For any of the Dopers around in the 40s and 50s, do you remember when you or your neighbors got their first TV? What were your viewing patterns? How do you compare the introduction of TV with the early days of VCRs or the internet? And do you agree those early days were the “Golden Age of Television”, or was that an after the fact idea?
Nah TV was shit back then, I for one don’t want to go back to the good ol’ days.
I remember getting our first colour TV in 1973, I can’t compare it to the internet etc because I was just a kid then. But I heard a good study that showed how war had changed due to communications in general.
I’m not sure when we got our first TV, but we had one before I went to kindergarten, which was around 1956. In NY we had 7 stations, with 13 back then a commercial station, before PBS. When I got up early I watched the very first thing on, after the test pattern, which was the Star Spangled Banner playing over film of the Blue Angels or some other aerobatic team. Then they had Modern Farmer, then Farmer Gray cartoons which were silent.
My first color TV was in 1979 after I was married. The people down the street had one, and when I was in elementary school all the kids in the neighborhood went there to watch Groucho Marx in The Mikado as a school assignment.
I remember Gerald McBoing Boing vaguely, and Winky Dink and you, which involved you putting an erasable piece of plastic over the screen and drawing on it as a first bit of interactive TV. And there was the original Mickey Mouse Club, and Sky King, and Whirlybirds, and Rocky Jones Space Ranger. Mostly that early stuff is a blur, and it is hard to tell when I saw each show.
We got our first TV (black and white, of course) in the late summer of 1955, when I was 7. I remember it very clearly, and I got to watch the exciting MICKEY MOUSE CLUB when it aired a month or so later.
It’s hard to judge “Golden Age,” and IMHO depends on your definition. It was a Golden Age because it was new, people watched without being jaded, and there were only three (or four) networks, so there wasn’t the huge variety we have today. The entire nation watched some popular shows, so there was a sort of national “unity” of entertainment. You could have conversations the next day about your favorite show, confident that everyone else watched it as well.
Anyhow, here are my thoughts:
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It was a more experimental era in many ways, because no one was sure how to use the new medium. (Silly extreme example: WINKIE-DINK involved children drawing with crayons on the TV screen.) But comedians like Sid Caesar and Ernie Kovaks certianly showed how inventive the medium could be.
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There were lots of live shows, which seemed interesting and made TV “diferent” from movies. Quiz shows like WHAT’S MY LINE or I’VE GOT A SECRET were fun in a way that theatre or film wasn’t (and couldn’t be.)
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Shows didn’t have season-long arches. Each episode stood alone, and that made for lots of repetition, but shows like PERRY MASON were still interesting and fun, partly because you KNEW how they’d come out. Today, we look at them as boring because each episode is so much the same. But that’s only because we’ve been bombarded with 60 years of such shows.
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There was a lot more emphasis on acting and less on action, in part because of budgets, in part because of audience tastes. The “action” was mostly Westerns involving horse-riding stunts and gun-fights, rather than explosions and helicopters.
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Violence was all very tame (there was NEVER any blood) and sex was all sub-text (married adults slept in separate twin beds, swimsuits were worn well above the navel, adultery or pre-marital sex was a sin/crime, etc.)
Many of those shows now seem trite. Of course, that’s a complaint about Shakespeare, too: he uses so many cliches. But, by todays’ standards, most of the 1950s and early 60s shows now seem old-fashioned, slow-moving, and clumsy. I’ve heard the same said about Dickens, for instance. Standards and tastes do change.
However, IMHO, some of the old shows hold up just fine, like I LOVE LUCY or HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL. (I add the footnote that not every episode was a gem, of course.)
Of course, there is also a large element of distaste on account of the sexist attitudes (often explicit), and from the racism (usually more subtle.) And gays were rarely portrayed explicitly, but homosexuality (however subtle) was always Evil. Fortunately, those attitudes have changed, but they do taint older shows. And some shows did rise above it (black comedians like Eddie Rochester, for instance, may have played roles of servants, but had many of the funniest lines.)
We got our first TV when we moved into our new house in 1954. I was just a little kid, but one thing I remember was there wasn’t much to watch during the daytime. Literally – some stations ran test patterns until noon or later.
Nobody called it a golden age back then, just like nobody in the 1940s called that the golden age for comic books. The golden part came when people realized that live TV drama would never come back, along with its constant demand for original scripts that gave a lot of young writers experience and exposure.
The Internet and VCR’s didn’t have the same impact. It was much different to go from a home with no TV to TV than from home with TV to TV and VCR. As for the Internet, well, my neighbors didn’t come over to my house to watch me open my first email.
I’m too young to answer, but I once asked the same question of my now-deceased parents, who were “first generation TV”. I felt like TV was more transformative than the technologies which had come online during my lifetime, and I wanted to know what it felt like at the time.
