Look closely at that screen. Although the unit is turned off, you can still see the shadows of several dozen orphans pressed hammering against the inside of the screen. Now that’s GE Performance Television. Chuck here would like to sell you one. Do you have a seraglio of a thousand slaves to help you lift it out of the store? Please note: Enola-Gay-sized VHS video cassette recorder is not included.
[via Retro-Thing]
I was just watching Mad Men last night and, as Don Draper adjusted the station on the recessed control panel of a magnificent, oak-veneer console stereo, I thought: Will appliances ever again be furniture?
Ah, but thanks for helping dispel my naïvely romantic notions of such things.
I miss the days when wood grain, not sleek white or black was the true calling card of “high tech.” And you knew it was well built because it weighed a friggin ton and looked like furniture.
@12
I must be confused between the BoingBoing comments and the BBGadgets comments. alas.
Quit smirking at me, Chuck! I happen to like Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.
Wow, such a huge TV console and yet the speakers are NOT CENTERED beneath the TV. How whacked is that?!
- Jack, All-Seeing Wine Snob
I’d like to see someone dig up one of these units, strip out the guts, and replace them with a modern projector.
Retro 70′s style, modern HD picture! With all that surface area on the top, it’d be no problem adorning it with plants. Can’t do that with a modern LCD screen, can you?
The smug look on this guys face is priceless. He’s looking into the camera almost as if to say… “Yeah I work for GE… Yeah thats a bigass woodgrain TV I helped put into production… but now let me ask you a question, why is your top still on?”
It’s not widescreen. It’s just a big screen– that has the proportions of a conventional TV.
(though judging by the prevalence of stretched images on airport/hotel/pub TVs, people might have a hard time understanding such a advanced geometric concept).
@17 It didn’t really matter if the speakers were centered because tvs & vcrs were mono then.
I see Harrison Ford under those glasses…
I had that VCR! My father still has the tapes we recorded of the original Battlestar Galactica.
@#6 (Clay):
Well, appliances are small enough nowadays to be better placed within furniture or fixtures. But sadly few designers do it well. I mean, look at iPod docks. They are all pretty much ugly as sin. Why? I don’t know. But there is a whole world of possibility out there of some designer would just use their imagination and make it.
I wonder if they covered the cost of removing then repairing the wall that had to come down to put this thing in your living room?
“GE Perfomance TV, now using as much electricity as your average city block!”
anybody have any idea how much this monster went for originally? i would think somewhere between $3000-5000, but have no clue, really…
Nice subtle nod to Hiroshima day.
OMG I had that recorder
That thing is beautiful in a 1980s it’s-enormous-but-has-never-existed-before kind of way. That thing would fill half my living room, and would be worth every cent.
I’m pretty sure this thing is bigger than my entire TV-watching room. Of course, I keep the TV in the closet, so it’s not like there’s a lot of space to begin with.
Sure, we all laugh at it now, but someone is going to find one of those, and then do a case mod on their Wii with wood grained contact paper and aluminum tape, hide an Apple TV or a Mac Mini in that tape deck, and then we will see who wants one.
Is that Huey Lewis?
That thing would’ve sold like hotcakes if only they’d hired George Plimpton to pimp it.
“Now I don’t know what you’re watcing right now, but it’s not TV. Wouldn’t you rather be bathed in blue light by a device the size of an airplane hangar?”
Is the shorter part of the console created just to hold that gigantor VCR?
#22 apparently there’s at least the right speaker built in that part of the tv hut.
@bender:
The shorter part of the console may house the projection guns.
Why is Hugh Hefner trying to sell me this giant TV???
I got a feeling most people here would like what I did with my own 40″ High Def TV…I took our old 27″ TV furniture unit, took out all the shelves that housed the VCR etc, and it fit perfectly, and can hold plants up top too.
@8: not a single soul here said it was widescreen.
Hey, that’s the VCR we had when I was a kid!
“Sure, we all laugh at it now, but someone is going to find one of those, and then do a case mod on their Wii with wood grained contact paper and aluminum tape, hide an Apple TV or a Mac Mini in that tape deck, and then we will see who wants one. “
…I’m already looking for one, but only for myself, and not for a damn Wii. I’m one of those who abhors console units because if a game doesn’t play like I want it to, I want to be able to hexedit the damn thing to jump through *my* hoops and not what some crack-addled game tester thinks is “easy”.
…But yes, laugh all you want, but they just don’t make TV’s as elegant as this anymore. A TV was meant to be furniture, not a flat slab on a wall!
Those are some performance glasses.