Sidekick
 

Here is a BW set my buddy gave me. A little rough but it works. Kinda out of the decades I like but better than sending it to the dump. Denim and the name sidekick and they were serious enough to do it. So funny.

Those are funny but they work forever. I don't know what Zenith was thinking with the denim, must have just been a "70s" thing. I have some sets with the same chassis that have never needed repair in the 12 years they've been around here. Thanks for savin' it!

Is that a tube or solid state set? I had a 12" solid state Zenith covered in Denim. I think mine may have been a Sidekick II; but, that was too long ago to remember for sure. At any rate, I'm glad you saved this one.

I'd be willing to bet on either a 4 or 5 tube hybrid {some have SS HV}.

I had a Zenith 12" solid-state b&w portable (model J121Y in a jet-black cabinet) I bought new in 1978. It was still working (no repairs of any kind) when I gave it up in 2000, twenty-two years later. Would have kept it, but I moved in 1999 and had no room for three TVs in the apartment I moved to (I had brought two color sets with me, one of which is a Zenith Sentry 2). That Zenith portable had an excellent picture; the CRT was still very strong after 22 years, which surprised me as I have seen TVs from the '50s, some of which were in my own collection (when I had a bunch of old '50s-'60s sets), with CRTs so weak it wasn't funny. My small Zenith portable was used a lot too. I wish I knew what it was about the CRTs in Zenith's small '70s portables that made them last so long. :scratch2:

BTW, I'm not sure if the Zenith "Sidekick" (or any of Zenith's small 12" portables for that matter) had any tubes whatsoever, except of course for the CRT. My own set was 100 percent solid state.

The denim covering on the Sidekick series definitely sounds like something Zenith would have done in the seventies. Having grown up in that decade, I saw quite a bit of crazy stuff going on (not just with TV cabinets), so it wouldn't surprise me if Zenith introduced this line of TVs just to keep up with the times.