How One Innocent Tweet Destroyed a Night’s Sleep for 80s Teenagers
So Maria was away yesterday on business and early on Friday evening a very innocent looking tweet popped into my stream, one that had been liked by someone I follow:
The tweet had started to go a little bit viral. Nothing insane, but you would imagine that the collective hive mind of Twitter would be able to find the answer soon enough.
But the hive mind for once last night failed.
And then things like this started to happen:
Who Got the Assist is in fact two people who run an excellent Fantasy Football channel who I follow. I was reading the tweet at 7pm in Brazil meaning that it was now 11pm in the UK and people had been struggling for hours to remember where the design was from.
For anyone who was a teen in the 80s, the pattern was almost instantly recognisable, but just not quite.
Was it an MTV logo?
Had it appeared in a tv show’s opening credits?
Or was it from an album or single cover (as many like me had been convinced about)?
It was starting to drive people to distraction:
One very early contender for an answer was the opening credits to Saved by the Bell — close, but not an exact match.
If you have spent some time by now trying to remember, you too may be beginning to get frustrated. People wanted to know what the exact question was, and if the question had said it was a tv show or album:
Amazingly someone did manage to find a skateboard with the design on it, but people were not satisfied since the pattern was famous and the designers of the skateboard must have copied it.
And people were starting to ask their friends on other social media:
Not even the best of Google’s apps in our modern technological age could help find a match:
No one was able to go to sleep last night in any kind of satisfactory manner
As you can see, despite having this image of the skateboard, many people were still not happy:
But if you look carefully, especially where the lower wheel is, the original photo does seem to have come from the one of the girl holding her skateboard:
People went to bed, some couldn’t sleep, and others awoke and immediately went to Twitter to see what people had come up with:
This chap is currently in his loft looking through his 80s records! (Be sure to watch with sound).
All we know at this moment in time is that we do seem to have the original photo. Did this print come from somewhere from the 80s, or is it just reminding us of patterns we have seen so many times in our teens, but now can’t quite locate?
If you are wondering, the design pattern is one which came from the Memphis Design school, a style which emerged in 1981, and which was founded by Italian designer Ettore Sottsass. This was of course so hugely influential that many of us recognise the pattern without being able to locate this particular example. Hence the frustration of thousands of people last night.
Ultimately, no one has achieved any sense of closure yet. Flappy Pants is taking a lot of flack for this:
Do you recognise the pattern? If so please let me, Flappy Pants and the rest of the twitterverse know!
Thank you
