Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/12/exploding-whale-film-gloriously-restored-in-4k.html
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“Now you can discern individual falling chunks of blubber and everything.”
It’s like the five stages of grief:
Denial - That’s disgusting, there’s no way I’ll watch a whale be exploded.
Anger - Why would they even do that! Nature would have cleaned up that whale carcass anyway!
Bargaining - I’ll bet it’s even more disgusting than my imagination thinks it is. I just need a quick view to confirm that I’m right.
Depression - What kind of sick f**k am I? Who gets their jollies from this stuff?
Acceptance - Just one more slow-mo loop to see where that background chunk lands, and I wash my hands of this whole affair.
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“The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.”
The Exploding Whale story is the true Les Nesman of live broadcasts. Maybe not QUITE as funny as that WKRP episode, but certainly comes closest.
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This is all I wanted for Christmas.
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Here is an article from today’s paper in Eugene about the slow embrace of the exploding whale in Florence
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“…hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement!”
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They’ve found the long lost Myth Busters pilot episode!
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I was a kid living in Portland and at the dinner table when this was originally aired. There was stunned silence at the table as that whale blew up and the screams of the crowd filled the air as they were plastered with a hail of rotting, reeking whale entrails and blubber - then came the seagulls. To this day, it is one of the most awesome things I have ever seen.
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How to make instant tuna salad for everyone…
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Man, that’s so much better than my Bud Dwyer news experience as a kid…
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Much like those proposals for constructs that would warn people of the dangers of radioactive waste for 10,000 years, this video has served as warning for 50 years about what not to do with a dead whale on the beach. With the remastering, perhaps it can still continue its mission for many more years to come.
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Cannot help but think of this
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Yep. It remains my favorite half hour episode of situation comedy in the history of television. And it’s just about time to start seeing it popping up all over the place as the Thanksgiving holiday nears.
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At the 36 second mark on the unrestored version (10:12 on the restored), check out the guy whose job is to sit on top of the boxes of dynamite to keep them from bouncing around too much during transport across the beach to the whale. His leg/boot is visible in the top left of the screen. I’m not an explosives expert, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this was probably another bad idea.
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A monument should have been made out of demolished caddy, placed on the beach as a warning to all. If that was my car, I would have fixed it just enough to make it drivable and used it to tool around town, like a character out of Cronenberg’s Crash.
“Here comes pieces of… ew!”
I still have the old-internet, postage-stamp sized video somewhere. To think I was all of six years old when this happened.
landlubber newsmen about to be land-blubber newsmen
I love it. When everything wasn’t live a lot more thought and writing went into the commentary
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