Is this the first instance of the flashcard trope?

April 18, 2018 5:33 PM

Is this music video of Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues the first instance of this flashcard trope? I realize there's going to be some ambiguity in answering this; just hit me with whatever observations you've got.
posted by HotToddy to Society & Culture (4 answers total)

The film isn’t a music video, it’s the opening scene of Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back documentary. The cue cards were Dylan’s idea “he said: I have an idea for a film where I write out all the words to this song on pieces of paper, and I’ll just throw them down as I read them,” according to Pennebaker.
posted by Ideefixe at 5:51 PM on April 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

It isn't just that Bob Dylan did this first. It's such a well-known sequence that all subsequent uses of the cue card gimmick are deliberate nods to Dylan, intended to be read as such.
posted by cincinnatus c at 4:57 AM on April 19, 2018 [6 favorites]

Hm. Well, it might be worth mentioning that if it was Dylan's innovation, the innovation was to put it on camera rather than behind the camera. In radio and concerts from the 30s on, the cue card person would hold and drop them in just the same way. That practice also transitioned to TV in the pre-teleprompter age. So he didn't invent the idea of writing words on cards and dropping them, but he may have been among the first to make it the subject matter of a film.
posted by Miko at 9:02 AM on April 20, 2018

Yeah, even if Dylan wasn’t, somehow, the first to pull this gag, Don’t Look Back is still the canonical reference point. The first time I can remember seeing it mimicked directly was when Tim Robbins did it in Bob Roberts, and it’s become more commonplace since then.
posted by Mothlight at 9:13 AM on April 20, 2018