Plus ca change...

On a recent school holiday, we took our friend and her seven year old son to the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. This place is all kinds of awesome and we went mainly to worship at the shrine of Jim Henson. The horror obsessed boy had other ideas (telling us in no uncertain terms that the Muppets were a big waste of time) and wanted to see only the head spinning puppet they used in The Exorcist.

(A brief note about our friend's son: when we say horror obsessed, we mean obsessed. We've had to field more questions about the origins of Freddy Krueger than anyone on this earth aside from Wes Craven. But, we love the kid. He's lots of fun.)

Right next to the Exorcist puppet, (and lucky for us since we were there for a while) there was a display about Thomas Edison and his kinetescope films.

Now, I know it is a pastime for the old and sort of old alike to decry the state of entertainment that the youths of today enjoy. I mean, look at the internet! Countless hours wasted on pointless diversions, like stupid cat videos, like this one:

Sixty million people have watched this. My favorite sitcom was put on hiatus because it can't draw more than 4 million people a week. If only those troglodytes could learn to appreciate smarter humor, like back in Edison's day, when everyone wore a dinner jacket and dress pants to go to work at the factory.

(You know where this is heading, don't you?)

Presenting, one of the very first movies ever made! Shot by Edison himself at the Black Maria studios!

Yes, the one of the very first things ever committed to film was a stupid cat video.

Just give Transformers 3 an Oscar and let me go back to watching Wipeout.