So This Is 2025: Last night I (re)watched Dead Again, a 1991 Kenneth Branagh movie (he directed and starred in it).
Emma Thompson has Amnesia which is my favourite Movie Medical Condition. (There’s a ton of dying of cancer movies…not really a fan of those.)
Anyways…at one point in Dead Again Kenneth Branagh’s pager goes off…woah!
The pager never really got a Hollywood close up.
Lots of movies feature phone booths/pay phones…corded car phones and Saved By The Bell’s brick phone shows up in a number of movies. (Even in recent movies as a cultural joke for people of a certain age.)
We’ve seen fax machines/printers (“PC Load Letter? What the fuck does that mean!?”) all kinds of tech.
The pager never gets spotlight attention. Casually it shows up every so often…Die Hard 2, Heat (“I paged your ass all day. I can’t stand fuckin’ pagin’.”) a couple of other movies.
But yeah the pager failed to make a big splash.
I felt bad for the pager.
It’s like CDs. There’s buttloads of movies about records and craploads of movies about making mixtapes but hardly anything about CDs.
The middle child of technology is often under-valued, hardly recognized and typically overlooked.
We turn a page..r quickly on em and move on.
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Sammy Younan is the affable host of My Summer Lair: think NPR’s Fresh Air meets Kevin Smith: interviews & impressions on Pop Culture.
