Classic retro horror moment from Panasonic Australia, which has been reminiscing on social media about that glorious cultural epoch in the 1970s and 1980s when horror, slasher and gore-core reigned supreme.
Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween were all box office hits, spawning sequel after sequel after sequel, while creature features like Jaws, Piranha and Sssssss also experienced varying degrees of popularity (and credibility). There’s nothing scarier than a crazy person hunting you down with a chainsaw or an enormous shark looking to take a piece out of your midriff. Well, nothing scarier until the Freeling family moved into their new Californian home and demons starting communicating with daughter Carol Anne through the TV set!
UnderCurrent was still very young with the Poltergeist films came out thought it does remember being absolutely terrified while its older sister and cousin forced it to watch it while on a play date. One memory that has been blocked, however, is Panasonic’s integrated sponsorship of the series, as depicted here:
In addition to the enormous wall of text so popular in 1980s print ads, UnderCurrent loves the very quaint ‘movie houses’ and the dual colour fixed light display: you knew this model was high end because it had both red and blue readouts.
“This video recorder invited the buyer to ‘experience the supernatural’, boasting picture and sound qualities to rival any cinema,” said a current-day Panasonic Australia spokesgeist. “It even performed the ‘unbelievable’ feat of turning an ordinary TV into a stereo TV! If this VHS Hi-Fi recorder, capable of recording up to eight programs over three weeks, seemed to have supernatural powers then, imagine how the folks of the 80s would feel if we could take one of our remote record Blu-rays back for them to play with…we’d probably been burned for a witch.”
Wonderful stuff guys!