but one day a week Dominick gets to dust off his Hammond organ and throwback to a different time a Tuesday's I play from 8 o'clock till 10:30 the people that come on Tuesday nights our mixed crowd a number of the skaters are old-time skaters in their 70s and 80s who like to skate to the organ music this place is special because it's been here for so long it's a historical landmark people have skated here through the years met their boyfriends girlfriends here raised a family bring their grandchildren and it's something from the past and I just want to hold on to at least one night a week I love coming here I come every day and I enjoyed my customers they appreciate it and they like the music I have no plans to stop playing the organ I'll play it as long as I'm here [Music] every radio definitely has its own personality this is the boombox your grandmother or maybe a great-grandmother would have carried around this reminds me all football actually if you live in a split-level house this is the radio for you this radio has never been opened before this one's a breeze there's not a whole lot of documentation that's still around on how to do this you're going to read from I like it you get them in wrong the radio blows up sometimes I work on these radios for hours and hours and hours and just when I think I'm about to give up something clicks in my mind and it works to me this radio looks very science-fiction like and this would be like the the console of a spaceship that start off as a hobby and now it's become a little bit more than that I have several hundred at any given point these radios are found in dumps and garages and old closets there were families that probably sat around these radios and listened to the first man land on moon FDR's fireside chats were probably playing through these radios digital technology sterilizes music old radio sound a lot more organic a lot warmer when I repair these radios I feel like I'm giving them back their old voice the Mortal Kombat games are some of the most iconic of all time and when you're winning nothing my name is Steve Ritchie and I'm a pinball and video game designer in the early 90s Steve was making pinball machines in the very same building a couple of guys were developing the second Mortal Kombat game upstairs was pinball downstairs video development Steve did the voices for a bunch of pinball machines he designed most of the time I do I do bad guys and this is the voice that I have and it can be I am the Black Knight did for ac/dc a devil I'm on the highway so when the Mortal Kombat creator needed a new voice for the announcer he knew what right where to go and pulled Steve into the recording booth and he started telling me say it like this fatality he would say no more breathy lower fatality all this beeping that little R had to be wrong lately okay round 1 fight oh that was it oh yeah after you add the effects you know it's a lower pitch leadership well cool okay Johnny Cage wins Mortal Kombat has spawned a dozen video games comic books TV shows and a film franchise featuring this awesome techno song but these contribution to Mortal Kombat isn't what he's known for its pinball because Steve he's made a lot of pinball machines I've created more pinball machines than anyone else in the pinball history but whether he's a voice in a video game or designing a pinball machine the thing Steve loves most well we'll let him tell you I like to put the player in a spot of an adversarial relationship a battle you're beating your balls snatching and ends of things to experience normal combat you know it's a video game but when he says something it's like round one fight it's just like he's scary and you are battling this guy hey Steve Jim just kidding you should do it Steve [Music] imagine two acres of land that are covered with Las Vegas history dating from the 1930s up to present day and when you walk in they tell a story the Neon Museum was founded in 1996 and we rescue signs there are over 200 signs in the neon boneyard Las Vegas is a town that is known for imploding all of its hotels and not preserving its history because we're always wanting to move on to the bigger better brighter thing there's beauty in the warned signs they're a glimpse into the past you see that rusted paint you see the broken neon and it's kind of bittersweet the folks who designed these are really master craftsmen they can to blow the neon that's in them the yucca motel the intricate artwork the glassblowing that had to go into the design of the actual yucca the start a spire reaching up into the sky it's becoming an art form that's going away we preserve a lot of those memories so people who didn't see the signs actually on the strip are able to come here and get a real sense for what they were like in person [Music] in the 1920s and up through the 1950s Hollywood had a particular way of talking come around about No what are you doing up there to person anyhow book club really really it was called the Mid Atlantic or transatlantic accent but we don't speak like that anymore so what happened to know why it disappeared we need a little history the accent is sort of a British American hybrid linguistically speaking it has three main tenants one drop the are like mother and father to emphasize the tea like raita and winter and three soften her vowels like dongs and call and this accent was acquired so there's no line tracing it back through history some believe it came out of early radio when bass tones were difficult to hear but many attribute its popularity to write or eat it's Skinner she actually wrote a book called speak with distinction which was the book to help you learn the accent either way it was a language for the American upper class people like FDR Katharine Hepburn Cary Grant they all used it but after World War two the accent dwindled in popularity with a growing middle class and aristocratic accent was no longer fashionable as for Hollywood acting methods changed and the accent was just too fake so it disappeared mostly if you've ever seen the show Frasier Niles and Frasier spoke with an updated mid-atlantic accent I love lovely [Music] bimbeau always an arcade favorite but if you grew up in New York City between 1940 and 1976 playing pinball meant breaking the law in 1933 congressman Fiorello LaGuardia was elected mayor of New York City one of the first items on his agenda was to crack down on the Mafia he honed in on mobile and slot machines and surprisingly pinball machines he's exceeded in getting pinball declared in the legal game of chance and in 1940 the city banned the game this of course drove pinball machines underground to seedy parlors and even seedy air strip clubs the public disdain for pinball wasn't as high as it was for slot machines which made it hard for the mayor to gain public support for his raids on these newly illegal pinball establishments that was until 1941 after Pearl Harbor the government established the salvage for victory campaign which called on Americans to turn in scrap metal to be used for the war effort enter mayor LaGuardia who took this opportunity to seize and destroy more than three thousand pinball machines all in the name of helping the military of course 30 years would pass before New York City declared pinball game of skill not chance and legalized it [Music]

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 58,103

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, documentary, docs, retro, vintage, old, radio, roller skates, pinball, oldies, classic, neon, slow, New Releases, Great Big Reels, Weird & Fun Knowledge, weird, fun knowledge

Id: zDi8PHzTtKI

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2019