Funny(?) Strange, Random story (with pics).
In the thread in the Movie House about the next Avengers film, there was a joke about Itzena possibly pretending that the Brits invented cinema. That made me want to throw Muybridge in the mix, as that british scientist is one of the forefather of cinema. To make it short he was interested in animal and human movement, so took pictures using a number of clever mechanisms and then created animations from these pictures using what he called the zoopraxiscope.
When it comes to the origin of cinema, people in the US tend to favor Edison and his kinetoscope. It used an actual perforated film reel, had a stop-and-go mechanism for the filming apparatus, but instead of projecting the result, it was shown in single viewer booths (a reason why the french claim the origin of cinema: the Lumi?re brothers actually did the first paying public projection of a film).
In my little wikipedia escapade (initially to check Muybridge's name spelling and verify he was indeed an englishman), I learned that kinetoscope went tits up and Edison & co moved to projection, because a cheaper alternative entered the market: the mutoscope. Instead of using film, the mutoscope used a stack of cardboard photographs with a mechanism to flip through them, a bit like a rolodex. I had never heard about anything like that.
https://youtu.be/Hs3y-lhVWbc
That's pretty random, but now we go into the strange. Later in the day, after that Muybridge comment and that trip on wikipedia, I checked a random movie on Turner Classic Movies: The Net. A 1953 movie about love and spies on a research facility for a futuristic jet (not an especially great movie).
Anyway, at some point a couple goes to an amusement parc... and they check a mutoscope! I could not believe my eyes. We even get to see the clip with the flipping cards. What are the odds of that happening? Unfathomably low. So.... thank you Joss Whedon for a strange moment I guess?