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's Monochrome March: Network Promo from NBC (Mar. 21, 1958)

Posted to YouTube by user 'obsgia'
Length - 1:12

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!

Here is another monochrome network promo from the late-1950s, this one from NBC on March 21, 1958 (not 1957 as the YouTube title suggests). TFTP analyzed some of the qualities of 1950s program promos here, in a previous post on a promo from the late-1950s, and the above promo certainly has the same qualities (and limitations).

The above promo, which promotes that evening's prime-time line-up, comes during an episode of the NBC daytime game show "Treasure Hunt". It highlights three programs from the Friday night line-up: "Truth and Consquences" with guest star Lou Costello; "M-Squad" starring Lee Marvin; and "The Thin Man", the TV series adaptation of the movie series by the same name. The promotion for the three programs is held together by a puzzle-piece theme (evident in the promotional art and the voiceover).

TFTP's Monochrome March: A Whole Month of Black & White Television from the Past!

Posted to YouTube by user 'tvdays'
Length - 0:59

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

For the entire month of March, TFTP will bring you posts featuring monochrome programs and clips in glorious black-and-white! That means that in addition to TFTP's Monochrome Monday, which brings you a classic black & white TV program or clip every Monday morning to kick off the week, all the posts on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays in March will also be programs or clips in black & white. ("Sign-Offs Through the Years" will continue its progression through the years on Fridays each week.)

Peter Rabbit Ears in the ABC promo above (from circa 1959) is just a first taste of the monochrome TV from the past that will be featured during the month of March.

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: Promo for Daytime Line-Up from NBC (1956)

Posted to YouTube by user 'MattTheSaiyan'
Length - 1:00

TFTP's Monochrome Monday brings you a classic black & white TV program or clip every Monday morning to kick off the week....

Network program promos don't get much more bare bones than this 1956 NBC daytime promo (unless they're strictly slides with announcer voiceover). The first half of this minute-long promo is a rather crude stationary drawing of two women with a voiceover of two women chatting with each other about TV. One of them is suggesting to the other viewing the morning line-up of shows on NBC. The voiceover conversation between the two continues into the second half of the promo as slides appear of the three shows under discussion, before ending with a slide that lists all three programs.

The three programs promoted are (1) "Home" with Arlene Francis, which had moved to a new timeslot; (2) game show "The Price is Right" with Bill Cullen ("that one with the bidding for prizes and all that" as described by one of the women); and (3) "Truth and Consequences" with Bob Barker.

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: Commercials/Promos from ABC (Dec. 18, 1957)

Posted to YouTube by user 'pannoni4'
Length - 8:05

TFTP's Monochrome Monday brings you a classic black & white TV program or clip every Monday morning to kick off the week....

Although not a flow sequence in terms of all having been aired continuously in a solid block of airtime, here is a series of commercials and (mostly) promos from ABC from December of 1957. A pair of minute-long 7-Up commercials kick things off, with one very odd commercial featuring several birds (ducks?) performing different tasks (packing pickles, picking cotton, etc.) made more tolerable by having a bottle of 7-Up. This is followed by a second 7-Up commercial in a bullfighting setting (again with one of the strange birds as a matador).

Most of the rest of the block is ABC network promos, beginning with a short one for "The Frank Sinatra Show" with guest Bing Crosby. An ABC network ID follows, succeeded by a PSA for the U.S. Mail. A station ID for Philadelphia's WFIL-TV leads into a promo for "Wild Bill Hickok"; a lengthy "Season's Greetings" spot with names of ABC personalities displayed; promos for "The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom", "Wednesday Night Fights", and "The Saga of Andy Burnett" (a serial shown on "Disneyland"); and a closing, longer promo for the episode of "The Frank Sinatra Show" with guest Bing Crosby, a Christmas episode featuring various carols and holiday songs.

Interspersed among these are a couple of bumpers for "American Bandstand", an episode from which came all of the promos and other spots in this block.

TFTP Signs-Off for the Week: Station Sign-Off from WAFF/Huntsville-Decatur, AL (1979)

Posted to YouTube by user 'robatsea2009'
Length - 4:52

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 sign-off from 1979 for northern Alabama station WAFF begins with a few NBC program promos: for an episode of "Little House on the Prairie" (NBC hadn't started to use the "very special episode" trope yet, but if they had, this one would've qualified), for the prime-time special for the 17th anniversary of "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson", and for NFL Football on NBC Sports.

