Risque in Times Gone By

Risque Times Gone By

The Reel in Realize

by Shamus O’Wayback

Georgia Adair and Paola ReyWhen you make movies, your brain gets all out of whack when it comes to a holiday season. You could easily be shooting Christmas movies in June, or even earlier. Feel like being really scary around Valentine’s Day? Then horror movies are perfect for you. You have to work well before you want people to see the final product, which makes perfect sense if you think about it. [Well, timing is everything, after all.]

We don’t work quite that far in advance, but as most of us were out shopping for a gut-extending Thanksgiving meal, we did have an editor that kept playing a midi version of Auld Lang Syne over and over [and over and over] as he worked on a special video for New Year’s Day on 247. Around here we tend to be pretty much over whatever holiday happens to be current by the time it comes around. It just goes with the territory. [And yet not once have I ever heard, “Naw, I’m over Christmas already. Don’t even bother getting me a present.”]

VERY Early RisqueSo with that pounding through our brains, when D.Minion got an announcement on AOL yesterday about checking out the web in 1999, well, you can probably figure out what we started doing. We started digging. [Yes, they did.] As most of you probably know, we have massive archives around here, and we had great fun — and many groans — over the next couple of hours going back and trying to find out what risque.com looked like in the “early web” years. For example, this image here represented a turn of the century sales pitch. [Some of us might feel a bit taken aback at this moment, comprehending that for a majority of our society now, “turn of the century” means moving into the twenty-first century. When the heck did that happen?]

Given the amount of time we had [took] to devote to the project, we did manage to turn up a version of the site from at least close to that time. Back in those days, “Risque” was the management company while the web folks used “Adult Diary” as their working name.

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As such, Adult Diary apparently had a few major “parts” accessed via the index pages shown — with at least a slight amount of horror — on the next page. Juli had been doing Playboy TV’s Night Calls for a few years by this point, so she could afford to hire a fancy professional graphic designer to do her site. She was really, really nice about everything in life, though, so we didn’t hold it against her. [This did not, however, keep us from teasing her mercilessly about it. What are friends for, after all?]

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