TFTP Signs-Off for the Week: Sign-Offs Through the Years - 1982 (KCET/Los Angeles)

Posted to YouTube by user 'MicroJow'
Length - 2:22

Each Friday afternoon, TFTP signs-off for the week with a classic station sign-off sequence for your enjoyment and to bid farewell until Monday...

And throughout 2018, we are featuring "Sign-Offs Through the Years", as we go year-by-year with each successive week.

This 1982 sign-off from Los Angeles public TV station KCET has just two main parts: a minute-long promo for the Great Performances presentation of "Charterhouse of Parma", and a ownership/technical voiceover that is over a panoramic view of LA. (For reasons unknown, in the later part of the voiceover the camera pans and zooms in on the panorama.)

There's no national anthem film in this sign-off, as usual for most public television sign-offs that have been featured on TFTP (such as here, here, and here). The reasons for this, as for that mysterious zoom in this KCET sign-off, are unclear.

TFTP On This Day: "Today" from NBC (Feb. 22, 1982)

Posted to YouTube by user 'AmpexQuad'
Length - 3:21

It Was 36 Years Ago Today: This brief clip from the "Today" show--from 36 years ago today, on February 22, 1982--was from very early in Bryant Gumbel's tenure as "Today" host. He'd become Jane Pauley's co-host (replacing Tom Brokaw, who'd been promoted to "NBC Nightly News" anchor) only about a month-and-a-half earlier, on January 4, 1982. (Pauley was in her sixth year hosting, having started in 1976.)

Pauley recounts some information about how men's hair and whiskers grow faster in the spring, following up on a comment about how she'd had a sneak preview of spring on a trip south a few days before. Weatherman and sidekick Willard Scott participates as well, and he seems tickled by the fact that spring might make his toupee'd head grow hair faster. Taken from old Ampex quad video tape, the footage repeats twice, the second time without any sound.

TFTP Local Weather Round-Up! WHBF/Quad Cities, IA/IL, WLS/Chicago (1973), KING/Seattle (1982)

Posted to YouTube by user 'fromuncle' (top), 'Steve Newman' (middle), 'robatsea2009' (bottom)
Length - 3:46 (top), 3:55 (middle), 3:13 (bottom)

Weatherman Doug Dahlgren in clip #1 (top) of this local weather round-up looks like he bought his suit jacket at the same place that "Mary Tyler Moore Show" weatherman Ted Baxter shopped, what with the light blue color and the patch on the left pocket. This 1966 clip from WHBF in the Quad Cities area of Iowa and Illinois utilizes what looks like back projection of overhead transparencies to present the weather, supplemented by a series of number dials to present the temp, humidity, etc.

Clip #2 features weatherman Steve Newman of WLS in Chicago, who apparently shopped at the same store as Baxter and Dahlgren (these blazers were all over the place in the 1960s and early-1970s). Newman, in a 1973 clip, has a rotating four-sided presentation board on which his various weather charts are displayed (and there must be someone on the back side of it putting in new charts, because Newman turns the thing more than three times with a new chart every time).

The last clip, clip #3, with Don Madsen of KING in Seattle from 1982, apart from being a morning weather report, is done almost entirely using electronic graphics, with Madsen offscreen doing voiceover for virtually the entire weather report. As a wintertime weather report in a mountainous state, Madsen's weather report includes additional information such as snow conditions for skiing and the status of various mountain passes.

As you watch these weather clips from different eras, you realize two things about the evolution of local weather: first, there becomes less and less emphasis on technical aspects of weather such as fronts, barometric pressure, etc. (which are hardly ever mentioned in TV weather reports now); and second, there used to be a lot more reporting on national weather, something that is minimized if it is presented at all in most local weather reports these days.

TFTP Will Return After These Messages: Commercial Block from NBC (Oct. 8, 1982)

Posted to YouTube by user 'pannoni4'
Length - 7:48

Every Wednesday, TFTP takes a break from regular programming to bring you a selection of classic commercials. We will return after these messages...