A locally-branded bumper for "News 48" sports leads into a short religious segment called "A Seed for the Sower" coming from somewhere called the "Guido Evangelistic Association" in Georgia. The ownership/technical voiceover follows, on images from a TV master control room (WAFF's, presumably). The national anthem film closes out the sequence, with a rather spare piano rendition over stock images of monuments, military transports, and natural wilderness ("Courtesy of the Army National Guard").

TFTP Cable: Commercial/Promo Block from Nickelodeon (1983)

Posted to YouTube by user 'JustinInAtlanta'
Length - 6:13

The cable kids' channel Nickelodeon went on the air in 1979, so this commercial/promo block from 1983 is from fairly early in the network's history. It's early enough that the longtime Nick branding with its signature orange color was yet to be implemented (that didn't happen until the following year, 1984). The logo and branding seen here, with the large silver ball underlying the multi-colored "Nickelodeon" wordmark, was known as the "pinball" logo.

There are some great nuggets of vintage Nickelodeon here: The billboard for "coming up next" programs "Third Eye", "Livewire", and "Tomorrow People"; the ads for ViewMaster's line of glowsticks (who knew?), the Simon electronic game, and Stratego board game; the promos for "You Can't Do That on Television" (Nick's flagship program in the early-1980s), Leonard Nimoy-hosted "Standby...Lights! Camera! Action!", and "Reggie Jackson's World of Sports"; and the spot for the "Great Nickelodeon Sweepstakes".

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: Program Promos from CBS (Oct. 29, 1960)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Pannoni 9'
Length - 4:04

TFTP's Monochrome Monday brings you a classic black & white TV program or clip every Monday morning to kick off the week....

This block of black-and-white program promos is from Saturday, October 29, 1960, and includes promos for specials, regular programs, and broadcasts related to the presidential election (between Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon) that would take place about a week later.

The first promo is for CBS's election night coverage and touts the network's track record covering the past few elections dating back to 1952. This is followed by regular program promos for "Lassie", "Dennis the Menace", and "The Jack Benny Program". Another election-related promo features Walter Cronkite, who had not yet taken over as the network's evening news anchor but was already a top CBS news personality; he previews an interview program with past presidential nominee Thomas Dewey. Finally, Danny Kaye presents a comical promo for his first TV special, "An Hour with Danny Kaye", which aired the following evening on October 30.

TFTP Flow: Commercial/Promo Break from NBC (Dec. 1980)

Posted to YouTube by user 'WREYtube'

TFTP is fond of what television scholars (yes, there is such a thing) call "flow". "Flow" is the idea of looking at and analyzing a random segment of TV as aired and seeing what kinds of elements make it up--which usually includes the programs themselves, news breaks or updates, commercials, PSAs, station IDs, bumpers of various kinds, and so forth. Examining an unbroken string of such elements, such as in today's clip, helps to understand what viewers experienced when watching TV and how they experienced it.

Various blocks of commercials have been featured (and will continue to be) here on TFTP. But these are sometimes not continuous in terms of what a viewer at that time may have actually seen. For this and future "flow" posts, the clip featured will be an unbroken "flow" of material that is from a distinct program on a particular day; the term "flow" in part refers to the way in which the different elements sort of flow past the viewers in an often disruptive but yet still appealing sequence.

The "flow" sequence in this clip is from an NBC airing of the holiday special "Jack Frost" from December 1980. The sequence includes commercials for Minute Maid orange juice, Timex watches, and Kellogg's Graham Crackos cereal, and program promos for "Here's Boomer", "CHiPs", and "The Asphalt Cowboy". The voiceover in both the bumpers leading out and back into "Jack Frost", as well as in the program promos, is none other than Casey Kasem.

TFTP Cable: Promo Breaks from USA Network and CBN (Feb. 1986)

Posted to YouTube by user 'WREYtube' (all three clips)

USA Network and CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) were well-established as cable networks by the mid-1980s, both having been started in the first big wave of basic cable expansion in the late-1970s. At the time of these promo break clips, all from February 1986, both had as a mainstay of their programming off-network reruns of old shows from the major broadcast networks.

The first clip above from USA features a short segment of the game show "Jackpot" before moving into a promo break for "The USA Comedy Hour", a programming block airing at the time that had episodes of very obscure network sitcoms such as "Mr. Merlin", "The Second-Hundred Years", and "He & She" (as well as the less-obscure "That Girl"). USA showed a lot of game shows in those days, most of them off-network reruns, but "Jackpot" was at the time a Canadian-produced first-run game show.

