This video, Transformers, is a good example of how far computer animation had advanced in the two short years between The Mind’s Eye videos (1990) and this compilation.
I was 3 years old when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted into law and had little real understanding of what it really meant at the time. As a kid of an age in single digits two of my best friends were a couple of brothers that lived two houses down my block. That their father was black and their mother white, and that their marriage was illegal still in many states, never hit my radar.
February 2, 1960. Greensboro, NC. A sit in at the Woolworth's lunch counter
In elementary school I remember the children’s schoolyard songs and taunts changing over time, racially charged terms no longer accepted by the adults amid our own dawning understanding of bigotry.
In the decades since I have to admit a certain disappointment in an America that still cannot seem to eradicate racism and intolerance, but I have hope that perhaps we have finally beget a generation who will give truth to Dr King’s dream.
For my part, on this day, every year for the last several I have listened to Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ and ‘Mountaintop’ speeches. I will do the same on every year I have left to me. When others are around I turn it up loud enough for them to hear, but it doesn’t matter if it’s just for my ears because the change he dreamed of must take root one heart and one mind at a time.
I Have a Dream – August 28, 1963
An excerpt of his last speech, the “Mountaintop” speech, given on April 3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated.
Brave New World is the fourth installment of Beyond the Mind’s Eye and, besides showing off some good video processing power with the geometric transformations, gives us a bit of a virtual tour through a computer. This is 1992, remember, and the Pentium CPU wasn’t released until the following year, so it’s likely patterned on a 486 mainboard – and well patterned I might say, the board is quite recognizable to an old hardware geek like me.
Whatever your thinking on Michael Jackson, he was a major talent. When this video debuted in 1990 I was blown away. Detailed and complex backgrounds, mixed animation styles, catchy tune. Directed by Jim Blashfield it won the Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video in 1990.
