Awesome 1940s

UK watchmaker William Wood pays tribute to the Massey Shaw, a British fireboat that rescued 600 soldiers stranded on the beach at Dunkirk. The bronze 42mm watch features a face inspired by the boat’s engine order telegraph. Its outer rim is based on the red pipes in the engine room. You’ll find a tiny piece of the actual ship’s engine inside its back.

George Lucas got his inspiration for Star Wars from a variety of sources, among them, vintage serials like Flash Gordon. Abandoned Films used generative AI to imagine what a Star Wars movie might have looked like had it been created 40 years earlier. The ship design and voiceover are spot-on, but the creepy AI-generated characters are nightmare fuel.

Chickity China, the Chinese chicken. Postmodern Jukebox and vocalist Emma Smith take on the Barenaked Ladies’ 1998 track One Week, revamping the fast-talking pop hit in the jazzy style of a 1940s lounge act. It’s another brilliant performance from Scott Bradlee’s retro cover band.

NASS took archival footage from Los Angeles and used digital restoration tech to sharpen, brighten, remove noise, increase frame rate, and add faux colorization. It’s a wonderful time capsule of life in a different era, from how people dressed to the cars they drove to how retailers marketed their wares. The footage comes from the Prelinger Archives.

Long before Dude Perfect was posting trick shot videos on YouTube, bowler Andy Varipapa was knocking down pins with such skill that he could target specific pins on two separate lanes at the same time, throw backward strikes, and even bowl with his foot. This vintage newsreel’s voiceover is as entertaining as the bowling.

Muzen’s tabletop sound system has the look of a vintage Bakelite radio out of the 1940s but has modern technology inside. In addition to its AM/FM radio, it works as a Bluetooth speaker and has an auxiliary input for other sound sources. It cranks out 20 watts of power for room-filling sound. Gotta love that old-school tuning dial.

Max and Dave Fleischer’s 1940s Superman cartoons are beloved. But the quality of the public domain videos online isn’t very good. Jose Argumedo ran the episode “The Bulleteers” through Waifu2x, a neural network upscaling application that recovered an incredible amount of detail, especially compared to the source video.

The next time your smartphone acts up, just sit back and watch this 1949 training film from the Bell System, which walks us through the numerous steps that telephone operators had to go through to connect two parties. Just remember to restore your dialing key, folks.