It's also (approximately) Lawrence of Arabia; at least the same principle.

Lawrence puts out a match with his fingers as a showy trick. Someone else tries it, and cries out that it hurts, then asks what the trick is. He replies, "the _trick_, William Potter, is not _minding_ that it hurts."

Teller, from Penn and Teller, I think https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller

That reminds me of the Ricky Jay article in the New Yorker. What an amazing guy! https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/04/05/ricky-jay-magi... It so worth the read and there's no paywall.

I would cut my own finger if it's not from prestige.

:)

Penn & Teller, although someone else might've said that before them.

Wow! There's a look of the Noddy at the end of this video: https://youtu.be/agKiATDgdBs (as well as what the broadcasted video looks like before it).

Funny how there are other frames like "Temporary Fault", that the camera can point to to inform the audience if there's a problem.

The Wikipedia page also mentions how they added "Colour" to promote the fact that colour service is available, and how people were choosing to remain in B&W because the licence fee for colour TV is higher. Meanwhile in 2025 I'm still using 1080p instead of 4K monitors because theye're good enough.

How does this article not include a video or photo of what the logo actually looked like?

The theme is much more subtle and complex than my mental model.

I can recall in an electronics lab in university, we had just built the first prototype of input and output stages for an amplifier, and hooked it up to a function generator playing a sine wave and probably a simple paper-cone speaker. The system had fairly heavy hyperbolic distortion (as I expected from following along with the textbook)... my lab partner (who up until that point I'd thought of as not especially bright, relative to the standards of the course) listened a bit, grabbed the frequency knob, identified a few pitches, and then started playing the main melody of the Doctor Who theme entirely by ear. (And of course I provided a vocal bass line accompaniment, almost instinctively.)

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was just incredibly innovative. I spent a long time learning about them and their techniques as a music student.

> Composed by Ron Grainer, realized by Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

> I'm guessing studios enjoy not paying for all of that now that everyone streams everything and has no time for ancillary content.

Is it that, or is it just that they realized that that stuff is easy material for promoting the film, so they just let various media produce free content about it and put stuff on YouTube?

Wikipedia says it was first marketed only 3 years earlier so it was pretty new https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly(methyl_methacrylate)

"This Island Earth" was featured on MST3K: The Movie!

When "Universal International" appears on screen, Mike Nelson quips "Doesn't the fact that it's universal make it international?"

It's quite a hybrid would count this a in-camera, not pure practical. not to this discount this but to encourage mixing media. Lots of projection mapping going on which is pretty much capturing a digital screen on other surfaces.

Still my overall favorite Windows desktop background.

Here's an anecdote:

I've read that the original Fraggle Rock was the last major puppet TV production that didn't use computers to supplement the puppetry by hiding the strings.

I'm sure the newer Fraggle rock and other newer Muppet shows have impressive puppetry but the viewer is further removed from the actual craft since the image is computer enhanced.

Fair enough, "used to" is probably not the right qualifier. Still, those guys back in the 30's had to be pretty inventive to make some of the stuff they did with very limited technology. Not to disparage people working with practical effects today.

There is also a misconception that digital vfx are necessarily easier, faster and don't take as much skill etc.

My wife and I moonlight as performing magicians. We both love horror movies and when I was a child in the 80s / early 90s I wanted to do sfx makeup and practical fx for a living.

Around the late 90s / early 00s, the movie industry went through this phase where digital vfx / cgi was extremely trendy and hype-driven. Kind of like the LLM hype train in tech today. Movie studios embraced digital vfx to the exclusion of practical for a variety of reasons and with mixed results as far as public reception went. Just like with LLMs, there was this attitude amongst studios and fx shops that digital was "the future." It was driven partly by cost but also by the impression that you can do things digitally that you can't do practically, or can't do as safely or for the same budget.

So during this period we saw a hell of a lot more digital CGI and a hell of a lot less practical.

The state of vfx has matured quite a bit since then, and there has been a modern embrace of practical fx but not for the reasons that people think.

The idea that practical is better than digital is horse shit. But so is the idea that digital is better than practical. Just like with anything, it depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve.

Digital vfx artists are magicians. What they do is not easy. Neither are practical fx artists. Both are highly skilled crafts and disciplines and most movies today use hybrid approaches because it's all about finding the right tool for the job at hand.

What gives a lot of us vfx enthusiasts a laugh, is when studios boast about doing everything practically because of just how much of a bad image the general public has gotten about digital fx.

First, they're almost always lying to you. They undoubtedly do a lot with practical, but there is still a lot of digital vfx going on. But they play fast and loose with what they mean by "digital vfx." Is compositing the same thing as CGI? Not in a strict sense, but it's still an example of a digital effect unless you're filming on film and doing it the old fashioned way.

People have it in their mind that digital is always going to look artificial, and practical is going to "feel" real. Go look at some budget practical fx from the 80s. Some of it is brilliant and has aged well, while others looks absolutely garbage. That's true for digital as well.

The techniques needed to mature, the computers needed to mature and the industry needed to mature. Now a days most people would be surprised how much is done with digital vfx that they wouldn't have realized, because good CGI is invisible CGI. You believe it and don't question it. And amazing results are had when practical and digital are combined. Which, if I can play loose with the term "digital" has actually always been the case since Georges Méliès, a 19th century magician and early film and vfx pioneer, who accomplished a lot of his sfx using a combination of "on camera" practical methods and film compositing (what, pre-CGI, people would call "camera tricks"). A lot of what is done digitally today, takes tricks and concepts that were done by hand with film and lets people do it faster and easier with software.

While I agree that it would be great if artists had more freedom to create whatever they wanted, I think it is overly cynical to dismiss commercial art as somehow lesser. I think this specifically is a great example of that. It isn't really an ad for anything else beyond other art. It doesn't need to be as intricate, involved, and for a lack of a better word, artistic as it is. The only reason it ended up that way is because artists had personal pride in making it. This is true for countless pieces of art. Nearly all the music or movies people listen to and watch today are commercial art. That doesn't make them any less noble than art created by someone who has no financial incentive to create art.