Clip #2 (in the middle) is another, shorter one from USA that has a promo break for an Western/adventure block that included "The Monroes", "The Virginian", "Wanted Dead or Alive", and "Lancer". This is followed by an excellent example of the mid-1980s USA Network ID bumper, then the first seconds of an episode of the game show "Chain Reaction".

The third and final clip, from CBN, starts with the close of an episode of the game show "Go", followed with a nice CBN network ID. Then, a promo break features "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." and then a "Late Night Comedy" block including Groucho Marx's "You Bet Your Life", the '70s version of the "Bill Cosby Show", "Dobie Gillis", and "Father Knows Best". The clip ends with a fascinating CBN image spot called "Family Power".

TFTP Promo: NBC Network Promo for Fall 1967 Morning Shows

This minute-long NBC promo highlights the network's fall 1967 weekday programming.  These, of course, were the now long-lost days when networks programmed this time period themselves (rather than allowing affiliates to run syndicated fare, as happens now), and for the most part the networks filled the mornings with game shows and occasional light variety. 

Featured in this promo are "Snap Judgment" with host Ed McMahon (in this period working the morning and late-night shifts for NBC); "Concentration" with host Hugh Downs (ballyhooed as the network's longest running game show); "The Pat Boone Show," a rather obscure and presumably short-lived variety half-hour starring the pop singer; "The Hollywood Squares," the long-running (and oft-revived) celebrity-centered game show that was near the beginning of its TV life; "Jeopardy" (in its original Art Fleming-hosted incarnation); and "Eye Guess," another fairly obscure show, one of the many game shows hosted by Bill Cullen.

This promo is a delight to watch, partially because its difficult to imagine any network running such a clip now (at least without intended irony).  Multiple images--some stylized drawings, some stylized photos of the hosts of the various shows--cascade in kaleidoscopic fashion across a 3x3 grid of squares that resembles the playing board for the aforementioned "Hollywood Squares."  Accompanying the images is an appropriately jaunty and lighthearted musical score that would be right at home in any of the shows from NBC's fall 1967 morning schedule.

TFTP Promos: NBC Network Promo (Jul. 19, 1957)

Posted on YouTube by user 'MattTheSaiyan'

This fascinating NBC promo gives a glimpse of how networks promoted their programs in the late-1950s. Likely because of the difficulty at the time of editing together film and videotape clips (the latter was a brand new technology in 1957)--and the fact that many shows were still broadcast live, and thus would have no clip footage to edit into a promo--the promos were mainly still images with an announcer's voiceover. There is no way of knowing for sure, but it's possible that the voiceover may have been done live as the promo was airing, although it's equally likely that it was prerecorded (since this promo seems to have survived with soundtrack intact).

This is for NBC's Saturday night line-up in mid-1957, which consisted of the "Julius LaRosa Show" (LaRosa, of course, had famously been fired on the air by Arthur Godfrey in 1953), "George Sanders Mystery Theatre" (an anthology program hosted by movie character actor George Sanders that lasted a single season of 13 episodes), and "Encore Theatre", yet another anthology drama that at this time consisted of repeated episodes of the anthology program "Ford Television Theatre".

The anthology drama was a TV genre common in the 1950s, as common as sitcoms and police procedurals are today, and that has pretty much completely disappeared now. They featured new stories with a different cast every week and had no ongoing cast members or dramatic premise, with each week being a new mini-play of sorts; some had ongoing hosts, like George Sanders here, but others merely had a sponsor's identity or a generic title (like "Encore Theatre" here) to provide continuity. Eventually, we'll get around to posting some episodes from anthology dramas of the 1950s here on TFTP!

TFTP Promos: ABC Friday Night Line-Up (Fall 1970)

This 3-minute promo highlights the ABC programs on Friday nights for Fall 1970; featured are "The Brady Bunch," "Nanny and the Professor," "The Partridge Family," "That Girl," "Love, American Style," and "This is Tom Jones." "Brady Bunch" and "Partridge Family" are well-known, "That Girl" a little less so. "Nanny and the Professor" ran for about two years, from January 1970 to December 1971. "Love, American Style" was an anthology program featuring humorous stories about love--it's biggest claim to fame being that it featured as a 1972 episode the pilot for "Happy Days" (entitled "Love and the Happy Day").