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rfmcdonaldTorontoist's Jerad Gallinger has a post up interviewing Ed Conroy, creator of the YouTube channel Retrontario, an online archive of hundreds of vintage clips from Ontario television, some dating as far back as the 1940s.
What drives you to do it? An ironic love of the retro? Pride in your city? Boredom?
Certainly a pride for the city and the province. Most of this stuff was welded into our psyche, but I realized a few years ago that it was in danger of disappearing into the great black hole of history—once people's home-recorded VHS or Beta tapes bite the dust, then the only people left with recordings of this type are TV stations and ad agencies, neither of whom have a great track record for preservation.
YouTube is brilliant for people who like to mainline nostalgia, and since no one was focusing on Ontario-based stuff, I saw an opportunity to rekindle some retro love for our city's awesome televisual past. Plus the responses the videos get—for example, some people send me pictures of themselves crying when watching Polka Dot Door clips—is quite touching.
