“Won’t You Be My Neighbor” Documentary Tells the Touching Tale of Mister Rogers

15 years ago, Fred Rogers left us, but even today, his legacy lives on in the minds of millions of people. “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is a documentary about the life of the man who was behind “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” a show about kindness, accepting differences in others, and overcoming life’s challenges.

[Focus Features]

Oldschool Handheld Video Games Now Playable Online

The Internet Archive has added 75 handheld games to its collection of playable archived games. While there’s a big omission, the collection does have some wonderfully obscure games.

The archive already included thousands of PC, console and arcade cabinet games, but this is the first time it’s added standalone handheld games. Popular in the 80s, the attraction here was the novelty of a video game you could play without a TV set. The fact that the device only played one game (or variants upon a base game) wasn’t an issue to most buyers until the emergence of the GameBoy and similar handheld consoles.

The obvious omission is the Game & Watch series which, hard as it may be for younger readers to imagine, had the selling point of combining a video game with a digital clock (in some cases with an alarm.) It was prime on my Christmas list one year, but I learned an early lesson that you don’t always get what you want. The series is likely not in the archive because of rights issues with Nintendo.

The collection does include a great range of popular and lesser-known games. This includes handheld versions of titles such as Frogger, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, along with more dubious tie-ins such as the handheld MC Hammer game, Batman and Robocop games, and even a Garfield title.

As well as the more traditional screen-based ‘video’ games, the collection includes memory game Simon, the full-keyboard Speak and Spell, Merlin: The Electronic Wizard and even the virtual pet Tamagotchi that was a big late-90s fad.

Cookie Monster Eats a Computerized Coffee Machine in This 1967 IBM Training Video

Here’s an IBM promotional film starring an early version of Jim Henson’s Cookie Monster.

The Coffee Break Machine was used for an IBM training film and performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967 and on The Muppet Show a decade later. A proto-Cookie Monster wanders upon a talking coffee machine that has been set in “Auto-Descriptive” Mode. As the machine describes its parts, the monster eats them. Once the machine is finished, the voice of the machine from inside the monster tells him that he has activated the anti-vandalism program, which harbors the most powerful explosives known to man. The monster instantly combusts. The version on the Ed Sullivan Show is slightly different; in this version, the machine itself is an explosive device. [Source]

[scrappymintz | Via BB]