#douglas rain

(since, as we all know, he was born 9 may 1928. and not on any other date.)

Colours in the Dark (1967) A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968) Hadrian VII (1969)

and since earlier this year, i finally completed the newspaper clippings project that i had been intermittently working on (though mostly just procrastinating from) for like a year and a half, let me use this momentous occasion to share with you the earliest recorded mention of DR in the archive i scoured — an article from the winnipeg tribune, 21 may 1934, page 7 (he would have just turned six at the time):

....yeah, welcome to the private little circle of hell i live in, called "where the fuck is douglas," in which i spend hours squinting at the horrible grainy scans of ancient newspapers trying to figure out where the one singular mention of DR is hanging out on this tightly printed page. this is why it took a year and a half.

spot him yet? no worries if not; that's what you have me for, after all. he's in the section at the top left titled "CLUBS" – right here:

this article does not give any further details, other than mentioning him by name, so we don't really know what his part of the 'program' for this club event was. but we can hazard a guess based on the fact that basically all his appearances in these earlier newspapers talk of him reciting poems, speeches, and such things.

the most recent mention of him btw (at the time i scoured the archive, over a year ago at this point) was from the gaston gazette, on 21 february 2024, on page 20. in the tv program section, of course:

How many closeups does HAL 9000 get in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Did a little thing, just short of 3 minutes of the total runtime are taken up by HAL’s ominous lens.

Edit: I have now added captions, also here’s a Google Drive upload just in case.

#23 is my favorite, I never noticed it fades directly into Dave marching out of the airlock to go deactivate him without changing color at all, what a great and poetic shot. 

Also of note are:

The way it zooms in closer and more unnervingly after the first handful of shots when HAL asks Dave his questions and is really beginning to malfunction, then stays at that distance for the rest of the movie. Some of the shots are identical and only vary in length and audio, which is why I included lead ins/outs to differentiate.

The way the light becomes drowned out by the red lighting of the logic memory center, leaving just the yellow dot and resembling a pupil contracted tightly in fear.

The slightly different brightness levels of the red light (can you say headcanon that he can purposefully and/or unconsciously change the brightness levels as a subtle form of computer body language).

The way the red lighting on the closeup of Dave marching out of the airlock implies that HAL can see him there despite there being no lens visible that I noticed.