Posted on 02/12/2019 5:26:02 PM PST by SamAdams76
It's snowing, sleeting, icing and doing other global warming type things in Connecticut so I decided to start a blog so that I could post stuff there and then link it here to Free Republic where all you people would click the link and send me revenue.
But it's almost 8pm and I don't have the energy for opening the GoDaddy account apparently necessary for starting such blog so I'm just going to go ahead and post the entire comments of my blog tonight here.
Now I have a bit of an interesting piece of trivia concerning the hit song "Logical Song" by Supertramp that was the lead single from their massively successful album "Breakfast in America." Highly recommended album of progressive pop-rock if you are into that sort of thing.
Anyhow, there was an engineer named Richard Digby-Smith who worked on that album and during the recording of "Logical Song", Supertramp was looking for some interesting sound effects to buttress the track.
Some of you old timers might remember the early era of electronic "video games" - that really started taking the world by storm by the late 1970s. Most of them could be found in arcades where they were displacing pinball machines at a rapid rate. I miss pinball machines. Perhaps my next blog will be about that and I'll put it behind a paywall and expect all you guys to come pay for it. But that will have to be another day.
So getting on with the story, there was a big market for simple "hand-held" games that you could find down at the Radio Shack, back when Radio Shack was still a cool place to go and had a store in just about every shopping mall in America. The only aggravating thing about Radio Shack back then was that they always asked for your address at the counter so that they could send you their catalogs. Even if you went there just to buy a battery, they would still ask you for your address. Even if you told the you already gave your address on your previous 67 visits, they would still politely ask you to give them your address and they would write it down with ballpoint pen on carbon paper. The white copy was for the store, the bluish copy went to corporate headquarters and the canary copy went...well I have no idea where that canary copy ended up to tell you the truth.
So after a while, I started just giving them fake addresses. I would just make them up out of thin air. Such as 314 Blueberry Drive or 69 Clover Tree Hill Road. Each time the cashier would smile and thank me and I guess Radio Shack sent out a whole bunch of catalogs during those years that ended up coming back as undeliverable due to invalid address.
Sorry about that Radio Shack. I was young and immature at the time. Now I'm just immature so I have improved somewhat.
Now back to the main narrative. Mattel Electronics was a major player in the burgeoning hand-held electronic game market at the time. They had this hand-held football game that sold millions. It was really kind of a simple game. A bunch of primitive LEDs were displayed on a tiny screen and would attempt to simulate an actual NFL football game. It was really sad by the standards of today. But back then, it was the cat's pajamas. Pretty much every boy from age 12-22 had one. Just like in real football, you would get four downs to go 10 yards and you could hit buttons to kick, pass or run. If you decided on a running play, you could hit any of four red buttons to make the player (just a red LED blip) go up, down or sideways.
I won't bore you with the details but I played often enough to have to keep going back to Radio Shack to get more batteries (and giving another false address).
So this was in that 1978-1979 era, right about the time that Supertramp was recording this "Breakfast in America" album. At about the 3:20 mark of the song, lead singer Roger Hodgson sang the lyric "d-d-d-d-d-digital" and wanted a neat sound effect to emphasize the "d-d-d-d-d-digital" lyric in the song. So enter engineer Richard Digby-Smith for his five minutes of fame.
You see, Digby-Smith actually had this handheld game with him and as a result he was able to insert the sound effect of the player "losing the football" (i.e. fumble) right into the song. This can be distinctly heard around the 3:24 mark of the song.
So anyway, there you have it. A very interesting piece of trivia and you did not even have to click a link to my blog to read about it. Someday you might have to click my blog and pay me some revenue but until then, I'm letting you have my content for absolutely free.
Thank you and good night.
lol...I played that game ALL the time...never picked it up in the Logical Song but as soon as I heard it yup!
Dad had that game.
I had this. Played it a lot.
I always thought he sang,”dig it, dig it”.
I probably spent three hundred hours on that device.
You gotta post the song!! LOL!
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=logical+song+supertramp&t=h_&ia=videos&iax=videos&iai=low6Coqrw9Y
P.S. As a Gen-X'er myself I had that game and loved it
I played the game..AND..played the album. Or maybe it was a cassette. 8 track?
Didn’t the Clash include the audio from one of those games in Rock the Casbah?
Could play it at night, under the covers.
“Could play it at night, under the covers.”
—
And I’ll bet you thought that your parents didn’t know you were doing it. :-)
.
The first version came out in 1977.
That was a fun read! Good job!!
Not sure if it was a Mattel game though. And the influence on the Super Tramp song seems limited.
Who knows what his parents though he was doing !!
thought
Remember that game! Remember that song!
True! LOL
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The lyrics in the song reference the word “digital” and that is when the sound is played.
I’m a big fan of the “Breakfast in America” Love the song “Child of Vision”
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