This commercial block from NBC from Oct. 8, 1982, features ads for Campbells Soup, Listerine, Burger King, Pam cooking spray, Phillips 66, Zerex antifreeze, Inglenook wine, Windex glass cleaner, Wal-Mart, Stayfree pads (with gymnast Cathy Rigby), Rave hair perm kits, and Prestone auto products.

The block also includes a pair of bumpers for "Remington Steele"; promos for "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" and for NBC's Saturday night line-up that included "Diff'rent Strokes", "Silver Spoons", "Gimme a Break", and "Love, Sidney"; and a short weather radar segment (for the state of Missouri).

Happy New Year from TFTP: Television from the Past!

Posted to YouTube by user 'The Museum of Classic Chicago Television'
Length - 1:50

Television from the Past wishes you a very Happy New Year, as we begin the year 2018!

For your classic TV enjoyment in kicking off the New Year, here's a short flow clip from ON-TV, a subscription television service that lasted for several years in the late-1970s and early-1980s. There were a number of such over-the-air pay-TV services in this era, after HBO and Showtime had launched and cable TV in general was growing quickly, but before these other, more familiar services had really entrenched themselves in American homes.

The clip above--from New Year's Day 1982--begins with the last few seconds of the end credits of the concert film "No One Gets Out of Here Alive" with The Doors. This is followed by a "Happy New Year" network ID for ON-TV and the opening bumper for an "ON-TV Subscription Television Special". The special, the first minute or so of which follows, is the legendary "Elephant Parts" by Monkees member Michael Nesmith. This hour-long program was a pioneering work of music video, cited as one of the influences on MTV when it premiered the previous year and winner of the first-ever Grammy for music video.

TFTP Local Weather Round-Up! WBAL/Baltimore (1959), KAKE/Wichita (1974), WAGA/Atlanta (1982)

Posted by YouTube users 'EyeLikeTooWatch' (top), 'Troy Diggs' (middle), 'radioman1968' (bottom)

Here is the inaugural TFTP Local Weather Round-Up, a periodic feature in which we will round up a few clips of weathercasts from local TV stations. Typically, the Local Weather Round-Up will consist of three clips, one from the 1950s or 60s, one from the 1970s, and one from the 1980s.

Local weather reports are fascinating to watch now, due in part to the folksy charm that many of them exhibit, in part to the variety of techniques that were used over the years by different stations, and due to the way in which weathercasting technology evolved in the decades between the 1950s and 1980s.

Clip #1 above is from April 12, 1959, on station WBAL/Baltimore. The single-sponsor method of sponsorship, common in the early days of TV, is evident in this clip from the ways in which Luby's Chevrolet is integrated so closely into the weathercast, which utilizes entirely a chalkboard method of weather presentation. Clip #2 is from KAKE/Wichita in 1974. Apart from being in color, the main difference here is a slightly more sophisticated presentation of the weather, largely using a suitably seventies-ish round board with several layers that are progressively revealed (the last couple seemingly utilizing chroma-key). Use of weather radar has begun in this mid-1970s era as well. Finally, the third and final clip--from WAGA/Atlanta from April 3, 1982--is from a time when chroma-key technology has been fully embraced as the chief (although not exclusive) weathercasting technique (as it remains today). (Gotta love those rotating sections of weather map!)

TFTP Signs-Off for the Week: Station Sign-Off from WKBW/Buffalo, NY (1982)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Retrontario'
Length - 4:29

Each Friday afternoon, TFTP signs-off for the week with a classic station sign-off segment for your enjoyment and to bid farewell until Monday...

TV stations located near the U.S./Canadian border--such as WKBW from Buffalo, New York, featured here--serve a Canadian audience as well as an American one. And so their sign-off sequences sometimes featured the Canadian national anthem, "O Canada!", in addition to "The Star-Spangled Banner". This sign-off sequence starts with a brief religious message and a statement of the Television Code, followed by the technical voiceover on a slide of WKBW's transmitter towers. The two national anthems come after that (followed in this clip, with almost a minute's worth of black).