Relics of Minnesota history play bingo
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Standing inches tall, giggling and green, there is one little Minnesotan with a healthy, historic and commercialized past.
Some might guess it’s the Jolly Green Giant, mascot of the Minnesota-based Green Giant Company, but he once was joined by another leaf-clad character named “Little Green Sprout.”
In a 1972 ad, Little Green Sprout chuckles as he settles in to read a book taller than he is. He's reminiscent of the Pillsbury Dough Boy and familiar to Minnesotans of a certain era.
This commercial is part of the Minnesota Historical Society’s archive of corporate records collected over time. And it is one of 25 digital films coming out of the vault to be part of a bingo game hosted by the Minnesota History Center.
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The sold out Thursday, June 12, event is the center’s first-ever archival footage bingo. It will feature segments from KSTP broadcasts, commercials, home videos, “Film in the Cities” projects and interviews with famous Minnesotan women, in a nod to a recently closed traveling exhibit at the center titled “Girlhood (It’s Complicated).”
The idea to weave the decades-old footage with Bingo came from Media Digitization Technician April Rodriguez.
"This idea of bingo is kind of like a universal game,” Rodriguez said. She first saw a game organized like this at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles. After years of working with audio, sound and footage, she was inspired to create a game of her own.
Rodriguez and Joe Larsen, MHS Digital Media archivist, spearheaded the endeavor at the center.
“When we digitize film and video, we do it in real time, so we're watching it. So, of course, we have our favorites, and this seemed like a great way to kind of show off what we have that people might otherwise not know even exists,” Larsen said.
The films they have prepared for this event go between sound and silent, in black and white versus in color.
The game works like any bingo game, with amended rules to incorporate the films. Five balls will be drawn in each round of bingo. The letters, B-I-N-G-O, correspond to a different theme.
Each number on the bingo balls corresponds to a different video clip. Depending on what the clip shows — whether it’s in color or black and white, for example — participants will mark either all even or all odd numbers in each column. Whoever gets five chips in a horizontal or diagonal row on their scorecard gets to call out bingo and win.
How they landed on which videos to show is boggling, considering how vast the society’s archive is.
Many of the clips come from overlooked corners of Minnesota history — relics that have faded from memory or never made it into the standard narratives of state pride. One clip features a Japanese commercial for Mister Donut from the 1970s; another includes a 1987 interview with Dorothy Molter, the “Root Beer Lady.”
One of Larsen’s favorite clips is from a movie called “Up the Congo.” It was filmed in the ‘20s, and it follows Minnesotans Alice O’Brien and Grace Flandreau as they journey on the first female-led expedition in the Congo.
“We actually only have the first half of the film because the second part was lost in shipping when it was sent to us,” Larsen said. “The film doesn't exist anywhere else. So we just have this 45 minutes of their expedition.”
As for Rodriguez, her favorite is a clip from the “Film in the Cities” category. These film projects were part of a program that helped middle and high school students make films and get credit for them back in the 1970s and ‘80s. The piece, “Tim Leonard at the Roller Garden,” features kids at a lost relic to modernity, a roller rink.
“I love a good roller rink, and the music behind just gets you into the mood of the whole festivities of bingo. It's really lighthearted, and it's just a bunch of kids doing what they're doing,” Rodriguez said. “You can see what was in style at the time, in terms of what they're wearing, and it's packed.”
They're both especially excited to show the home movies. The oldest clip is from the 1920s.
“It speaks to anybody about remembering their own birthday and how it was captured, or family travel, or maybe you think to yourself, oh, well, I don't really have a lot of home movies in my family. Maybe it inspires you to get out your phone and take movies,” Rodriguez said.
Larsen also sees it as an opportunity to showcase part of Minnesota’s rich history in the media, especially filmmaking.
“It's nice that the home movies can sometimes pair with kind of the history of amateur filmmaking here in Minnesota,” Larsen said.
These are dream jobs for Larsen and Rodriguez, who have fallen in love with digitizing and being stewards of the material.
“It goes back to advocating. It goes back to making sure we're digitizing what we can,” Rodriguez said. “We're just doing our best to fulfill the mission, to steward the materials, digitize them, to preserve them and then also be able to make them accessible.”
When making content accessible, they consider all factors. How can they make attending the History Center more accessible through free Thursday night admission, exciting events or other opportunities?
Rodriguez describes accessibility also as “findability,” when considering online platforms, metadata and cataloging so the public can find materials in searches.
That is part of what makes an event like this so special for the center.
“It's a fun game to play, but also, we're trying to get to educate people and and then answer any questions they may have, because what we're doing is on behalf of them,” Rodriguez said.
The history center's archive can be viewed online and in its library. They also continue to collect all kinds of materials, digital and physical, for their archive.
