This 1981 spot for the Maganvision 8000 was one Leonard Nimoy's better roles, if you ask me.

A review by Marcus F. Wielage in March/April 1979 issue of The Videophile described it as a "sleek, low-profiled device (22" x 16" x 6") encased in a rigid black and silver colored plastic cabinet [with] a gleaming futuristic appearance that would almost make it more at home in the Jetson's living room that ours in 1979." Lifting the lid to load an optical disc was "not unlike a car's engine hood," which you had to do before you turned it on. It took 20 seconds to warm up to spinning the disc at 1800rpm—kind of like today's speedier Blu-ray players.

And like today's Blu-ray players and DVD players before them, it was the pinnacle of home AV quality at the time: "As I testified under oath in court recently, the MCA/Phillips player puts out a better picture than any home videotape I've ever seen, and is almost equal to U-Matic players as far as audio and video specifications go."

The review concludes with a bit rumormongering, an echo of Gizmodo in 1979: "As it is, rumors of a consumer disc player from Pioneer continue to abound, and I, for one, would be happier with a product from that company than from Magnavox, if only because of their fine reputation as a leading mass-market high-fi manufacturer."

We can blame Pioneer for ditching the much more excellent DiscoVision brand in favor of Laserdisc when it released its player in 1980. [Laser Video Disc, YouTube]

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

The Blu-ray player doesn't have Ethernet (so it's just Profile 1.1), but it'll play all the Blu-ray movies in full 1080p.

For Father's Day, Walmart is also featuring 2-for-$20 Blu-ray movie bundles and a Garmin nuvi 250—with a 3.5'' touch screen and voice guidance—for $128 too. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, these deals are not available online and can only be found in Walmart stores. [Thanks to Checkoutblog]

Note: Walmart refers to the player as both NB500MGX and NB530MGX. We are assured that this is a sales-reference difference, and not a spec or appearance difference.

The SF-based designer found the speaker horn at an antique store, carved out slots for the horn and iPod, and installed a channel to carry sound between the speaker and MP3 player. With the multitude of really mediocre iPod docks out there, it's great to see someone create something so unique out of their own garage. [BoingBoing Gadgets]

You may laugh while pointing to your 50" plasma, but I know a lot of people for whom a 19-inch HDTV would be the perfect bedroom complement, especially here in NYC, land of the hovel.

Also, maybe we were hallucinating, but my girlfriend and I thought we saw another sub-$200 19-incher pop up in Best Buy's ad a few Sundays ago. Both BB and Walmart have been floating around the low $200s for a while, but has anybody seen any more 19-inch HD sets for under two Franklins? Drop some links in the comments if so.

The Spin The crucial moment in this ad comes early on, when the turtlenecked hubby fits the Hockey template on his TV. Both narrator and caption stress that the Odyssey works with any TV, a vital point given Magnavox's earlier bungling. The very first Odyssey spots in 1972 (unavailable, alas) showed gamers using a Magnavox color TV. This created terrible confusion: Many consumers assumed that the Odyssey was only compatible with Magnavox sets, and color ones at that. So though 80,000-100,000 consoles were sold in 1972 alone, Magnavox was actually somewhat disappointed with the Odyssey's performance; the company feared that, having burned through the early adopters, it would be hard-pressed to capture the interest of mainstream consumers. This commercial, then, is all about reassuring folks that, no, you don't have to ditch your beloved black-and-white RCA in order to enjoy a spirited game of Roulette or Football.

Counterspin Despite a quick remark that the Odyssey is fun for the whole family, this ad shows only an adult couple. And while it's hard to understand the mindset of folks who were alive during Watergate, was the Odyssey such a technological wonder that it could hold the interest of thirtysomethings for hours on end? As with the TI-99/4A previously discussed in this space, the Odyssey seems like it would most enrapture gamers in the grade-school demographic—even if we'd been born in the 1940s instead of the 1970s, it's hard to picture my wife and I settling down for a fun evening of Odyssey Geography. Of course, the console's outrageous price made it the sort of item that you probably didn't want Junior messing around with: The Odyssey (including six program cards) cost $100, which is around $480 in today's dollars. And you thought the PS3 was overpriced...

Mission Accomplished Tough to say, as the estimates for Odyssey sales are all over the map. Inventor and vid-game god Ralph Baer claims that 350,000 consoles were sold between 1972 and 1975, when the original Odyssey was replaced by the new (and streamlined) Odyssey 100. Contemporary newspaper accounts, however, put the overall sales at under 300,000. Even if Baer's figure is correct, however, the Odyssey is generally regarded as a failure—not because of the technology, but because of the marketing. The initial consumer confusion over compatibility was a huge obstacle; so, too, was Magnavox's insistence on selling its hardware exclusively through Magnavox stores. (Yes, such things existed before the majority of us were born.) Lastly—and most forgivably—the Odyssey's game designers thought that people wanted electronic facsimiles of real-world games, rather than gaming challenges that couldn't be replicated in meatspace. Magnavox corrected this in the late 1970s with its Odyssey 2, which eventually featured such games as Pick Axe Pete and Quest for the Rings, but by then it was too late: The age of the Atari 2600 had arrived.

Hype-O-Meter 4 (out of 10). Too little, too late to save the doomed Odyssey. And a better marketing effort might also have saved Magnavox from its somewhat ignoble fate as a low-end Philips brands (although the company did reportedly make a mint by filing patent lawsuits against the likes of Bally-Midway). I do, however, sorta dig the husband's haircut—very Downhill Racer.

(Huge thanks to Ohbutyet for posting the video.)

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired, a columnist for Slate, and author of the forthcoming Now the Hell Will Start. His Hype Sheet column appears every Thursday on Gizmodo.

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