The streets of Kuala Lumpur in the 1960s (50 years ago) and now

I recently discovered two videos where YouTuber Kerul Kamal made the effort to identify and visit various film location that were used to film of two PRamlee movies in the 1960s. He then did a YouTube video showing the snippet of the show and intercepted with how the locations looked today.

Having the movement and audio visually shown in video brings a stronger feeling of nostalgia compared to just viewing before and after photographs. Even though I was not born during both the films, I am now able to visually see the places that my mom used to describe to me.

I’ve embedded both the videos where from Kerul Kamal’s channel.

Seniman Bujang Lapok (1961):

You would see the before and after of the location.

Masam Masam Manis (1965):

 

At the end of the video above, it showed the video of a car arriving at a normal road in the 60s. The shop name was called “Lodging Mak Minah”. Then a road from today is being inserted into the scene to show the comparison before and after.

Because at first glance the road does not look similar- in the sense the shop names are of course different since there is a gap of more than 50 years. The first time when I watched that scene, I did wonder how did he know it was that road. I thought perhaps he just picked a random road and that’s it.

But he answered the question in my mind right after by explaining how he managed to identify the road. He mentioned he spent 3 hours each day for 3 months searching the roads in KL through Google Maps. Then finally identifying the road through certain structures that did not change such as the shape and a structure of a few buildings, the same grill shape that is located on the door and the same No 40 plate, a curvature of the road, etc. It was Jalan Brunei Selatan.

He took so much of effort that some viewers asked him to include an account number where they can make a little monetary contributions because the video meant so much to them.

You can see that he painstakingly went to each location that he wanted to compare and tried his best to pan the videos in a similar direction as how the original location was shot. Meaning he really have to shoot the “today” roads on his own so that the angle and direction of the video moment would mimic the original movie as much as possible.  However, at times he was not able to do directly for example the 60s where the Chinese Assembly Hall is viewed from above is now a busy road with the monorail line above it.  But he certainly tries his best as much as he could.

Wow! Absolutely amazing.