soviet television

Urban explorers break into the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to film the abandoned Soviet Buran space shuttles. The video shows the decaying orbiters and the dangerous trip to reach them.

An Asianometry explainer on why the Soviet Union, once a leading computing power, fell far behind the US in computers by the 1980s. It traces the gap from the 1960s onward despite strong state support for science.

A song by Pig With The Face Of A Boy that narrates the history of the Soviet Union from a worker's view, set to the Tetris melody.

Part one of Sergey Kuryokhin's 1991 live Soviet TV hoax in which he claimed that Lenin was a mushroom. With subtitles, it shows how a surreal absurd theory can be made to seem proven on live television.

The first episode of Adam Curtis's 1992 BBC series Pandora's Box, on the engineers' plot, examining communism in the Soviet Union and the rise and limits of technocratic central planning.

A one-minute clip from James Burke's 1978 BBC series Connections in which he walks past a Saturn V rocket and a timed take-off happens behind him in a single shot, with no green screen.

Technology Connections explains how analog television produced moving images without computers, covering scanning, CRTs and standards like NTSC and PAL. It is part of a series on analog TV.

A panel at The National WWII Museum on the Battle of Kursk, moderated by Keith Huxen with historians Robert Citino and John Parshal. The discussion covers the armored engagement and the German, Soviet and US approaches to tank production.

The main theme from Eduard Artemyev's score to the 1979 Soviet film Siberiade, an electronic piece that features the ANS synthesizer.

A Channel 4 Equinox documentary on the NK-33 engines built for the Soviet N1 moon rocket and how they ended up in the USA. It includes rare footage and interviews with veterans of the early Soviet space program.

A short clip of former KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov in 1984 describing Soviet ideological subversion of Western societies. It is a political commentary excerpt from his longer lecture.

A New York Times Opinion documentary tracing Soviet and KGB disinformation, from the 1980s AIDS origin hoax to modern campaigns like Pizzagate. It features former KGB officers and the people who tried to counter the lies.

Matt Parker explains the history behind NTSC television running at 29.97 frames per second rather than 30, tracing it to the backward-compatible addition of color. He walks through the arithmetic behind the odd ratio.

A 1983 Los Angeles lecture by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov on how the Soviets carried out ideological subversion of target societies through propaganda. He walks through demoralization and normalization stages.

Gaming Historian recounts how Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris in the Soviet Union and how a fight over publishing rights spanned the West, Mirrorsoft, Nintendo and the Cold War. It runs about an hour with chaptered parts.

Technology Connections explains the early history of analog color television, from the 1954 start of modern color broadcasting, and how shadow masks work in CRTs. It is the first in a series on how analog color TV works.

Jafar Husain of Netflix explains at React.js Conf 2015 how Netflix runs React-style rendering without the DOM on smart TVs and game consoles. It uses a canvas-like API for performance.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained shows how the Atari 2600 draws images with almost no video memory, by having the CPU race the CRT beam line by line. It walks through the techniques in detail.

Adam Something gives a short, tongue-in-cheek defense of Soviet-era prefab apartment blocks. He argues they offer efficient, dense housing with schools and services built nearby.

Kevin Spacey, giving the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival, urges TV channels to give viewers control. He points to Netflix's House of Cards release as evidence that audiences want to watch on their own terms.

Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback and Sorrows of Empire, lectures on parallels between the decline of the Roman and Soviet empires and the United States. He argues the US shows the same symptoms: overextension, corruption, and an inability to reform.

The first episode of the BBC's 1982 television series The Computer Programme, introducing home computing to a general audience. It surveys mainframes, early personal computers such as the BBC Micro and Commodore PET, and the changing computer market of the time.

A short clip showing how the Soviet Union used a nuclear explosion to extinguish a blown-out, burning gas well.

A 1967 CBC clip in which Hunter S. Thompson faces a member of the Hell's Angels on television. The studio audience's reactions are a striking window into the era.

CNN footage of correspondent Omar Jimenez and his crew being arrested live on air by police while covering protests in Minneapolis in 2020, after identifying themselves as press.

A short amateur clip of a Moscow grocery store from 1989, filmed by a visiting production worker. The shelves look sparse, and the uploader adds a note on the hard-working people living under a system that did not reward them.

Seven-minute footage of Fred Rogers testifying before a US Senate subcommittee in 1969 to defend federal funding for the new Corporation for Public Broadcasting. A skeptical Senator Pastore starts out abrasive and is won over during Rogers' brief, calm testimony.

A Ukrainian documentary about the liquidators who cleaned radioactive debris off the Chernobyl reactor roof in two-minute shifts. It presents their firsthand accounts and footage of the work.

Stargate Studios' 2009 virtual backlot reel shows before-and-after shots in which green screen and compositing replace locations in ordinary TV dramas and comedies. It shows how much of a seemingly real show is computer generated.

A Sesame Street animation from 1979 with music composed by Philip Glass, showing geometric circle patterns.

The 1985 Channel 4 TV film 'Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future', the origin of the computer-generated TV host Max Headroom, with a soundtrack by Midge Ure and Chris Cross.

Seventeen-year-old Ray Kurzweil appears on the TV show I've Got a Secret in 1965, playing a piece of music composed by a computer program he built.

Technology Connections follows up on his analog TV video to clear up the debate over whether CRT phosphor dots are pixels. He explains the shadow mask, color triads and how they relate to the scanned picture.

A short classic Sesame Street clip in which a mother sends her young daughter to the store to buy a loaf of bread, a container of milk and a stick of butter.

A short Reuters news clip showing declassified Russian footage of the 1961 Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. It shows the blast and the mushroom cloud.

A one-minute clip of an episode of Hawaii Five-0 featuring a blatant Subway product placement.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff lectures on how political debates are framed through language and metaphors tied to values, and on the moral worldviews behind progressive and conservative politics. It was given in 2005 at UC San Diego.

Robert Lustig of UCSF lectures on the biochemistry of sugar, arguing that fructose and lack of fiber drive the obesity epidemic via insulin. It is the widely viewed 90-minute talk that popularized the anti-sugar case.

Elizabeth Warren's 2007 Berkeley lecture, when she was a Harvard law professor, on why middle-class families are under growing financial strain. She draws on bankruptcy research to examine rising costs of housing, health care and education.

Douglas Adams gives a talk at UCSB, recorded shortly before his death, about the odd lives of animals and what they suggest about humanity's future. It draws on his Last Chance to See work and is funny and wide-ranging.