The anachronistic Walkman?

Last week I watched Super 8 when it came out on disc, and kicked myself for not having gone to see it in the theater. It's one of the best movies of the year, and a lot of fun, especially for anyone who grew up in the 1980's. The film is set in the summer of 1981, and has a certain strange nostalgia for that time period. This is the era I grew up in, before cell phones, the internet, or even most video games. The main characters are filming an amateur movie on Super 8 film (hence the name), which was pretty complicated at the time, even though you could probably get a better result with a Flip camera or decent smartphone nowadays. I won't spoil the plot (seriously, you should see it) but the kids get involved in a disaster and mystery that plays out through the rest of the movie.

There's one particular scene, however, that caught my attention. In that scene a convenience store clerk doesn't notice the events going on outside because he's listening to a Sony Walkman. The moment I saw that scene my over-developed sense of detail started flashing a warning in my head. Were Walkmans around in 1981? Before the scene was over (and it's a really good scene) I had already pulled up Wikipedia to see when the Walkman was invented and when it came to the U.S. The information on the page was actually inaccurate, but it did eventually link me to a TIME magazine article about the history of the Walkman. It turns out that yes, Walkman's were introduced in the U.S. in 1980, and while they weren't immediately successful, it would be believable for a store clerk to be sporting one in the summer of 1981. 

I got a kick out of how the Walkman looked when it was first introduced. The batteries were so big that they required a separate case and belt clip. But this was cutting edge technology at the time, and it really took off. Walkmans (and their imitators) were so ubiquitous when I was growing up, with over 200 million units sold worldwide, that they basically defined the 1980's as much as the Apple iPod defined the last decade. 

So it turns out that there was no anachronism in Super 8 after all.  Walkmans were right at home in 1981.  The device changed a lot over the years, slimming down and losing the separate battery pack. Eventually  Sony released versions that played CDs, mini-discs, and later mp3s as new media formats gained popularity. 

But the funny thing is, there still is something of a real-life Walkman anachronism, because I learned that the old cassette tape Walkmans are still being sold to this day. The new versions are nearly half the size of the original model sported by the store clerk in the movie, and they now run on a couple tiny AAA batteries rather than the large separate battery pack. But the device lives on, produced in China instead of Japan, and there is a small but steady demand for the old school format. That may seem out of place, but the same nostalgia I felt for the era depicted in Super 8 makes me smile to see that the old style Walkman for sale. 

A couple weeks ago I went down to my basement to get out some of my winters clothes. As I looked for  the right box, I opened a box of stuff from when I was in high school: some year books, sports t-shirts, photos, and an old Walkman-style cassette player with a bunch of tapes. I think I'll get it out tonight, find some batteries for it, and give it a listen.