The makers of From Bedrooms To Billions return with The Rubber Keyed Wonder, a documentary about the ground-breaking ZX Spectrum computer and its making. The film is heading to UK cinemas on the 18th October.
The brainchild of the late Sir Clive Sinclair, the ZX Spectrum gave a generation of users an affordable entry point into programming and videogames. Making its debut in 1982, the Spectrum quickly spawned an entire eco-system of magazines, software and hardware add-ons; selling millions of units, the diminutive yet cheap computer helped kickstart the British games industry.
Upcoming documentary The Rubber Keyed Wonder revisits the Spectrum and the mercurial inventor behind it, delving into the innovative pieces of hardware that led to its creation – calculators, a portable television, computers the ZX80 and ZX81 – and the seismic impact felt by the kids who plugged a Speccy into their TVs in the 1980s.
The feature-length film is the work of Anthony and Nicola Caulfield, who previously directed the similarly retro-themed From Bedrooms To Billions (2014), which provided a broader overview of the British games industry in the 1980s and 1990s. The Rubber Keyed Wonder will take a more focused but hardly less nostalgic look back; we defy any reader of a certain age not to look at the trailer below without emitting at least one sigh of wistful recognition.
Read more: The ZX Spectrum | Celebrating Uncle Clive’s greatest hit
Like the Caulfields’ previous documentaries, The Rubber Keyed Wonder was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter, with the campaign raising some £27,000 last July. We’ve now learned that the film is getting a UK cinema release – the Film Distributors Association has The Rubber Keyed Wonder scheduled to screen from the 18th October – the same day, curiously, as horror sequel Smile 2, animated fantasy The Wild Robot, Alice Lowe’s indie comedy Timestalker – which just happens to be the cover of our latest magazine, available here – and Mel Gibson’s thriller, Flight Risk. None of them stand a chance in the face of The Rubber Keyed Wonder’s 8-bit nostalgia blast.
You can find the film’s trailer below.
