Thursday, May 22, 2008

Yeah, I Remember Records

I never called them 45s, but yeah, I remember records. My parents had a whole stash of them and still do. Nothing worth any money mind you, just good old classics like John Denver and Anne Murray. I definitely had a few favorites back in my younger days, most of which were either kids records or show tunes, but they were still records.

I remember putting on "Annie" and running around our cream colored couch with big brown flowers on it while listening to "It's A Hard Knock Life." I always thought the "Fox and the Hound" record was the coolest because instead of black vinyl it had an actual picture on it. We also had "The Muppet's Rainbow Connection." There was an "Electric Company" record but I think that show was a little before my time and I had never watched it. I never listened to that record because I thought something called "The Electric Company" sounded really boring. We also had a "Raggedy Anne and Andy" record that told a story. It was kind of creepy to me back in the day. Something about the voices I think. Of course I thought that the red cheeked grouchy puppet that lived in the spinning carousel type house on Mr. Roger's Neighborhood was creepy too.

I also remember when CDs first came out. My family was pretty technologically advanced for our time and I remember my dad bringing home our first CD player. I used to love to just hold a CD and look at it. They were so beautiful with all their rainbow colors compared to cassette tapes and records . For the longest time we would go to the mall every Saturday and my parents would stop into the music store and buy a couple CDs. That was back when they used to come in long skinny boxes, not just wrapped in a plastic coating like today. It's amazing how much technology has advanced in my lifetime. CDs are already becoming obsolete with IPODs and other devices now that can hold your whole music collection on something less than half the physical size of a CD. Makes you wonder what it'll be like in another 20 years.

Computers have also come a long way since I was a kid. I don't ever remember not having one at home. We used to have all our games on the big 5" floppy disks and we'd type a run code into DOS to get it to start. Occasionally we'd forget what the special code was and have to call mom up at work to get it. When it came to computers mom always had the answer.

Around that same time in my life was when Nintendo came out. That was the coolest thing in the world. Three buttons was all you needed and as far as I'm concerned it's still superior to all the new complicated gaming systems out there. What other gaming system can you fix by blowing on it? We had probably 40+ games within just a couple years. I wish I still had it. Believe it or not, the Nintendo caused the breakup with my first boyfriend when I was about eight or nine years old. He never let me play. To this day many men still favor gaming systems to women. Some things never change.

1 comments:

Rachel said...

We also had "The Fox and the Hound" on CD. I would always weep at the end when the fox and the hound's little kid voices would float over the music, "We'll be friends forever, right?" "Right."