Punk'd by the 1970's: Time Capsule Contains Porn

by jordan | April 27, 2007 at 06:25 am

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A time capsule was embedded a wall in the University of Washington's Dept. of Communications in the early 1950's, to be opened one hundred years later. Then, in the far-flung future of the late 1970's, pranksters opened the time capsule and inserted artifacts of their own, including porno mags, junk food, and joke newspapers, effectively pranking the future us.

Atop the 50-year-old memorabilia were items from the late '70s and early '80s: adult magazines, an April Fools' edition of The Daily, UW's student newspaper, clip-on ties, women's underwear, and nearly petrified Twinkies, among other things.

"I just think this is a great college prank," department chair Gerald Baldasty said Thursday night after an event at which alumni from the classes that sponsored the time capsule got to look at what was inside. "We're not upset at all; we're just having a good chuckle over it."

It didn't appear that any of the original items placed in the capsule 50 years ago — reel-to-reel films and copies of local publications — were missing, Baldasty said.

The time capsule was locked away, implanted in the wall of the Communications Building, with an inscription that said it should be opened on the 100th anniversary of the first journalism classes at the university, which is this year.

Time capsules have a built-in irony mechanism: with the speed at which pop culture and technology change, even the goodies from three or four years ago seem vintage: CRT computer monitors, older iBooks, portable CD players... every season we get more and more too-cool-for-school, and these disco-era students, whether they realized it or not, encapsulated that perfectly.

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