8mm Forum: Panorama International Travelogues

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Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on February 06, 2013, 11:55 AM:

Panorama International Travelogues (1x200’, Panorama International, 1975)

I’ve loved travel for a long time: I’ve been all the way from one shore of the Pacific all the way around to the other.

Naturally this means one of the favorite genres in my collection is travelogue films. I have a bunch of Pathe Pics and Looks at Life, so I was really pleased to find something a little closer to home in Panorama international Travelogues.

These are all 200 foot shorts concerning one US region, be it a state, a natural feature or a city. Being only ten (or so) minutes long, they aren’t very much in depth, but they succeed in giving you the flavor of a place. They were produced for Super-8 distribution and I don’t believe they have ever been released on any other format.

My first one was “San Francisco”. I found it on the Derann used list. The lure for me was the fact that I’d recently spent a couple of weeks in San Francisco on business. The film has scenes taken around the hotel near Fisherman’s Wharf where I'd stayed. (My room overlooked where the Hyde Street cable car is turned around to go back up the hill.), and captured the place much as I remembered and enjoyed it.

I was hooked!

These films are like potato chips: you can’t simply have just one. In the years since I’ve accumulated these:

California
Grand Canyon
Las Vegas
New York - A Dynamic Expression of American Civilization
San Francisco
Washington DC
Yellowstone Park - A Vision of Picturesque Legend

“Los Angeles” is still out there somewhere: appropriate since at least so far I’ve never set foot in the real L.A. either. Could there be a “New Orleans”, “San Diego”, "Santa Fe" or a “Boston” (and others)? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t mind at all.

There are overlaps among the films. “California” shares footage with “San Francisco” (and probably ”Los Angeles”). “Las Vegas” shares with “Grand Canyon”, since “Canyon” shows a tour by plane which takes off from Vegas.

One that kind of gets to me here and there is “New York”. There are a lot of views of the World Trade Center and that tends to bring a hush to a room these days.

The narration in these films often veers into weirdness: it’s as if the writer just got a thesaurus and wanted to get his money’s worth. You keep on running into lines like “It presents a vista of outstanding and eclectic harmony” which use a great many syllables to say essentially nothing. If real people talked like this they would be asked “What on Earth are you talking about?!”. Still I feel these films inspire sentiments of awesome perspicacity in all who imbibe their munificent and verdant splendor. (See how dumb that sounds?)

These "abundant panoplies" take place in mid 1970s America of course, and it’s fun to watch the passing scene. For example, the cars are by and large from the very pits of the American Automobile. To use the language of the narrator: Mid 1970s Detroit Iron was elephantine in corpulence, glacial in acceleration, egregious in quality, bulbous in appearance and superabundant in corrosivity (-huge, slow, crappy, ugly and rusty!). The clothing and the haircuts are a hoot all on their own! Therefore these films take you not just to a place, but also a time. (Oh, that they were made in the mid 60s even if just for the cars!)

The quality is a variable. All are at least a little grainy. In the case of “San Francisco” and “Yellowstone Park”, they are very sharp, but in some others the graininess is excessive and the sharpness will have you reaching for your focus knob without any satisfaction.

The sound is generally very good, although in some the level jumps around.

The color has generally survived the years very well, and is often quite beautiful.

“Las Vegas” and “Canyon” have a leader set up to help the projectionist focus, yet no dark length of film to start the machine and light the lamp!

All of these are full and sometimes overfilled 200 footers. A little close attention on rewind can prevent a mess.

The bizarre thing about all of these films is I’ve never seen even one of them for sale over here. All came from the UK: either Derann or Paul Foster.

My favorites among them? “San Francisco”, “Yellowstone Park” and “Washington DC”.

Posted by James N. Savage 3 (Member # 83) on February 06, 2013, 06:42 PM:

Steve those sound excellent.

I enjoy those travelogues too. I've been keeping my eye open for the Washington DC one, since thats my home town. I'd love to see it from a 70's point of view again [Wink]

.

Thanks!

James.

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on February 06, 2013, 07:37 PM:

Interesting, James!