They said that it didn’t feel as transformative as you might think. People relate any technology to what came before, and TV was just the movies, but in your home. Of course there were more than movies on TV, but in those days there were more than movies at the movies, too. There were cartoons and short subjects and newsreels. TV was the same stuff, on an inferior screen, but without having to leave your house.
And, my parents were adamant that the early days were not golden. Much of the early stuff was slapstick and silliness, like Milton Berle and I Love Lucy, overacted to make an impression on the small screen. That style never appealed to my parents. It was a step down from what they were used to seeing at the movies.
That’s not to say they were disappointed with their first TV–there was news and sports and big events like conventions and the Oscars, and all that was new. My father described it as magic when he first watched a baseball game and could identify Yogi Berra by his big schnoz, right there in his living room.
But, they were adamant that their first TV wasn’t a life-changing event, and they sneered at much of the early programming.
LoL. when my parents were kids then was the time first t.v was introduced. just one program in the whole day…
I wasn’t born that early but was a kid in the 1970s and we had only a B&W set for quite a long time. And occasionally, the TV would stop working, so we would open the back, take out all of the vacuum tubes (not the picture tube, of course, but the vacuum tubes of this sort), carefully noting the original location of each. Then we’d drive to the nearest Radio Shack, which had a big self-service machine that you could use to identify the one that wasn’t working, and then buy a replacement.
YESYES! First TV in 1955 when I was 7.
I adored the Mickey Mouse Club. (I can still sing most of the “day” songs… Monday- Fun with Music, Tuesday- Guest Star Day, Wednesday- Circus Day, Thursday- Anything Can Happen Day, Friday- Talent Round-up Day). My biggest fear was that by the time I got old enough to be a Mouseketeer, they wouldn’t have them anymore. Sure enough, that’s what happened. That set the stage for a life of disappointment and broken dreams. And when they revived the Mickey Mouse club, I was too old to be a Mouseketeer. Story of my fucking life.
We lived in San Bernardino, CA, when the original Disneyland opened. I saw Mouseketeer Darlene riding on an elephant. Big thrill for me. Not so much for her, I guess.
I remember the test pattern on the black and white TV, and the Star Spangled Banner with the Blue Angels. I remember Winky-Dink and drawing on the plastic sheet that you stuck to the TV screen. In California, there was a program called Sheriff John (and I can still sing HIS theme song, too. So there!), Little Red Schoolhouse, Annie Oakley, Lone Ranger, a show called Stories of the Century that launched a life-long attraction for Jim Davis (later the patriarch on Dallas).
The neighbours down the road had the first TV in our street. No idea how they afforded it but he was a night watchman so he may have knocked it off.
Anyway, as a child my siblings and I used to walk down and watch TV there until we got our own B & W. I can recall people watching television in electrical stores windows after closing times.
I would add this was in Australia so probably about five years down the track from the USA experience.
(And while it wasn’t asked, when colour TV first came out, the capacity to flog stolen colour TV’s through pubs- now you can’t give one away).
My father was a television aficionado.
We were the first family in the neighborhood to have a color TV in 1966 (or perhaps 1967).
I believe it was a Zenith.
The neighbors quite literally would show up several times a week just to look at the TV for a while.
It was transformative and started the trend of people staying at home instead of going out.
Some nights, Mother would cook TV dinners (y’all remember those, right?) and we would all sit around with TV trays and watch whatever was on.
And watching baseball on TV was much more interesting to a boy than listening to it on the radio.
This theme is dealt with poignantly in the movie Avalon.
Comment from IMDB message board:
I cried all the way home from this movie, for the reasons described here.
Did you eat TV Dinners on tray tables while watching?
Yes.
Just to make you feel old, the revival I assume you’re referring to started the day after I was born. >_>
That doesn’t make me feel old.
Being old makes me feel old.
hahahahaha
No, really, I don’t feel old.
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Most of the time.
Hehe. Age and treachery will triumph over youth and skill.
We could finally afford our first TV in 1956, when I was nine. Juneau, Alaska had one TV station, and the first show I saw was a very fuzzy Robin Hood. It was contact addiction from day one. We moved to Anchorage that year, which had three stations, all of which went off the air at around 11 or 12 o’clock and broadcast the “test pattern”. Man, I loved the westerns of that era and watched them all, although Gunsmoke was a little too mature (boring) for me. Also, Annette’s tits.
No. I remember TV dinners alright (Salisbury Steak, fried chicken) but my parents never let us eat in the living room, only at the dining room table, just like we did with our kids. In fact, I don’t remember eating in front of the TV at all when it was upstairs - when it was moved to the basement yes.
Though I was only 5, I remember that I still thought there was something really interesting about Annette. I also remember seeing the only two serials I remember - Spin and Marty and the Hardy Boys, over and over and over again.