Time for Olde Tyme Techcitement, when we take a look back at technology relics. It’s basically your grampa talking about the good old days, but sooner and totally more reasonable than dumb boring stories about how all this used to be farmland.
Football’s always been an impenetrable sport to me. As a marching band geek, I went to every single football game in high school, often wondering how my classmates on the field understood what was going on out there. (We had an 0-11 record my freshman year, so maybe they were as confused as I was.) Even today, it still just looks like a bunch of men running around and jumping on each other.
It was about this time, 1988 – 1990, that Sports Illustrated introduced the football phone. That, I understood in an instant. It was a telephone that looked like a football! Back in the days when telephones all looked alike and were made to blend in rather than stand out, here was creativity, here was design!
Everyone wanted a football phone. Everyone.
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWtx9JwNzmY’]
I never did get that football phone. My family didn’t subscribe to Sports Illustrated and I had no particular use for the 1991 Swimsuit Issue. Christmas came and went with no free gift card under the tree, and I quickly moved on to other things.
But I marvel to this day at how this ingenious device captured a nation’s imagination, standing above all the other novelty telephonic equipment on the market, almost a precursor to the variety of devices we take for granted today.
Of course, the Ickey Shuffle captured the nation’s imagination at about the same time, so maybe our imaginations were easy pickings.
You can tell those scenes were staged. That woman said, “It’s crazy. No one cuts prices before Christmas.” (Unless of course in 1988 to 1990 Christmas sales were less common than they were now.)
And all the enthusiasm over a clunky phone shaped like a football. Aahhhhh what bygone times those were.