Football 40 Years Ago

Advisory: Nostalgists. An interesting glimpse of footballic history, but of slight archival instead of general interest. That is, its appeal is more to buffs, historians, and athletes past their prime than to the general public. For just ten minutes, football coach Pop Warner shows his players not only the equipment, but also the style, of play in the game 40 years ago, in the 1890s. Some of the helmets, with their leather earflaps, look more like those of modern hockey players; many had no facemask whatsoever, and some early examples of facemasks are more akin to crude leather muzzles, the like of which were likely uncomfortable and wouldn't have afforded much protection. There are several other interesting differences between the games of 1890 and 1930, but how many -- and which -- are considered relevant enough to mention by the powers that be today is left as an exercise for the interested reader -- who is also, one might add, someone of an amateur historian, as the film doesn't provide a lot of narration beyond a narration of the various game events by the commentator. All that having been said, this is still ten minutes of pure enjoyment for the right person or group of people. It's certainly a good tool for instructional purposes in a class on sports history or perhaps in a filmmaking course's study of newsreels. And if a viewer has been indulging in the popular 1930s trend of anthropomorphically-animated features combining human characters with animal characteristics, he or she may welcome the slightly lower-speed フィルム and more human-like characteristics as a creative palette-cleansing reprieve. And all kinds of people may get a kick out of knowing that football players in the 1890s /1891 exercised on homemade contraptions akin to crude medieval torture devices -- the most similar modern inventions being stationary bicycles, elliptical machines, and modern vibration exercise machines for use seated in a chair -- and those who are into the modern sport of weightlifting might chuckle at the sight of a weightlifting machine that consists of two heavy iron dumbbells attached at the bottom by a leather band that is alternately hooked first onto one dumbbell, then the other, in a moving-rail system which does bring to mind the early leg presses of today. Older viewers, as well as an older generation of athletes of nearly any sport, will be fascinated by this view of football 40 years ago, but more modern types may get /8 bored by its slow speed and sparse commentary -- though even they will probably have a hard time arguing with its historical importance, and with its interest as a time capsule of a much earlier age -- nearly half of a century ago. The preservation and digitization of a film like this is important to sporting history even if, as with many such archival features, it is of interest only to a select few of viewers today.