Have we always counted down to significant events? My guess is "No". What do you think? So looking it up, it turns out that Fritz Lang filmmaker used it to "create suspense? Who would guess that? And yet it makes great sense, as we use it to create excitement and anticipation for the upcoming festival of Christmas. Our social order now orients to the number of shopping days.
Fritz Lang's movie was a science fiction "Woman in the Moon" and the countdown was to create suspense in then story's lunar-bound rocket launch. It seems to me that Fritz Lang spoke it and NASA fulfilled it.
I am thinking of New Year's Eve countdowns, and the U.S. Time Square Ball started in 1907.
The Babylonians recorded their New Year's celebration over 4,000 years ago. They were celebrating the spring equinox in late March. The Romans moved the date to January 1st when Caesar fixed the calendar so it was better synced with the seasons. It started with Janus, the God of new beginnings. Things went bumpy for a while with the Church trying to dissociate from the Roman holiday, but it returned to January 1st eventually.
There is a website - your countdown.to/everything - which shows the countdowns to various things, including movie releases. There are 4,253 countdowns in their list and the top one is Avatar the movie, followed by Christmas Eve. In the middle is the countdown to the year 2023 - I wonder whose timezone it is based on.
The Y2K Countdown pretty well topped the list of countdowns for anyone who was here in 2000. We are now used to countdowns for anything and everything. Any top "N" list now is presented in countdown format. It builds excitement as to who/what will be identified as number 1. It works. |
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