I posted this in another thread:
That’s from Capricorn One. Question: Is the quote based in fact? Did people really complain about reruns being preempted?
I do not know the factual answer but given that Apollo XVII was known about for months (timing wise) and years (conceptually) I can’t see that any schedules would have been made to be usurped.
[ul]
[li]The Apollo 17 mission took place in December 1972.[/li][li]The I Love Lucy show when off the air in 1957.[/li][li]You might be thinking of Here’s Lucy which aired from 1968-1974.[/li][/ul]
There’s an urban legend attached to the Apollo 17/I Love Lucy storyline but no evidence to support it.
I’m not sure what kind of cite would be involved here (a network switchboard operator relating a personal anecdote of receiving such a complaint?), but it wouldn’t surprise me. Apollo 17 was long after the “first ever” Apollo 11 mission, to many people of the time it felt like “more of the same” - a rerun itself, if you will. There’s a reason that was the last manned lunar mission in (that era of) NASA history; the Congressional funding wasn’t there any more because the glory was captured, Old Glory was planted, and nothing new was going to get done, just the same stuff for longer periods of time and gathering more of this so-called “data” in the form of lunar rocks and whatnot that don’t exactly fire the public imagination. That, or really expensive stuff like setting up a permanent base on the Moon or something, which it was not clear was worth it - a major reason it hasn’t happened yet 40+ years later - the technology for it has only gotten easier, but the reasons why we should do so haven’t gotten any clearer.
And even the Apollo 11 landing didn’t strike a deep chord with everyone… 
As for whether or not people call in to complain at all about programming getting displaced by live events: that absolutely happens! I personally called in to NBC when they switched off showing Game 5 of the 1994 NBA Finals to show OJ Simpson’s white Ford Bronco driving at 35 MPH on an empty California highway with police helicopters overhead. Breaking news with updates on the scroll feed, maybe; cutaways during commercial breaks, sure; but full time live coverage of basically nothing going on? With every other channel showing the OJ thing anyway? Come on!
The quote says reruns of I Love Lucy. I used to watch the reruns when I was a kid during that time.
But the legend is centered not on originally aired episodes of a Lucy show like Here’s Lucy, but reruns of I Love Lucy. The fact that these were not even new episodes of a show is supposed to add to the indignity. And yes, I Love Lucy was definitely being shown in syndicated reruns in December 1972. As is well-known, it has literally NEVER been off the air since it began - it was already into “reruns” when completing its original run. So it’s plausible… Though even if someone could dig out a TV Guide from the week of the Apollo 17 landing and prove it was being aired exactly at that time on some station somewhere in the USA, that doesn’t prove someone actually called in to complain.
The space program was far from universally popular in the U.S.:
As time went on, it got more unpopular. People increasingly thought that it was a waste of money. I don’t know whether the claim that people complained about Apollo 17 preventing them from watching reruns of I Love Lucy was true, but it’s certainly true that a lot of people weren’t interested in watching anything from the later Apollo missions. The general idea, as opposed to the specific example, in the quotation from Capricorn One was certainly true.
Exactly. While we can’t realistically pinpoint proof of someone calling in to complain about the Apollo 17 landing displacing a rerun of I Love Lucy, and in any case such “proof” would be anecdotal anyway.
In re-reading the OP it’s not clear which element the OP is surprised about: that interest in Apollo 17 was so low, that interest in a Lucy rerun in 1971 was so high, or that someone would bother to call in a complaint to a TV network over displaced programming. But for all three dimensions, these are verifiable facts:
1 - By the time of the Apollo 17 landings, public interest and support of the lunar missions were at an all time low and waning.
2 - Reruns of I Love Lucy was popular programming in 1971. It was on multiple times a day, pretty much every day, and on different channels, IIRC.
3 - People definitely call in to complain to a TV network about expected programming being displaced by something the caller feels is much less interesting. In my own personal example of calling in during the 1994 NBA Finals, the person on the other end mentioned that they were getting TONS of similar complaints from Knicks fans in NYC. This would be especially true, IMHO, in the era when over-the-air live programming on about 5 or 6 TV channels (local and national networks combined) was all there was.
Put that all together and it’s very plausible to me that someone, somewhere in the USA called in to complain in December 1971 that they tried to watch Lucy and found this stupid boring moon landing thing instead. AGAIN.
I’m not surprised about anything. I’m just wondering if the quote was a statement of fact, or if it was made up for the movie.
No network broadcast reruns of I Love Lucy in 1972. It had long ago gone completely into syndication and was shown in individual stations. In many markets, they were on non-network stations (including New York). Those stations didn’t ever broadcast space missions: they couldn’t use the network feed and wouldn’t pay for their own.
