Designated By The U.S. Government As One Of The Eight Greatest Inventions Of The Decade

It's The Violano-Virtuoso, of course. Who are we to say that our government was wrong?

I had an idea some time ago to do a TV show focused exclusively on things that remained just the way they used to be: people, events, ideas and traditions which surprisingly had survived the years more or less intact. I shot quite a bit of footage, using the downtime I had with my crew from another TV series. We covered a national marbles championship, visited with Ray Broekel, the world's leading authority on candy bars, and went to Pride Lines Corporation at the time they were hand-making perfect replicas of 30's Disney toys, including the Lionel Mickey/Minnie Handcar.

I re-cut the automated musical instruments section into a 40 minute documentary that ran on a local PBS station. This is a clip from that edit, narrated by by the machine's owner, Harvey Roehl.