Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Skylab: fear and loathing on Saturday Night Live

A couple of weekends ago I was glued to the computer, waiting to hear when and where the UARS re-entered.  The blogosphere and the twitterverse were in a frenzy.  One of the gems that emerged, via @cosmos4u and @spacearcheology, was this video of John Belushi in a sketch from Saturday Night Live in 1979.  I'd not come across it in my search for the cultural footprint of Skylab.  (Actually that's quite a good concept, I think!).

There's a creepy World Trade Centre reference, and talk of probabilities - just the very stuff that psychologist Talma Kushnir identified as an issue feeding public fears.  In general the sketch betrays a lack of faith in official information: of course they're going to tell us there's nothing to worry about!  Skylab ends up not as passive technology, but a vicious world-destroying monster, paid for by John Belushi's hard-earned taxes.


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