The NASA Rocket Countdown Came from a 1929 Fritz Lang Film | Hacker News Reader

The NASA Rocket Countdown Came from a 1929 Fritz Lang Film

atlasobscura.com

114 pointsprismatic31 comments

I went looking for a picture of the retired analog countdown clock from the article, expecting to see a giant clock face with hands.

But as far as I can tell, the analog clock they're referring to is the one in the photo on the right here [1], which most people would probably consider digital.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/content/new-display-counts-down-for-new...

It doesn't use a digital display, so how can it be considered digital?

"Digital [adj]: (of a clock or watch) showing the time by means of displayed digits rather than hands or a pointer."

Imagine the confusion in an alternate universe where the clockmakers of old decided to call the pointing sticks "fingers" instead of "hands".

  A digital clock is a type of clock that displays the time
  digitally (i.e. in numerals or other symbols), as opposed 
  to an analog clock, where the time is indicated by the 
  positions of rotating hands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_clock

I think scoreboards would be considered digital displays even if they use lights to make the numbers.

Digital. Digit-al. It displays the time in terms of digits.

Does it display digits?

FWIW, It's not just the AtlasObscura writer. NASA calls it analog on the page referenced: "Workers remove the analog countdown clock from its mount..."

Yes. It's an analog digital clock.

And I guess something like this[1] is a digital analog clock.

[1]: http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Cl...

...And his follow-up contribution to illustrate a modern economy circa 2015 was "Metropolis."

"...Made in Germany during the Weimar Period, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and follows the attempts of Freder, the wealthy son of the city's ruler, and Maria, a poor worker, to overcome the vast gulf separating the classes of their city. ..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film)

Metropolis has quite an interesting history:

The original cut was lost and only fragments survived. Since the 80s the most popular version was one made by Giorgio Moroder (the same guy that worked with Daft Punk on the Album Random Access Memories). Over the years different versions and scenes were found all over the world and since 2010 there is version that is considered close to the original.

Popular culture is full of references to this movie, from "The Fifth Element" to Queen's "Radio Ga Ga".

I can also highly recommend "M"[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_%281931_film%29

I also recommend M. Given the fame of the original film, it is a little bit surprising that they haven't remade it recently.

There is a 2000 Anime and Manga remake of Metropolis. Very interesting variation. (but not close to the original)

The whole film is on Youtube. If you are just interested in the countdown scene the link is below:

https://youtu.be/9MVga1D6rRQ?t=5626

EDIT: The clip is also in the original article but a bit different. This link shows only the last 10 seconds, it has English translations of the titles and has no modern background music.

I'm a big fan of colorized history over on Reddit. The old pictures become much more appealing this way.

Wouldn't it be great to colorize these classics, and also remove the title cards and hire some foley and voice artists to create a soundtrack for them?

These are artworks, and even though they are made with limited technology they are built to those constraints. You can't update the medium and not lose the essence of the piece.

You don't make super mario more appealing to modern audiences by rendering it from first person. We should build emulators so that people can play the original. Or you can draw inspiration from the original and make a new piece that works in modern ways.

So I think it would be waste of effort. Colorizing historical photos is cool, but I don't think it's the same thing.

> You can't update the medium and not lose the essence of the piece.

I don't find this argument compelling at all. If the director at the time had color film and sound, he certainly would have used them. After all, how many silent films have been made after 1930? 2? B+W persisted for a while because it was so much cheaper than color film, but now that that differential has gone away, how many movies are released in B+W? 1 every 5 years? Even film noir is done in color today.

Yes it's a technical limitation which he would not have chosen today. I agree.

In the silent era they had to work around the missing technology and that affects acting style, story points, the pacing, lighting, set design etc. This created silent film. To reverse those creative decisions you need to redo lot more than color and sound.

Even today when you shoot b+w movies and probably use color camera you light it totally different. Just simply desaturating the image does not work.

The examples in Reddit's colorizedhistory subreddit show how good and effective colorization is. It doesn't have to be effective, and those colorized pictures don't quite look like color photography, but things don't have to be perfect to be a huge improvement.

Not really, the pacing is completely different from modern movies.

And there still is an audience which watches it in cinema in 2015, so there's no need to vandalize it for mass appeal.

I know that colorizing it will offend some people, but the originals are not damaged and people who want to see the originals can.

Is it so much different from converting existing movies to 3D?

I watched a restored print of 1929 "Wings" and they added a few foley sound effects here and there. It dramatically improved watching the picture. The flick is already in HD, and looks great. Colorized, foley soundtrack, and dubbing will make it much more fun to watch.

I know a lot of younger people who simply refuse to watch anything in black&white, and I don't blame them.

Pictures of the clock from when it was being dismantled:

http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/images/small/2014-4558-s.jpg

http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/images/small/2014-4559-s.jpg

http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/images/small/2014-4560-s.jpg

http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/images/small/2014-4561-s.jpg

Fritz Lang, in turn, may have been inspired from the old portrait photography days whereby the subject is counted down to -- to indicate that the long process is almost over after many many minutes.

The Nazi party had this film withdrawn from release. They felt the film was realistic to the point of giving away German technological secrets.

I was just skipping through it. This film gets things right many scifi films don’t to this day. Which is astonishing, really. There was no real need for it to be this accurate. I mean, there just was no space flight, so you could just as easily have picked stereotypes about what it’s like to fly to space … it’s not like anyone (safe some scientists) would have noticed.

(I love the scene with the water bottle in zero g with some nice special effects. They got the nice round water bubbles right, but didn’t quite go for space travelers catching them with their mouths. I don’t think putting those bubbles in a drinking glass would be as easy as they show it to be. But probably easier from a special effect point of view.)

This attributes a little too much insight to Lang. Multi-stage rockets had already been invented. It is quite likely that people developing rocketry at the time were already using count downs and Lang was inspired by what he witnessed. This is the first documented countdown on film. It doesn't necessarily represent a novel invention.

If the article is about a specific item, there should be a picture of the item in the article. Without it, it's nearly worthless.

The second picture in the article shows the countdown clock. The article just confuses it by calling it "analog" and comparing it to a wristwatch, but in fact most people would consider it digital.

It should be on every nerds bucket list to view live rocket launch.

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