It’s possible that in some markets a network affiliate ran it in syndication, but back then it was rare for that to happen.
Possibly someone could have called NBC to complain that their affiliate preempted their regular lineup of reruns, but the odds they wanted to see I Love Lucy instead were remote: the usual complaint was that soap operas – which weren’t reruns – were preempted.
It’s in a box on a cargo ship headed across the ocean at the moment, but I have the newspaper television magazine from the week that Apollo 17 was on the moon. I should be reuniting with that box in a week or so, but as I recall from flipping through the magazine a couple weeks ago (I found it on my parents’ bookshelf and wondered why they had an old tv magazine floating around), notice of the moon landing was simply noted in the general listings, no real proclamations, and regularly scheduled programming was noted as being ‘possibly interrupted’ in the event of a successful landing.
The wording of the moon landing scheduled-slots, too, was blase – if Apollo 17 landed on the moon, then, yeah, ok, we have to pre-empt xyz show, but if something goes wrong, wayhey, it’s Carol Burnett as usual. Far more notice was given to the various Christmas specials on that week.
The schedule for the moon landing was so blase and meh, in fact, as mentioned, I flipped through the paper a couple of times and nearly tossed it as it wasn’t inherently clear why it’d been saved on the shelf for the past 40 odd years.
If I remember in all the craziness later this week, I can scan the relevant pages and put them up on my flickr account if there’s any interest.
That seems odd. You’d think astronauts crashing onto the moon would be be breaking news worthy.
Here’s your historical context.
In 1966, CBS News wanted to show live broadcasts of Senate hearings on the Vietnam War. They were overruled by network executives who decided to air the network’s normal daytime schedule of old reruns (including I Love Lucy and the Beverly Hillbillies), game shows and soap operas.
CBS News president Fred Friendly resigned over the issue and angrily blasted the network over their decision to ignore the hearings in favor of “a ninth rerun of I Love Lucy.”
Ever since then the phrase “I Love Lucy reruns” has been a shorthand phrase for either the viewer or the network’s disinterest in news.
FYI, here’s a broadcasting discussion board on the topic of pre-empting for breaking news (in this case, tornadoes.) Notice that no one said viewers had called to thank their stations, only complaints.
One reason I am not a Democrat: Senator William Proxmire.
Kunilou is right, “I Love Lucy reruns and soap operas” is shorthand for what the great unwash want to watch instead of what the cultural elites think they should.
I am pretty sure Apollo 17 was the only manned space flight to have a scheduled prime time launch. It was delayed for 2 1/2 hours and if the networks stayed with it the whole time (I didn’t watch, I was in college studying my textbooks. In a local bar with liquid refreshment-drinking age was 18 then), they easily could have gotten angry phone calls. This was the era when Howard Cosell of “ABC Monday Night Football” got death threats because the Washington Redskins did not get a 15 second clip of their Sunday win shown during MNF halftime.
People lost interest in the space program real quick. When Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13” came out in 1995, “Newsday” had an article on how people who were adults or teenagers in 1970, were astounded that three astronauts almost died in space. “There was a lot of other stuff happening then, like Vietnam War” was the usual reason.
In my neck of the woods in daily print, the filler/line was always a piece on “Canada, Our Friendly Neighbor to the North.”
Hell, I remember some mostly young, vapid, “unwashed” masses started complaining when basically all TV, network & cable, was preempted for several days after 9/11. They didn’t seem to get the idea that, yes there’s nothing new to report, but the huge significance of the event made returning to showing programs which were by & large meaningless, mindless garbage a tad inappropriate…
This story isn’t about the space program, but it is about what people want to watch on television.
Remember back in 1987, when baby Jessica fell down that old well pipe? Poor kid was down there for over 48 hours, and there was a lot of TV coverage of the rescue attempt.
But by the second day I guess some folks were tired of it. I was working where I couldn’t get TV or radio, but once, on the afternoon of the second day, I called a TV station to ask how the rescue was going. The lady on the phone put me on hold, then got back to me and said she wasn’t out yet. Then she thanked me for calling, and my concern, because a couple of times, when rescue seemed imminent, the station had broken into programming. Then the station had to field calls from people, mostly women, who were angry their soaps were pre-empted.
I don’t remember the station, but I was in East Lansing, Michigan at the time.
I thought I remember that the complaint was actually ovr the Gemini launches (not as spectacular as moon landings) pre-empting some shows; I thought the indignation and tons of phone calls were due to a launch pre-empting a major league football game (no small potatoes like I Love Lucy).
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/2579/1/umi-umd-2468.pdf (P53)
The only problem with that quote is equating Lost In Space with science fiction…
“And another thing: how come I can’t get no Tang around here?”
LiS deserved the SF label more than Star Wars or any number of others that are regularly called SF.