What do you miss about old school tv?

Cafe Society
61

There are still a number of amateurishly done shows around the country where a host or group of hosts in costume introduce old bad horror movies. Though the name escapes me just now, there is one that comes out of Buffalo, New York that also runs public domain films in other genres from time-to-time, such as On the Road to Bali and even The Seventh Seal. The hosts dress up like 50s-era beatniks.

I miss the old variety shows such as Ed Sullivan’s. I am just old enough to recall when Steve Allen and Jackie Gleason had shows in a largely similar vein.

62

I wonder if the latter was inspired by Count Floyd…

63

And what was on TV networks was a shared experience.

64

Back in the day, MTV actually showed videos.

65

The ABC Movie of the Week.
Did other networks have made for TV movies too?
Anyway, some of those movies were pretty good, like “The Girl Most Likely To…” with Stockard Channing which was one of my favorites as a kid. Steven Spielberg’s first movie, “Duel” was a TV movie. Brian’s Song, Bad Ronald, Trilogy of Terror and many more.
Also they had movies that became Tv series’, Six Million Dollar Man, Starsky & Hutch.
Many of these old movies of the week are impossible to find on video or DVD, but I’d pay good money to watch a collection of them.

66

I hanker for the days when television shows started on time. What a notion!

67

I know. I remember both. But in the early days manufacturers weren’t even required to put UHF tuners into new TVs until the F.C.C. mandated them in 1964. And they didn’t have an incentive to make high-quality UHF tuners. It wasn’t until some time in the 70s that they were required to make UHF tuners with channel stops instead of continuous tuning knobs (although the old sets still had fine tuning knobs for both VHF and UHF.

Side note: who remembers when UHF knobs went to channel 83? In 1983 the F.C.C. removed channels 70-83 from the TV band and reassigned it to microwave transmissions and cordless telephones. In 2011 the UHF TV band was further reduced as channels 52-69 were also reassigned.

68

+1. Beverly Hillbillies and Hogan’s Heros were off the air before I was born but I must have seen them all.

Hogan’s Heros must have the unfunniest premis of a sitcom ever.

69

More unfunny than, say, Heil Honey I’m Home!?

70

Good find, I was unaware of that.

I’m guessing they were trying to be meta about sitcoms. Still in bad taste I’d say.

HH seemed to be in earnest. Nazi POW camp vs making fun of how shitty sitcoms can be, I’d say HH still an unfunnier premis.

71

I miss variety shows, like The Carol Burnett Show, Laugh In, Sonny & Cher, etc. There were musical numbers, a few comedy sketches, often great guest stars… We just don’t do those anymore. Only SNL comes close, but that hasn’t been funny in years, IMO.

I also miss the old-school cartoons, like Road Runner and Bugs Bunny, but upon re-watching, I’m horrified by the blatant racism and sexism in those things. I think cartoons started to seriously suck somewhere around the late 80s (and I don’t think that just because I grew out of cartoons, because I never did).

72

  • Turning the knob to get to a channel and then fine-tuning to get the best picture (still crappy)

  • Discovering UHF and getting stations from Minneapolis, being rebroadcast as a local primitive rural cable system

  • The first run of Monty Python on PBS!

  • Johnny Carson back when it was 90 minutes long; usually turned it off if it was just an author

  • The Midnight Special with Wolfman Jack, back before MTV it was the only way to see music videos (Bohemian Rhapsody! - trippy)

  • The local Sioux Falls channel 11 station afternoon cartoon show, named “Captain 11” - a fake astronaut, letting kids flip up toggle switches on a fake spaceship for their birthday to start the cartoons like “Quick Draw McDraw” and “Snagglepuss” . Turns out Captain 11 was also the weather man and supposedly hated kids

  • In the summer time, being bored and playing around with the knobs, we could get stations from Arizona in South Dakota! Usually hot, humid days, something to do with temperature inversions.

  • Primitive weather reports (anyone else had the “spinning” discs that relied on scanning frequencies to show motion)?

73

Turning off the TV and seeing that white dot slowly disappear.

No infomercials or shopping networks.

It was a big ass deal when your favorite college team played on television.

The Sunday talk shows weren’t the same clowns every week delivering talking points or getting digs in, they talked like adults.

Saturday morning cartoons. And Buck Barry, for those of you who remember WOOD-TV’s Saturday kids’ host.

