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Old 01-26-2010, 09:29 PM
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See yourself on Color TV!
 
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Chicago TV listings from early color days

A couple of newspaper TV listing supplements from late 1957 and early 1958 in Chicago are posted on my site:
http://www.bretl.com/tvarticles/tvr0...tvr12jan58.htm

Be sure to see the daily listing of color programs. At that time, NBC in Chicago had gone to all color for all local live programs, including a late night 5-minute program on household hints. Wow! An exposition on oven mitts in COLOR!
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Old 01-26-2010, 11:31 PM
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Thanks for sharing!
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Old 01-27-2010, 03:30 PM
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Old TV Listings

great read, thanks; good find in what was probably a very hot attic. I've got several old guides from our local area (Tampa, FL) going back to 1955, when TV Guide magazine put all the peninsular Florida TV stations in one magazine. Great memories of some great and not so great shows of the past. I think there was more to see on 3 or 4 local channels back then than 180 channels now when half of a broadcast day is devoted to infomercials.
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Old 01-27-2010, 08:23 PM
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Now I'm trying to figure out who Norm Barry was (he had a five minute late night program)
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Old 01-27-2010, 11:24 PM
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In New York City one of our TV stations had "Modern Farmer" on at 5AM, as if there were any farmers in the area. Actually, in our area, a farm was defined as: "a place where they haven't built houses just yet".
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Old 01-28-2010, 07:03 AM
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Originally Posted by wa2ise View Post
In New York City one of our TV stations had "Modern Farmer" on at 5AM, as if there were any farmers in the area. Actually, in our area, a farm was defined as: "a place where they haven't built houses just yet".
From what I've gathered, the station in question was WRCA/WNBC-TV.
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Old 01-28-2010, 09:08 PM
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Added January 19, 1958 issue
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Old 01-29-2010, 02:25 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bozey45 View Post
great read, thanks; good find in what was probably a very hot attic. I've got several old guides from our local area (Tampa, FL) going back to 1955, when TV Guide magazine put all the peninsular Florida TV stations in one magazine. Great memories of some great and not so great shows of the past. I think there was more to see on 3 or 4 local channels back then than 180 channels now when half of a broadcast day is devoted to infomercials.
I know what you mean. The ION television affiliate in this area (which was an ABC affiliate until about ten years ago) runs infomercials literally all day long, running regular television shows from the network only during prime time. After 11 p.m. or so, it's back to infomercials all night long and into the next day, all day long; a vicious cycle which seemingly has no end.

Since about 1990 (plus or minus a year or two; I don't remember exactly when infomercials actually started on US television stations), infomercials have taken up the time between shows on the regular TV networks. I remember when TV stations showed old off-network reruns between network programs, and to be very honest, TV was a lot more fun to watch in those days. Now we are bombarded with advertisements disguised as half-hour TV shows, and they are shown at ungodly hours of the night--usually after the last network show ends, and all night long (or until the network's first early-morning program starts).

Who watches these late-late night infomercials, anyway? I think TV stations would be a lot better off if they went back to the old system of signing off after the last network program left the air, as most infomercials are a crashing bore (IMHO). Most of the few stations that still sign off after midnight or one a. m. do not say anything in the form of a formal announcement ("This is television station K--- in Podunk City, Idaho, now leaving the air . . .") or even play the National Anthem before ending their broadcast schedule (simply dropping off the air suddenly after the last program is over), but that's material for another thread.

BTW, my cable service is the lowest tier of service available from Time Warner Cable (standard basic, what I call "bare bones" basic--broadcast channels only). I used to have expanded basic and even digital cable, but when these services raised their rates higher per month than I was willing to pay, I had my service downgraded as low as one can go without actually having the service disconnected.

Do I miss those extra cable channels? No, not really. I have a DVD player, a VCR and a subscription to Netflix (in addition to a small but slowly growing collection of DVDs and about 60 VHS tapes, most of the latter having old and vintage TV series and movies which I taped about 25 years ago), so if I want to see my favorite shows from, say, when I was growing up (the 1970s), I need only look up the program in my video library. For newer shows I used to watch on cable, I can always go to that show's web site and watch full episodes online. With a selection of programs like that, who needs high-priced cable service, with an extra fee on top of that for a digital converter box? (That's my opinion and my view of the situation, of course).

I have never had pay-cable movie channels in all the years I've had cable (Lake County, Ohio, where I live, didn't get cable until 1982), except for one month some time in the late '80s when I decided to sign up for HBO. The channel did nothing, for the most part, but show the same movies over and over again all week long (the movies themselves weren't that good either, IMHO); needless to say, after about two weeks of this, I decided I'd had enough, so at the end of that month I had the service disconnected.

