Torontonian Dopers: do you really watch WUTV _that_ much?

I’m spending a few days are Mom and Dad’s in Buffalo. They’re watching one of the judge shows now on WUTV Channel 29: the local Fox affiliate. About 75% of the commercials on WUTV are for Canadian businesses, or else they’re the Canadian version of American commercials; nearly identical except they might display *.ca URLs, show a bilingual English-French product box, or use voiceover talent with a Canadian accent (about=“aboat”, out=“oat”, etc). It’s been that way since I was a child in the 1970s, when Eatons, Simpsons and Cottonelle kitten commercials aired on WUTV. (I’m surprised they didn’t air Particip-ACTION PSAs or shorts from the Film Board of Canada.)

Buffalo has several other television stations, but most of the commercials they air are American; ether national, or the badly produced local ads Buffalo is famous for. While everybody else might have something from the “Ford dealers of Upstate New York”, WUTV will air the same commercial from the “Ford dealers of Ontario”.

There’s more than a few Dopers from Toronto on the SDMB. My question to them: do you really watch WUTV that much?

Thing is, I might, but it’s been 20 years since I noticed a television station’s call letters. I didn’t know people still used that.

What shows would be on this station? Bear in mind the Toronto-Hamilton supercity is a much larger market than greater Buffalo; it’s about five times bigger by population. So you need a much smaller share of it to have the same advertising impact as you do in Buffalo.

It’s the local FOX affiliate which means it’s good for baseball, football, and repeats of the Simpsons and Seinfeld. Everything that they show in primetime (and some of the football games) is simulcast in Canada so we don’t get to see those commercials.

Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s , at least for me and my friends yes. Not so much on saturday mornings, but after school time slot of about 4 to 6. As well , we watched Commander Tom on WABC and the saturday cartoons on the local NBC, ABC and CBS.

Irv Weinstein and the fires in Tonnawanda were a must watch , and we always knew were our children were at eleven pm.

Declan

I notice a higher affiliation with WNED (PBS) which routinely shows pictures of Toronto on their station IDs. I guess they get a lot of funding from us up north.

I associate WUTV with commercials for Fantasy Island on Grand Island (“Fun? Wow!”). There were probably Canadian commercials there too, but I never paid much attention to them…even before we had a remote control I would channel surf during the commercials (explains why the tuner wore out, sorry Dad!). One thing that drew us to the station was the Sci-Fi theater on Saturday afternoons.

The Tops (Taps Friendly Mahket) commercials seemed to be on WIVB (CBS), Rocketship 7 on WKBW (ABC), and the afterschool movies on WGR (NBC) (yay monster week!).
Sorry, getting all nostalgic there…

Sort of vaguely aware of it–not as much as Global TV, say, or City TV.

I’m in Hamilton, which is closer to Buffalo than Toronto is… don’t watch Fox 29 much, mostly because they haven’t had much that I couldn’t catch on a canadian station… I’m really sick of american idol fever and the other fox reality shows, sigh.

Definitely remember it being a staple even up to just a few years ago.

Too true.

We didn’t have cable when I was a kid, so WUTV was the only channel we actually got clearly that showed after-school cartoons worth watching (like Thundercats and GI Joe), and a few others that sucked but that we watched anyways (like Bravestar).

Sometimes, on a very clear day, we’d get a half-decent signal from the ABC affiliate in Rochester. If that happened to coincide with a Saturday morning, this was a very very special thing indeed because it meant we could watch a fuzzy version of Rocket Robin Hood. :slight_smile:

(I should add that I very rarely watch WUTV any more, or any TV at all for that matter… but thanks for the lovely boost of nostalgia)