The world used to be different, indeed. When I was little, our TV was a B/W roundie, and our car had a funny bullet nose and weird fin things on the back, sort of like a rocket ship. I wondered where it might have been, before it became our car. Mars, like the rockets in the picture books? Yes, there had to have been a mysterious time in the past when everything had shifted from black-and-white to color... but you could still see the before-shift world on the round television, as the TVs hadn't made the shift yet. It was just one of those things, like how kids at some mysterious future point in their lives (around teenage years) would become grown-ups. Presumably at that same time they would get to choose whether they would become men or women.
Just being able to see things from far away while sitting right there in the living room was magical. I remember when we changed to a square screen; it wasn't a square thing to do, back then, but modern and cool. Color? Yes, TVs had it then, but it was new, expensive and fancy! Having a color set was something to brag about, something for friends to come over and "ooh" and "aah" at and be jealous of.
Someone tried to help update the old B/W days, once... they called it "colorized". It didn't quite work...
Yep, the world was different then. In those days having a "woodie" meant you had a car with wooden panel trim on the sides, being "gay" meant being happy, and "bad" was the opposite of good, not a synonym for it. Things were cool, not kewl, and being fat just meant you were that way, just like some people were short or had red hair. "Phat" didn't exist... although perfectly hot and tempting women were certainly around. Metal, wood, leather and cloth were used to make things... a little bakelite (which was already a little old fashioned) and plastic, too, but plastic wasn't all that strong so it wasn't used that much. The world had its problems, sure, but for the most part seemed simpler and cleaner. Most people believed that good was good and bad was bad, and most things were one or the other, instead of everything being muddled up in the middle. They lived that way, most of the time.
Gee, I sound like an old guy already....