I don't miss it, and do not intend to get pay-cable again. If it gets to the point where all TV (even the networks) becomes scrambled pay cable service (as I think it might, eventually--from what I've been reading in Broadcasting and Cable's daily newsletter lately, the advertiser-supported business model for broadcast TV isn't working anymore), I will drop my cable service altogether, get an ATSC->NTSC converter box and an antenna, and start watching TV over the air as I did for years, before cable arrived. I don't know how many OTA stations I'll get here, 35 miles east of Cleveland and maybe ten or fifteen miles further east of where the TV transmitters are located (they are all in a southwestern suburb of Cleveland), but I do know that, once I get the box and antenna, that's all I'll have to pay to get TV reception from that point on. I know someone who has just such an arrangement; this person gets more TV stations with a box and antenna hooked up to her TV than most folks in this area used to with just an antenna in the "dark ages" of analog TV, before June 12 last year.
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Last edited by Jeffhs; 01-29-2010 at 03:04 AM.
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Old 01-29-2010, 01:38 PM
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Correct me if I'm mistaken, but didn't WBBM's The Best of MGM (which showcased pre-1948 MGM movies) later evolve into The Best of CBS by the 1960's?
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Old 01-31-2010, 06:24 PM
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I remember as late as maybe 1970 or so, the "TV Prevue" guide in the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper identified programs in COLOR. Yes, in all-capital letters.
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Old 01-31-2010, 10:35 PM
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NBC also made a huge to-do over its color programming (since it was America's first "full color" television network by the mid-'60s, I am not surprised), with its signature peacock and a bold announcement--"The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC!" ABC's color programming was preceded by the network's animated ball-shaped logo and an announcer intoning "The following is an ABC COLOR presentation!". CBS, not to be outdone, came up with an animated logo in which the letters "CBS", each letter being one of the three primary colors and followed by the network's "eye" logo, dropped down seemingly out of nowhere to the center of the screen. An announcer proudly proclaimed, "CBS presents this program IN COLOR!"

PBS (formerly NET), however, did not, to the best of my knowledge, announce color programming over the network, at least not audibly. PBS, however, did have a logo consisting of the letters "PBS", each a different primary color, which the network showed after every color program until about the late '80s or so. Today's "Be more. PBS" logo is shown entirely in monochrome, as are the station IDs for the PBS affiliate in Cleveland; the interesting thing, to me anyway, about the latter is that the "W" in the station's call sign [WVIZ] is highlighted in blue, with the other three letters being white. I get another PBS affiliate on cable here, the ID for which (showing on-screen constantly) is all monochrome except for a small on-screen symbol following the words "Western Reserve" (the official name for the northeastern Ohio region, including Cleveland). The station, however, shows that symbol in full color during hourly IDs. Cleveland's hourly PBS station ID is "wviz.org" in white lower-case letters, against a dark blue background; the PBS network symbol is there, but easily missed unless specifically looked for, as it is extremely small.


By the time The CW and MyTV (formerly UPN and The WB) came along, virtually all network programming was in color anyway, so there was no need to make any kind of announcement preceding such programming. In fact, the few TV programs still telecast in b&w (there are a few of them left, mostly very old movies and comedy shows running during periods when MyTV and The CW are inactive, not to mention on cable channels; The Three Stooges, The Munsters and DuMont's The Honeymooners, et al. come to mind) are broadcast with the 3.58-MHz color burst subcarrier still intact--the signal is not disabled during the telecasting of monochrome shows.
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Last edited by Jeffhs; 01-31-2010 at 10:43 PM.
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Old 01-31-2010, 11:00 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wa2ise View Post
In New York City one of our TV stations had "Modern Farmer" on at 5AM, as if there were any farmers in the area. Actually, in our area, a farm was defined as: "a place where they haven't built houses just yet".
I'm not familiar with the New York City metro area, but I would think that there must have been farmers living in semi- or totally rural areas of Connecticut and New Jersey for whom that program was intended. For many years in the '60s through the '80s or thereabouts, before 24/7 TV became the norm, channel 3 (WKYC-TV, NBC) in Cleveland telecast, in very early-morning hours (after sign on at six a. m. or so) a short farm-news program, the title of which escapes me as I write this. This program was also intended for farmers within the station's viewing area; since channel 3, like all Cleveland television stations (three at that time, channels 3, 5 and eight), covers 17 counties in northeastern Ohio (including many rural areas in outlying counties), there were, without a doubt, more than a few farmers tuning in to get the latest agricultural news while they were having their breakfast or getting dressed before starting their work day in the fields.
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Last edited by Jeffhs; 01-31-2010 at 11:06 PM.
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Old 02-01-2010, 08:10 PM
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In fact, the few TV programs still telecast in b&w ... are broadcast with the 3.58-MHz color burst subcarrier still intact--the signal is not disabled during the telecasting of monochrome shows.
If you are watching these shows from a digital converter box, I am not surprised about the 3.58 MHz burst. Digital TV almost certainly does not have any provision for color/B&W identification, and the inexpensive boxes would likely not make use of such a signal anyway. If you are receiving low-power NTSC OTA signals, it still does not surprise me, just a bit less though.
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Old 02-04-2010, 01:37 PM
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Man does that bring back memories! "December Bride", "Topper", "The Big Payoff", "M-Squad". I was just 6...but the ol' Motorola held a lot of magic.
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Old 02-04-2010, 06:56 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wa2ise View Post
In New York City one of our TV stations had "Modern Farmer" on at 5AM, as if there were any farmers in the area. Actually, in our area, a farm was defined as: "a place where they haven't built houses just yet".
I remember when TV stations signed on and/or when 5 or 6 AM rolled around, they always broadcast the farm report first thing.
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