TFTP On This Day: "Action News" from WPIX/New York (May 8, 1980)

Posted to YouTube by user 'NewsActive3'
Length - 32:18

It Was 38 Years Ago Today: Station WPIX has a history that goes back to the late-1940s, and until the mid-1990s it was one of New York City's independent TV stations. (In 1995 it became a WB affiliate and later an affiliate of The CW, which it remains today.) This late local newscast from WPIX is from May 8, 1980, 38 years ago today.

Featured news stories include reports on Cuban refugees, the aftermath of an aborted Iranian hostage rescue mission launched by President Carter, the funeral of Yugoslavian leader Tito, controversy surrounding New York City medical official Michael Baden, a local teen who interviewed former President Richard Nixon, and comedian Bob Hope's efforts to help with the Iran hostage crisis. In sports are reports on the NY Islanders in the NHL playoffs, baseball scores for the young 1980 season, basketball scores from the NBA playoffs, and local horse-racing results. Towards the end of the newscast is a report about the controversy surrounding the PBS program "Death of a Princess".

The newscast recording includes the commercial breaks and within the breaks are ads for Potamkin Cadillac (a local car dealership), two different Black & Decker products (garden hoses and step stools), Seven Seas salad dressing, Citizen and Corum watches, Oldsmobile Cutlass autos, Waterpik Shower Massage shower heads, Micom word processors, Exxon information systems, Kaufman - The Carpet Experts, Energizer batteries, and Gravely lawn and garden tractors.

TFTP's Monochrome March: Local Newscast from KCMO/Kansas City (Oct. 1959)

Posted to YouTube by user 'KCTVFive'
Length - 5:18

College basketball has March Madness. TFTP: Television from the Past has Monochrome March! 

For the entire month of March, TFTP brings you posts featuring monochrome programs and clips in glorious black-and-white!

This brief clip is from Kansas City station KCMO (now KCTV) and consists of part of the local newscast from a day in October of 1959. Anchor Harold Mack reports several stories, including a local case in which a teen poisoned her parents, a local industrialist who had died, and a Future Farmers of America convention taking place in Kansas City. An ad for sponsor Maxwell House coffee appears, with a jar of Maxwell House sitting on Mack's news desk at the end of the clip.

TFTP Signs-Off for the Week: Sign-Offs Through the Years - 1980 (WVTV/Milwaukee)

Posted to YouTube by user 'MicroJow'
Length - 7:59

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.

The whole first half of this 1980 sign-off from Milwaukee independent station WVTV consists of late news delivered in voiceover on a slide reading "News Final". Many stations--of those that even had a news segment as part of their sign-off--used the same technique of simply having an announcer read news over a still slide.

The remainder of the sign-off has a short film of a hymn, the ownership/technical voiceover, and a curious treatment of the national anthem. An image of the American flag is superimposed on a chromakey image of the map of the United States, as the lyrics for the anthem appear below the map in "bouncing ball" style (so viewers who didn't know the words would be able to follow along?).

TFTP News: News Opens from KSL/Salt Lake City (1970s/1980s)

Posted to YouTube by user 'TV News Capsule' (top), 'aussiebeachut0' (middle), 'cmsloan2002' (bottom)
Length - 0:17 (top), 0:24 (middle), 0:46 (bottom)

Above are three openings over about a 15 year period for local news at KSL-TV in Salt Lake City, Utah. KSL was at the time of these news opens (from 1975, 1983, and 1989) the area's CBS station--an affiliation it held from its inception in 1949 until switching to NBC in 1995. The clips are brief (all well under a minute in length) and constitute the opening images that would have been seen by viewers at the beginning of newscasts. As such, they are the type of thing that presents an image the station is trying to project for its viewers.

The 1975 version (top) features the signatures of the newscasters, as if they are personally vouching for the content they're about the present. In 1983 (middle), titles declaring "Medicine", "Crime", "Politics", etc., provide a brief summary, and maybe make a promise, as to the types of content viewers can expect to see. This second open also utilizes the slogan "the News Specialists", which carries over into the 1989 open. The 1989 open (bottom) has more dynamic imagery, some of it aerial, of the SLC area, as if to show that KSL has got it covered. All three opens, as would be expected from local news, highlight the newscasters about to appear in the program.

TFTP Signs-Off for the Week: Station Sign-Off from KABC/Los Angeles (Oct. 5, 1976)

Posted to YouTube by user 'MicroJow'
Length - 18:14

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...

This more lengthy 1976 sign-off sequence from station KABC in Los Angeles includes a feature that was in many sign-off sequences: a newscast. Sometimes a sign-off newscast would be simply a re-broadcast of the station's 10 O'Clock/11 O'Clock news (or a portion of it); sometimes it would be a news update-type newscast aired live during the sign-off; often--as in the case shown here--it would be just voiceover of headlines read over still slides (a technique most likely used in cases where the station had already shut down its studio cameras for the night).

And so the first three-quarters of this sign-off sequence is reporter/announcer Len Beardsley doing such a newscast. Here it is broken up into several parts (local, national, sports, weather) with commercial breaks in between parts. These commercial breaks include ads for some local or regional LA stores (Leo's Stereo, Zodys discount store, Ohrbachs department store, Ralph's supermarkets), a couple of PSAs (for the lawyer referral service of the Yellow Pages and the Fair Housing program in the LA area), and ads for other products such as Face Quencher Make-Up by Chap Stick, Grape Nuts cereal, Audi automobiles, Crisco Oil, and General Foods International Coffee.

After the final commercial break, Beardsley does the technical/ownership voiceover on a slide of the KABC circled "7" logo, followed by the "Star-Spangled Banner" film (here with imagery of paintings depicting Revolutionary War-era scenes).

TFTP News: "11 Alive Newsroom" from WXIA/Atlanta (Apr. 13 1980)

Posted to YouTube by user 'NewsActive3'

From Apr. 13, 1980, is the local newscast--titled "11 Alive Newsroom"--from WXIA-TV in Atlanta, which at this time was the Atlanta ABC affiliate but later in 1980 would switch its affiliation to NBC, which it retains (along with the "11 Alive" branding) to this day. Curious local news tidbit: the painted portraits of newsmakers that are utilized as graphics in several of the stories here.

Stories featured in this newscast: demonstrations related to racial strife in the town of Wrightsville, GA; Ted Kennedy wins the Arizona primary in the 1980 Democratic presidential race in his run against incumbent president Jimmy Carter; a local rodeo in the Atlanta area; final results from the 1980 Masters golf tournament; flooding in Louisiana; and details related to severe weather in the Atlanta and north Georgia region, including a recent tornado watch.

Most of the commercials and interstitial elements have been edited out here, with a few significant exceptions: there is a Cadillac ad at the very end, an ad for the regional Krystal fast food chain midway through, and at the very beginning there is a brief bumper promo for local syndicated airings of "Star Trek".