On Our Miss Brooks, Eve Arden had the character live in a rented room and bought her clothes at low-price department stores so Miss Brooks would look like a typical school teacher.
Dick Van Dyke’s Rob Petrie lived in a very typical suburban ranch house, and his wife wore capri pants while at home.
Even as late as Happy days, the Cunninghams lived in a house that could easily be afforded by a relatively prosperous hardware-store owner.
I blame the sudden rise of affluence on Dallas and Dynasty, and also on the Cosby Show. But I can at least partly forgive Cosby for making the family affluent because he didn’t want a show about another struggling black family.
The Kramden’s fridge was absolutely, postively, 100% electrically powered fridge. It in no way shape or form required ice to be purchased to run it. It had a top mounted condenser coil unlike modern fridges where the coils are rear mounted. Consumer Reports was doing reviews of such models in the 1930s.
It was quite out of date by the standards of the 1950s which is why even Alice considered it pathetic.
The use of “icebox” to refer to an electrically powered fridge continues to this day.
The set design of the “The Honeymooners” is intended to reflect the psychology of the characters standing in front of them.
I remember my dad taking me to whatever theater the show was produced in, way back when. We were members of the audience, but, for the life of me I can’t remember the episode. What I do recall, was the set. There were 3 walls on the stage, and the audience was the fourth wall. I remember the stage hands on both sides of the left and right wall, doing what they do, as the Kramdens and the Nortons performed inside the three walled box. Cool.
When actors speak directly to the audience (think Ferris Beuhler), it’s called “breaking the fourth wall”.
I think the ‘income inflation’ in modern TV is largely due to the subject matter. You need a certain amount of space to make a TV show. Back when most shows revolved around a middle-class family, you could easily make a set that was realistic and still roomy enough. For example, look at the houses in “Malcolm in the Middle”, or “Roseanne”, and they are easily believable modern houses. That Malcom house in particular reminds me of the houses of my neighborhood when I was a kid.
But on the other extreme you have ‘Friends’ - None of those people could possibly afford the apartment they were living in.
I may not have seen every episode but in every one I saw it was definitely a fridge and not an ice box. Googling gives several episode guides that list shows where Norton takes something out of Ralph’s refrigerator, etc. Not even in slang would an ice box be called a refrigerator. (Unlike vice versa.)
If there are coils on the top, it’s not an ice box.
We need an expert on the version history of TH to clear up things about differences in the set over time.
I remember growing up in an apartment that actually looked a little bit like the Kramden’s, and living in apartments where the landlord did not allow pictures or anything at all to be hung on the wall. My father was a teamster, so he would not have been far off from the income of Ralph. Their apartment reminded me more of something from the 1890s-1900 than from the fifties, that may have been Gleason or the set designers intention to show an old, cheap apartment.
Consider that the apartment was a theatrical set to provide an atmospheric background, as opposed to an actual representation of an apartment. Sparse stage sets are not uncommon, since your attention is meant to be on the actors, not the decorations. TV was new enough in those days to follow that tradition, Gleason and company probably saw themselves as actors on a theatre stage as opposed to a movie set. The more realistic and elaborate backgrounds of today slowly evolved as TV brought in more and more money. I don’t think they had a team of people designing and redesigning TV sets in those days, not a huge budget, and they probably wanted something very simple to put up and knock down.
As long as we are on the subject, Rachael and Monica could not simply move into the grandmothers rent controlled apartment - rent control doesn’t work that simply (or, better put, it simply doesn’t work). To have that apartment, my guess is that both of them sleep with the landlord on a daily basis, and knock off bodegas and sell drugs on the side to make up the difference.
True, and also keep in mind that the Honeymooners originated as a sketch on Gleason’s variety show, where it was just one item of many. The set probably needed to be simple in order to be quickly put up and taken down.
This was quite jarring in the recent TNT remake of 'The Goodbye Girl". The whole point of the play is that they are starving actors crammed into a tiny NY apartment. The remake has the camera swooping through a well-decorated spacious one. /hijack
I think you are expecting way too much from the set designers. This was a prop in a TV show. You may in fact be correct that the prop they used was actually an old style refrigerator (I haven’t been able to find any photos on line that actually show it), but in terms of the show it was clearly intended to be an icebox - as shown by the fact that they had ice deliveries. Maybe in some episode guides it is carelessly referred to as an refrigerator (although in all the episode guides I’ve seen it is referred to only as an icebox), but in the actual dialogue I’ll bet they always or almost always called it an icebox, in deliberate contrast to the Nortons’ refrigerator.
There are plenty of other inconsistencies in the props and set - e.g. in Ralph’s “Man from Outer Space” costume, the icebox door he wears as part of the costume is different from the one he took off the icebox in the apartment.
Smithsonian Magazine: It felt like “pow! right in the kisser” when the Smithsonian’s David Shayt had to give up his quest for a kitchen sink from the 1950s TV series The Honeymooners.
There ya go! Now I’m remembering having to sway left and right, along with the rest of the audience, to watch the live action, as the 3 cameras were moved for different angles.
Later on that night, my dad and I went to Jack Dempseys restaurant, in Times Square, where, lo and behold, I obtained Mr. Gleasons autograph on a Jack Dempsey matchbook.
( he was at the bar…of course).
