RECORD CRACK: Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” is vinyl-centric
My daily ritual is a Portland, Oregon-based podcast (formerly a radio show) called cortandfatboy, which covers a wide range of different things in pop culture, everything from music to video games, comic books to various types of consumables, done in a geeky and humorous manner. In the latest episode of the podcast, there was discussion of a film that had not been in my radar, but perhaps should have been. I haven’t been in tune with “movies of interest” for a few years, and a lot of times I’ll hear a podcast like cortandfatboy and go “how come I didn’t know about this? This is for me.”
Anyway, there was a discussion about a new Wes Anderson film called Moonrise Kingdom and within a brief discussion about the movie, the question was asked about how good the music is. Apparently, the music supervision is considered excellent, which made me go “oh!” But what I found to be of greater interest is the fact that the film focuses on a portable record player. As I began to look for images, I discovered that the record player is a primary focus, and essentially plays somewhat of a major role that holds the film together.
Upon looking at this portable record player, my immediate thought was that it looked like the old Columbia GP-3 portables made and sold in Japan in the 1960′s, and had become an item of interest for a number of record collectors and cratediggers in the last 15 years.
Eventually, I found a clear screenshot from Moonrise Kingdom and discovered that while it is not a Columbia model, it is indeed of Japanese origin.
This is a portable record player made by Barrington, exclusively for the Japanese market, also from the 1960′s. What makes this model of interest is that it has an AM radio, so if you’ve run out of records to play at any given time, you could turn on the airwaves and hear your favorite hit songs. You could place 4 C batteries inside and carry it with you to the park or lakes, or plug it in when you were at home in your room.
Unfortunately, my searches came to a dead end when looking for any additional information on Barrington, so I’m unsure of Barrington was the name of the company who manufactured it or if it is the name of the phonograph model, made by a bigger company (i.e. Sony, Sanyo, Toshiba, etc.) Nonetheless, with record collectors looking for everything from the Columbia GP-3 to the Soundburger to the Vestax portable, perhaps Moonrise Kingdom will create a new demand for the Barrington.
(To listen to the episode of cortandfatboy which discusses the music and vinyl-centricity of Moonrise Kingdom, click here.)
(JULY 31, 2012: Mahalo nui to RushmoreAcademy.com for the link back.)
