A couple of days ago I posted a reel of 1970s TV commercials. My sense was that the 70s saw an upturn in the humor and style of commercials as opposed to the style of the 50s ads which were largely straight and often painfully earnest and the 60s which
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBp1wLMCmeohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYspFe9u5RU Apropos of yesterday’s post on the joys of Muzak, above are two TV spots for the Los Angeles FM Muzak station KJOI. My memory is that there were no announcers on the station–it was a solid hour of Muzak-Bed with a canned announcement at the end of the hour
Above is a charming reel of a few old RCA Victor television and radio ads. As always with ads for old technology, the yuk-yuk factor is easy, low-hanging fruit. Of course old TV sets look silly. So do the annoucers who sit there extolling their virtues. (They also sound silly–the
Last night we watched the above installment of ‘Hollywood Palace‘, an hourlong variety show that broadcast Saturday nights (except September 1967 to January 1968, when it aired on Monday nights) on ABC from January 4, 1964, to February 7, 1970. This particular episode was broadcast on January 20th, 1968. The host
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu1FLQ3sFEghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Kz469Be8CQ&list=PLzIxbVR-uc38-qT2ytfezf_rpJdzhETIh&index=49https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbZr9CbK59s&list=PLzIxbVR-uc38-qT2ytfezf_rpJdzhETIh&index=23https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK3I4op-M5E&list=PLzIxbVR-uc38-qT2ytfezf_rpJdzhETIh&index=83 Above are a veritable Valhalla of television station I.D. sign-offs and sign-ons which continue to prompt my unanswered question from yesterday’s post: why did TV stations bother signing off and on? Wasn’t there sufficient viewership in the wee morning hours to warrant spending a little dough on an overnight
Why did television stations used to sign off in the wee morning hours? Couldn’t they get anyone to work the overnight shift? Aren’t TV stations supposed to be like hotels–they never close? At least the sign offs were dramatic and interesting. Dig the above 1970 sign-off from KHJ-TV, Channel 9,
Yesterday I posted one of Rodney Dangerfield’s greatest appearances on Johnny Carson. Today we’re seeing him on The Mike Douglas Show in 1969. This is one of his earliest TV appearances (it’s shortly after his breakthrough opening for Dionne Warwick at The Sands) so it’s important to view it through
Every move, every twitch, every eye-pop of Rodney Dangerfield’s is a brilliant piece of method acting. Add to that the non-stop jokes and you have one of the truly ‘performative’ comics; he’s a man named Jacob Cohen (his real name) who, under the pseudonym ‘Jack Roy’ (his first stage name)
This is a terrific four minute ‘blooper’ reel of Dean Martin and Frank What’s-his-name stumbling through a promo for the premiere of Dean’s soon-to-be smash TV variety show in 1965. Filmed prior to the taping–hence the live audience who are delighted with the hijinks–it shows the two at both their
Here’s an interesting reel of opening credits and set-up sequences of the shows you were likely to see if you were watching TV in the late 1940s. Television had of course been around in various forms and incarnations for almost twenty years by then, but it was in 1947-48 that