NBC’s Saturday Night At The Movies

Weathermen drawing highs, lows, and front on a map with a marker.

That bowling show where they had a scorekeeper write down the scores in impeccable penmanship.

Variety shows, a little singing, some comedy sketches.

“The following program is brought to you in living color”

After school specials, like Skinny and Fatty.

Election return shows with the results coming in on massive boards with odometer-style digits.

Special days when the weather was just right and you got out of town stations.

Weekday morning game shows.

Turning the antenna.

Watching a sporting event and having to pay attention to remember the score, ball-strike counts, number of outs, what down it was, guessing how much time was left and where a first down would be.

74

Playing around with the color, tint, contrast, brightness, and vertical hold dials to find the precise unnatural look you prefer.

75

Channel 6, WJAC, out of Johnstown PA did that. Their mid-day weather report was, in fact, called “Weather in Motion” and prominently featured those spinning discs. They used them from at least the early 60’s well into the 80’s. I confess to ignorance of how TV worked then (and now, too), so I’d be obliged if anybody can give a brief and simple explanation of how the spinning effect worked.

76

I’m not picturing this. Are there examples of this on YouTube?

77

It’s called “broad appeal,” made back in the days when most households had just one TV, and the shows were meant to appeal to a whole family watching together. Practically every show on now is aimed at a specific demographic, sometimes a very narrow one, like “girls, aged 11-15.”

Kids cartoons got awful in the 80s, when they became 1/2 hour commercials for toy tie-ins. I babysat a lot then, and I can tell you that kids born 1978-1985 preferred reruns or videotapes of Scooby-doo, The Flintstones, and anything else made in the 60s and 70s over the new cartoons.

Cartoons made for adults, like Futurama, King of the Hill, Daria, and Home Movies have been some of the best shows out there, though, and Nicktoon originals were pretty good. I loved Hey, Arnold, even though it was a kids’ show. Maybe cable-original cartoons in general were better than network-original, or maybe 80s cartoons just sucked, like all 80s TV, and got better in the 90s.

You can still do that with the remote, and you have even more choices.

78

Oh, and also Danger Mouse. I loved me some Danger Mouse. I think “Penfold” would be a terrific pet name.

Upon Wiki searching for Danger Mouse, I discovered a reboot of the cartoon series is planned for 2015. Why do I have the feeling it might suck?

79

Others have mentioned local programming, and in particular the craze in the 50s and 60s for late-night horror hosts showing bad science fiction movies.

Everyone has their local favorites, but for sheer breadth of cultural influence, none can top Cleveland’s Ghoulardi. As I’ve said elsewhere, during his relatively brief run (1963-1966), he was singularly responsible for thousands upon thousands of northeastern Ohio kids growing up slightly skewed…in a very positive way.

The local programming angle also extends to after-school programs on weekdays. Each city had its own variety of hosts, and more than one in larger markets. Cleveland had Barnaby, Captain Penny and Franz the Toymaker, among others. The thing is, these guys had to come up with new material five days a week, 52 weeks a year…and through the 60s at least, it was performed live every day. An amazing workload I doubt entertainers of today would be up to, much less writing staffs.

And the other great thing about these shows is that it gave a whole new generation exposure to the classic cartoons and film shorts of the 1930s and 1940s. What a list of greats:

Laurel and Hardy
Our Gang
The Three Stooges
Popeye (the Fleischer shorts in particular)
Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies (through 1948)

…and many more lesser lights. Hell, I’ll even give the Bowery Boys a shout-out here! It’s hard to imagine my childhood without this, and it’s only relatively recently that the complete works of some of these luminaries have finally become available on DVD and treated with the respect they deserved.

Failing a DVD purchase, you play hell finding most of these films on TV at all these days. So we have succeeding generations having little idea of who they are.

One other thing I miss: local TV stations bought syndicated packages of old theatrical films and would show them late at night. Once I got out of high school, I was an inveterate night owl, and would stay up till 4:00 in the morning at times watching them. Many were B-films at best, but they still were enjoyable. And you’d occasionally see some genuine classics, too.

Now, once again, we have TCM…and not much else. And even with 24-hour programming, there’s so much they don’t get to. So these films have descended into that same black hole.

80

Humph. I see your Ghoulardi and raise you Zacherley. That’s who I watched in 1961-2. I even had his Zacherley for President record. I’ve seen, but don’t own, a horror stories anthology from him.