As part of writing the review I've been watching the films two a night this week. Last night was "Washington DC" (and "California"). My son (10 years old) visited DC about two years ago and he loves this film, so he gave me his own narration. I liked it even better!

"DC" has:

-The Capitol
-The Smithsonian
-The Supreme Court
-The Lincoln Memorial
-The Washington Monument
-The Jefferson Memorial
-President Kennedy's Gravesite
-The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
-The White House

On mine the image is on the "soft" side of "sharp", but it's a neat film and worth having.

If I remember right I snagged this one from Derann sometime in 2010. I think the best bet for you to get a print is Paul Foster.

Posted by David Ollerearnshaw (Member # 3296) on February 07, 2013, 01:02 PM:

Yet another topic that brings nostalgia to me. I bought some of these travelogues on my trips to USA from 1980 to last one in 1990 I have the "Las Vegas" one, and I have to admit to cheating on my home movies I took while there, I cut some of the casino scenes in to my own film.

I also have a couple of others somewhere in my collection. One is on Hollywood.

Were they based in Whittier CA?

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on February 07, 2013, 06:34 PM:

From what I can see about them they were in business at least as late as 1997 and based in Burbank, at least at that time.

What's interesting that I am finding out is that their channel of sales was not mail order or nationwide retail like (for example) Blackhawk, but they mainly sold through gift shops at tourist attractions.

If that's really true I am actually bringing someone else's souvenirs back home where they started when I buy these films.

Also interesting is they used to make Viewmaster discs.

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on March 16, 2013, 10:11 PM:

Update!

This showed up from Paul Foster yesterday:

I asked Paul, and he said as far as he knows I now have the entire series.

"Los Angeles" is a nice example of what is good about the Panorama International travelogues. It is interesting, colorful and nicely made.

There was shared footage with "California", but actually less than I expected.

The city itself looks worth visiting. Someday I'll need to see more of it than the airport changing flights on the way home from San Diego! (In all fairness, I've seen nothing more of Chicago, Dallas, St. Louis and Denver!)

Of course their writers couldn't resist overdoing the language on this one. Even the box art describes LA as "Electroluminescent"!

Posted by David Ollerearnshaw (Member # 3296) on March 17, 2013, 06:03 AM:

About two weeks ago there were a couple of travel films listed, one was Hollywood not sure what other was. They looked about 50ft each.

The ones I bought were from gift shops at tourist attractions.

Here's another company Chester-Lau-Sup er-8mm that did travel films.

I wonder if I kept the original packing for my films? If I remember they were in sealed plastic that needed scissors to open them.

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on March 17, 2013, 12:35 PM:

Many of mine are in 200 Foot boxes with card labels like the one shown above glued on one side.

-now I'm starting to understand!

David, were these films originally shrink wrapped on a cardboard display backing? Maybe these are the remains of that package.

It's still kind of curious that I only find these in the UK, surely sometime in the 200+ year history of the Republic some Americans visited these places!

(Although I can testify that people from New York often don't go to New York: I'm 50 years old and haven't been to the Statue of Liberty even once!)

[ March 17, 2013, 02:44 PM: Message edited by: Steve Klare ]

Posted by David Ollerearnshaw (Member # 3296) on March 17, 2013, 02:56 PM:

I think a lot came in this sort of packaging

Wow over 23 years since I was last in US. Time really flies.

The ones I saw on e-bay could have been from 'Universal Studios'

Posted by Adrian Winchester (Member # 248) on March 17, 2013, 08:19 PM:

Steve - I was interested to see that you have come across evidence of the company being in business as recently as 1997. I wonder how they kept going after the video boom - were they selling travelogues on video?

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on March 17, 2013, 10:14 PM:

Hi Adrian,

Yes they did go into video, but I don't think they got further up the video food chain than VHS. If I remember right a few weeks ago some of their VHS tapes were on E-bay.

The most recent evidence of them I found was this (withdrawn) stock offering they made in 1997:

1997 IPO for Panorama International

It's got a lot of interesting details about them.

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