One can write an entire book just observing the characters in both pictures and envisioning their purpose at this hour on this day 68 years ago. Each person pictured has their own mission, errand or destination just as is still going on everywhere today, like watching an ant farm with all the inhabitants completing their tasks, all intent on their own personal pursuit. There is so much going on in both of them and if one were to focus in on each pictured person's current activity, one can get caught up in their imagination, i.e., the young man with the long cardboard box hailing the taxi (what is in the box, where is he taking it, etc.). Apparently somebody didn't care for the open-topped "4" that most LED and LCD seven-segment displays now have, and installed one more segment to get a pointy-topped 4.Īfter spending a long time gazing at all the fascinating sights in both of these nostalgic Times Square pictures from RalphCS, it is impossible to choose a favorite. In another sign of the times, 1949 seems pretty early to me for a "seven-segment" clock display (on the Bond store). This would have worked better for standard-ish typefaces, like on the "Home of the Brave" sign, and not as well on custom ones, like the curved letters for "Barkleys of Broadway".
Then, when they got an order, they could paint a backing board, hang the letters on it, and wire them together relatively quickly. Spending money on fancy signs in New York might have helped the studios to convince independent theater operators in smaller cities to book the film - "it sold 5,000 tickets a day in New York!"įinally, for electric signs like this, it wouldn't have been difficult for the sign company to stock a few copies of the alphabet, with bulbs installed and ready to go. They'd get an initial release in, say, New York and LA, and then expand to smaller cities over time. I also understand that until maybe the 1970s, it wasn't common for movies to be released all across the US at the same time. Once they figured out who their top few leading men and ladies would be, they could re-use the letters for those names for several movies if they wanted to. Something that probably helped was that under the studio system, studios would sign contracts with actors for several movies. The studio probably had more money than an individual theater, so they could more easily produce fancy signs. 1949 was the tail end of it, but Hollywood used to operate under the "studio system", where movie studios would also own a relatively large chain of theaters. To Greg B's point about the elaborate signs - it may have been the studios that were paying for those.
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