Last August 13, Alfred Hitchcock celebrated his birthday and articles all over the world reminded us of the director's unique take on life and celluloid. Ironically, the most modern medium on the world is the best way to preserve the past with many of his films and his lesser known works available legally and illegally online. Today's generation, completely blinded by the Biebers and Kardashians, still have the opportunity to witness and appreciate true revolutionaries and very real icons. Love the person/his works or hate the person/his works, Alfred Hitchcock was a unique individual in history who contributed to a medium and to pop culture as much as Einstein and Michael Jackson did.
I was introduced to Hitch in a juvenile detective series called the Three Investigators. Hitch appeared in the opening and closing chapters of the beloved series and fit perfectly as a mentor and friend of the fictional trio of Jupe, Pete, and Bob. When Hitchcock died in 1980, the publishers summarily replaced him with faceless and lifeless characters (such as Hector Sebastian). Though The Three Investigators series didn't lose any of its quality as detective fiction, fans felt the disappearance of Hitchcock keenly and painfully. This isn't unusual - Hitchcock ingratiated himself into everyone via the exceptional TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (early 1970s), which is available today in various online sources for viewing. His brief presence during the introduction and outro was more memorable than the episode itself. Hitch was the slightly annoying but fun gentleman you wanted to talk to every day. As a bonus, he was much more intelligent and entertaining than the vacuous talk show hosts (and television anchors) in the last 20-30 years.
Sir Alfred was even ghostwritten to introduce horror anthologies such as Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum, Alfred Hitchock Witch's Brew, Alfred Hitchcock's Tales of Terror and Suspense, etc - books that are still available in online stores like Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. The first items I ever bought online (more than 11 years ago) was a hardbound copy of Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery. Biographies and interviews about the sardonic director can be read everywhere online even if it wasn't his birthday, capturing and reminding us of the amoral genius of this impressive man.
Digital preservation exists not only in DVDs, online stores, and e-books, but in articles, podcasts, streaming video, and essays revealing the past, trivial as it may. Personally, without hard-working web writers/administrators eager to reintroduce the laughable cartoons and TV shoes of the 80s and 70s, I probably would have never remembered just how good the old shows were in comparison to today's garbage. Having recently revisited 80s cartoon shows, I felt that the Spider-Man TV series of the 70s and the 1981 solo Amazing Spider-Man series captured the quality of the Spider-Man character much better than his current incarnation in the comic books, which rehashed and dumped the history of the character - the same history that made him so unique and well-loved. Torrents controversially allow fans to even go back in time in the golden years of the 80s and 70s when Peter Parker was still a real person and not a marketing tool reimaged as many times as Madonna.
Digital preservation isn't just for the pop culture enthusiasts, but also for the serious history student. Even if you weren't a student of history and literature, it's good to take a peek at sites such as Gutenberg.org and Archive.org, where you can download numerous books written by pompous and close-minded imperialists, priests, and missionaries, who erroneously judged, condemned, and criticized the people and culture from India, South Korea, China, and Japan as they traveled and exercised their right to hypocritical views 100 years ago. Hindsight is surprisingly a humbling, embarrassing, and enlightening experience if people invested the time for it.
As technology moves forward, I feel indebted to those who contribute to the Internet by looking back and preserving the past. Alfred Hitchcock, I am sure, would applaud them vigorously and tell them dryly that trying to save the past is a joke - but a jolly good one.
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