Monday, June 6, 2011

Show World 1980

Thanks to Crazy Eddie for sending in this 1980 video "Peep Show Serenade" (NSFW) from Screw magazine's Midnight Blue public access TV series.


click here for video

Written by Tales of Times Square author Josh Alan Friedman, the video takes us into the old Show World of Times Square. In the entryway, we hear the barkers calling out "Check it out right here...all live and all nude, we're gonna put a rise in your hot, sexy thighs...gonna do it, do it, do it to you."

"Silver dollars and tokens right here, live show, check it out!"

"One silver dollar will make you holler for more..."



Then we hear Chic's "Good Times" as we enter the peep carousel with a cast of furtive men. The windows go up and now we're inside the carousel with the totally nude dancers. These are rare shots from the dancers' point of view, as the object becomes the subject of the gaze, the camera looking back at the men who are paying to look.



The men are goggle-eyed voyeurs in greasy, steamy windows. They press their noses against the oily plexiglas, waggle their tongues, bounce up and down in delirium.

A comical sequence shows each man unzipping his fly, then removing penile stand-ins--dildos, bananas, stuffed animals. A Darth Vader-like heavy breathing overtakes the disco beat of "Good Times" and the video becomes nightmarish, a vision of purgatory.

At its climax, there's an odd castration scene--one man's banana snaps in half and drops to the floor.



At the very end, we watch a guy cleaning the peep booth floor on his hands and knees. He sings "Old Man River." Then he looks up, sees us watching, and says, "What are you looking at me for, man? I was a art major at UCLA."

Further reading:
Show World
Show World 2

8 comments:

  1. So what? I graduated from Columbia University and all I could get was in the scum filled booths, my own cock in hand.

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  2. Great little video document of days gone by.

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  3. From what I remember the video booths were on the first floor with the entrance on 8th Ave, a little past the bank on the corner off 42nd St. It wove around the bank with an exit on 42nd where were kept the hard core porno magazines. Upstairs were the dancers. I recall a very pretty black dancer who bent down to show off her twat, well, flecks of toilet paper were still stuck where she tried to wipe the shit off. I lost my jerking off hard on pretty quickly after that. Gross.

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  4. Great post! Thanks to Crazy Eddie for finding this!

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  5. I must say, I normally rally against your romanticism of the old Times Square porn industry, but this video is a masterpiece. ;)

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  6. Goggla, it was the stuffed animal in the guy's pants that did it, right?

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  7. Hey JM, is this video still available? When I click all I get is a screenshot/jpg.
    Thanks!

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