Movie Gadget Friday: The Pong console from Brian de Palma's The Fury
posted September 3rd 2004 4:43PM
It's time once again for Movie Gadget Friday. Last week Josie Fraser took a look at the Metaflesh Game Pod from eXistenZ, this week's look at a gadget featured in a movie is especially for all our nostalgic Lo-Fi readers:
You don't really need to know anything about Brian de Palma's The Fury apart from the fact that while it's
not a great film, John Cassavetes's head does explode.
De Palma had a lot of money thrown at him after the success of
Carrie and decided to stick with the psychokinetic kiddie theme, although Amy Irving was a mature looking 23
year old at the time of filming. Her character, Gillian Bellaver, upsets the other women at her school (also pretending
to be girls) with her spooky powers. While her mother swans off to France, Gillian moves into the Paragon Institute—a
suburban version of the Xavier Institute for the gifted. Instead of CEREBRO, wood panelling, and labyrinthine secret
passages, the Paragon Institute has a patio area for outdoor breakfasting and extreme rouching in the bedrooms. There's
no walking through doors, changing into puddles or being such a bad kisser you actually kill people here - the students
are only slightly gifted, and that gift uniformly consists of guessing the pattern on the card your friend is looking
at. It may have been more aptly named the Antimacassar Institute.
Gillian is nervous at first - there's only chess, backgammon or being a bit psychic for entertainment. Then she spots
the Institute's custom made Pong console. Later that night she and one of the other inmates have the most fun two women
in their early twenties could have together in 1978. Definitely qualifies for
Ms Krotoski's list of respectful unisex games although
maybe not so good on the depth of story line and character categories.
Laughed out loud several times...every line a zinger!
The two pictures dont show a pong console; these are pictures of an ancient SONY projector television!
The projector part swung out from the middle like a post office or bank feeder when you wanted to watch TV, and it was stored by pushing it back and pulling down a wood colored shutter.
The picture quality was pretty decent for back then, but its flaw was that the projector got in the way of the screen if you were sitting on an ordinary sofa.
It did not come with the two speakers you see in the second pic as standard; the sound came from inside the cabinet, mono of course.
Don't say chess in the same sentence as backgammon - it makes chess look bad ;)