Over the past two years, I’ve enjoyed the Amazon.com series, “The Man In The High Castle“–a dystopian TV series which explores a world where WWII ended with a very different outcome. This series is based on a 1962 book by Philip K. Dick.
As a promotion, Amazon recently created a virtual radio called “Resistance Radio” where the listener can pretend to be a part of this dystopia and tune in pirate broadcasts from the resistance movement.
It’s a fun virtual radio and the creators took some care in making it feel authentic. It’s reminiscent of a 1960s era Grundig or Telefunken.
The tuning knob, volume and memory push buttons all work. If you turn the receiver off for a while, it takes a few seconds for the audio to increase as the tubes warm up. It even has a red tuning indicator lamp. Between stations you’ll hear static, though it sounds a bit manufactured to us radio enthusiasts.
And, oh yeah, you’ll even numbers stations and Morse Code as you tune across the band.
Obviously, someone behind the virtual radio is a proper radio geek.
Someone needs to make a web-based virtual radio interface like this for TuneIn radio.
Update: SWLing Post contributor, David Cripe (NM0S) notes, “Utterly fascinating. If you access it on your cell phone, the interface is a pocket transistor radio!”
Click here to check out Resistance Radio (while it’s still online).
Unfortunately this is geoblocked in Australia. A VPN into the US soon fixed that however.
It simply has the message (yes in all caps):
RESISTANCE RADIO IS NOT AVAILABLE IN YOUR COUNTRY
FOR UPDATES, FOLLOW AMAZON ORIGINAL’S THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE ON THE SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS BELOW
I am an Alt- history fan and have enjoyed the books of Harry Turtledove, SM Stirling, Robert Conroy, Brendan DuBois, Stuart Slade..of these some are better than others. But the best of them is a series by John Birmingham called the Axis of Time Trilogy…a rollicking good read by pretty darn good writer.
Noted! Thank you for the suggestion!
Just excellent!
Thank you.
Steve
A side effect of this Amazon viral marketing idea is that apparently the trolls of Twitter caught on to it and thought it was some sort of opaque reference to the Trump presidency. Because apparently *everything* has to be politicized today. So, Amazon has gotten a LOT of publicity from this stunt, just probably not the good kind of publicity they were hoping for!
The Man In The High Castle is a good series, too. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a watch. A little plodding in places but overall they did a good job of making a convincing America under Nazi and Japanese rule.
I think where they really succeeded in this series is with set design. Everything looks authentic and timeless. Twenty years from now, you’ll be able to watch The Man In The High Castle and ask, “Now when was this series made again?”
Some of my favorite films and TV series have this timeless quality: Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett), Jeeves and Wooster (BBC), Tora! Tora! Tora!, Das Boot, and Poirot to name a few.
Agree. I just finished watching it. A cliff hanger at the end of every episode. Nicely done series.
If you can trick the BBCs i player with a VPN, saying you are in the uk, the BBC are doing something similar. At the moment they are dramatising Len Deighton’s novel “SS/GB” about a Nazi occupied London. However the best contra-factual film on Hitler winning the war is this one, which is free for all to watch on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89aL6ys1k9c. Other that the Amazon app is tremendous the African American DJ “Miss Evangeline” gets your mind to ask questions as “It happened here” does.
Wow–Thanks, Jim!
The movie “It Happened Here” is propaganda of it’s time. At 14:55 into the movie the soundtrack plays a portion of the Bruckner Symphony No. 9, which is the same as heard on Leonard Bernstein’s recording of the same at 24:40 of this recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw2LNhwnquk
Funny. This music was written to exemplify the glory of God by a simple but talented Austrian composer named Anton Bruckner in 1895. He could not have known anything about the Nazis or Hitler at that time.
Is anyone else having problems accessing this radio feature? I tried it in Vivaldi, Chrome, Edge and even Firefox but it would never show me the radio. I got really quiet audio with no way to adjust the volume or tune to other stations.
The only way I got it to work was to look at the “pocket transistor” version on Chrome for Android. That was really cool, but I’d like to try the desktop version as well.
Tom, it took me a moment to discover it the first time–perhaps this is the issue. After the page shows as loaded, click the button “Tune In To Listen To The Live Broadcast.” The page should then reveal the radio.
If this doesn’t work, I’m not sure what’s going on. Worked for me in Chrome and Safari.
-Thomas
I get that button, but clicking it does nothing. At first I thought it was the ad blocker in Vivaldi, but the other browsers didn’t work either. Very strange.
Hmmm…I just tried it again and it worked. You might disable any plugins you have running. In truth, though, I’ve a number of plugins running on Chrome (do not tracks, etc.) and it still works. Perhaps try it in an incognito/private browsing window?
-T
It worked fine with FireFox on my desktop. But then again, who knows how it is configured with each user. I found this radio TV series player to be pretty silly.
I got to play a couple of the radio push buttons to play different programs and the volume control knob worked. Big deal, I suppose.
PS. I have ad blockers on FireFox pretty much set to the max. That’s why I use it.
Wow! Virtual radio or not, that is beyond cool. I love the retro radio design.
Ooh, that nice rich, warm vacuum tube sound 🙂 What, no “magic eye” tuning indicator??