Fisher Price tape recorder: Small, tan, portable, and practically destruction-proof!
The Police’s Synchronicity was the very first album that I owned on cassette tape. I used to listen to it at night on my brother’s Fisher Price tape player while falling asleep. I found a picture of that very tape player online and it got me thinking about the early albums I owned (is “album” the proper term for it if it’s not on vinyl?) Synchronicity was the first cassette tape I had (given to me by an aunt, I think… I was unaware of The Police before owning this) and I LOVED IT. It remains one of my all-time favorite records. I also often listened to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band while falling asleep. I had several Blondie albums on vinyl, but not on cassette. And once I walked up to the Albertson’s grocery store near my house, where they had a small selection of popular records and tapes, and used my allowance money to buy Van Halen’s 1984. I got in trouble for that. My parents didn’t think that a band who would put a baby smoking cigarettes on their album cover would be a good influence on me. I can’t remember the details, but somehow I got to keep the tape.
I used this tape recorder and a 90 minute blank cassette tape to record the audio from Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail off of the TV, thus allowing me to play it over and over and over and over and over again, memorizing all the dialog, like a good little nerd-in-training.
Yesterday I was leafing through a magazine and found an advertising insert card promoting travel and tourism in Texas. Two things caught my eye. One: “You could win a fabulous trip to Houston, TX!” I lived in Houston, and visited frequently when my parents lived there, and I can say with all honesty that Houston is one of the last places on Earth that anyone should want to win a fabulous trip to. Two: Remember those red cellophane decoders from the 1970s and 80s? You’d put the red cellophane strip over an indeterminate patch of red and blue squiggles to reveal a secret message. This advert contains a Texas-shaped red cellophane window, and instructs you to go to their website and hold up the cellophane to your screen to see if you’ve won the aforementioned “fabulous” trip.
The times, they have a-changed.
