SUNDAY NIGHTS, FALL ’64

Here’s another of RwDt09’s compilation videos of intros to old TV shows. This is what a Sunday night lineup looked like in the autumn of 1964. (I would have been three months old and hearing these themes from the living room below…or I would have been sleeping). It’s hard to comprehend how astonishing it was to see shows ‘in living color’ in your own home. Indeed I don’t think anything could equal it now short of a TV show appearing as a hologram in your living room–something I fully expect will happen in the coming few years. Strangely, even though my father worked for NBC making documentaries through the 1960s, we didn’t bother getting a color TV until the early 70s. A junky old black and white Zenith was what we relied on for the first eight or so years of my life. It wasn’t that we didn’t have the money for another TV. Rather, it was an attitude ingrained into people like my parents who grew up in the depression. If something wasn’t broken you didn’t replace it. Upgrading as a concept didn’t really cross their minds. Cars were driven until they stopped being driveable. Kitchen pots and pans were never replaced, existing as increasingly grody reminders of meals from the past. Nowadays, when one purchases a house the first thing that usually happens is a complete revamp of whatever kitchen and bathroom appliances are currently there. Not only didn’t my parents do this in 1968 when they purchased our house in Hollywood, they never did it. When they passed away a few years ago and I put the house on the market, the realtors were amazed to see an intercom system–long defunct–still in the walls, as well as original blue tile in the bathroom with cute little 1950s fishes inlaid in the pattern. All tangents aside, enjoy the above peak into a Sunday evening, fifty-eight years ago. It sure as hell beats the current Sunday night lineup…

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