TFTP Sports: NBC SportsWorld (1979)

"SportsWorld" was NBC's answer to ABC's "Wide World of Sports"--a diverse array of sporting events presented under the umbrella of a single series. This clip is the opening tease for a 1979 episode of "SportsWorld" that included horseracing (the Marlboro Cup), swimming (the FINA World Cup), and track (a 1500 meter race held at the Brussels World Fair).

The "SportsWorld" series ran for 14 years on NBC between 1978 and 1992, featuring, like "Wide World of Sports before (and after) it, lower-profile and sometimes offbeat sports that would never have warranted independent TV coverage. Bowling and auto racing (both of which have, at different times, had independent TV coverage on various networks) were mainstays of "SportsWorld" for many years. The "SportsWorld" name lives on for NBC in a recently-launched section of the NBC Sports website dedicated to long-form sports-related reporting.

TFTP Drama: "The Guiding Light" (Apr. 9, 1953)

Posted to Internet Archive's Classic TV Collection

"The Guiding Light" was a very long-running and venerable TV soap opera, on the air on CBS for over 55 years between 1952 and 2009 (after 15 years on radio before that). This episode, a 15-minute one following the standard soap opera length at the time, is from April 1953, the show's first year or so on TV. Although watching old episodes of TV soap operas can have a disconcerting effect--being dropped into the middle of stories for which you have no context or understanding of what happened previously--they are nonetheless fascinating to look at (perhaps for this very same reason).

The entire episode consists of only two conversations: a young man (played, incidentally, by James Lipton of "Inside the Actors' Studio" fame) talks to a doctor about getting a divorce he doesn't really want; a pregnant woman and a little boy (who seem not to be related, or to really even know each other) have an encounter. Without any context, we have no idea what the characters' story lines are, and so we are forced to concentrate to a great extent on the form: characters sitting around, at a table or in a sitting room, having conversations in which story lines are advanced by millimeters. Soaps were shot and broadcast live at this time, so we can watch them now knowing that these were like little plays in which the actors performed in real time, at the same time that they were being watched by viewers.

Soap operas are so named because they started out with soap companies as their sponsors back in the radio days, so we are not surprised to see that soap brands Ivory soap and Duz laundry detergent are the sponsors here.

TFTP Late Night: The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers (Oct. 13, 1986)

Posted to YouTube by user 'RetroWinnipeg'

In memory of the late, great Joan Rivers, who died last week at the age of 81, we have a segment from her infamous FOX late-night talk show which ran for several months in 1986-87. Rivers had served as "permanent" guest host for Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show" for a few years prior and had appeared many times on that show going back to the mid-1960s when she launched her career on the strength of Carson's stamp of approval. As she transitioned to beginning her own talk show on FOX in the fall of 1986, she and Carson had a very public break with one another from which their relationship never recovered.

This clip of the "The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers" is from Monday, October 13, 1986, only the second week of the show. It begins with the top of the show and Rivers' monologue, during which she brings out her teenage daughter Melissa, in what may have been one of the duo's very first appearances onscreen together (they would go on, of course, to make many more with their red carpet hosting gigs and "Fashion Police" series). After a commercial break, Rivers continues with a comic bit revolving around the day's Columbus Day sales and phoning local department stores to try and get merchandise delivered to the show's studio before the end of the hour-long taping. After another commercial break, Rivers brings out the show's first guest, actress Angela Lansbury.

This clip is a bit peculiar in that it is not from American television, but rather from the "Late Show"'s airing on Canadian television; this is why the station ID at the very beginning of the clip as well as all the commercials are Canadian.

TFTP Will Be Back After These Messages: Commercials for TV Guide (1950s/1960s/1969/1980-81)

Posted to YouTube by user 'tapthatt2012' (first & third clips) and 'Diamond Pleshaw' (second clip)

TV Guide was once the most popular magazine in America. As a testament to just how central television was to American culture through the late-1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, TV Guide magazine had the highest circulation of any magazine in the country. This, of course, was an era before onscreen interactive program guides or availability of TV schedules via the Internet (not to mention before such things as DVRs and video-on-demand). Apart from daily or weekly listings in newspapers, if people wanted to have a schedule of TV programming, they had to rely on TV Guide.

These TV Guide commercials span this period of the late-1950s through the 1970s. We begin (in the first clip) with a one-minute spot from the early-1960s that extolls the virtues of TV Guide and gives some visual examples of the subjects covered in that era. Then, a series of shorter spots shows actor Michael Ansara from "Broken Arrow" in circa 1957, the stars of "Naked City" from circa 1960, and writer-director of "Noah's Ark" (and "Dragnet") Jack Webb from circa 1956.

In the succeeding clips are some additional TV Guide ads from 1969 and the early-1980s. First, a 1969 ad featuring Glen Campbell, who had one of the biggest shows that year with his "Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour", a huge variety show hit. Finally, a couple of ten-second ads from 1980 and 1981, the first highlighting the new Fall 1980 TV season, the second the Ronald Reagan presidential inauguration.
 

TFTP Variety: "Coke Time with Eddie Fisher" (Sep. 29, 1954)

Posted to Internet Archive's Classic TV Collection

Eddie Fisher is a name that not many people today would recognize, but he was a major A-list celeb in the 1950s; he was as famous for his wives as he was for his singing--he was one of Elizabeth Taylor's husbands after having been married to Debbie Reynolds (with whom he was the parent of "Star Wars" star Carrie Fisher). This post features a complete episode of Fisher's show "Coke Time".

"Coke Time" was Fisher's main star vehicle for a good chunk of the 1950s, running from 1953 to 1957 on NBC. Each episode of the twice-weekly series (as in the one featured here) had Fisher simply singing three or four songs, with few frills and little staging, punctuated with a commercial or two for Coca-Cola. "Coke Time" is a good example of a program that had the sponsor's name in the name of the show, which was, of course, very common in the late-1940s and 1950s.

The show is also a good example of a program type that would disappear by the end of the 1950s but which was fairly widespread at the time: the 15-minute-long musical variety show, a program type in which Perry Como and Dinah Shore were likewise featured at different times in the '50s. The quarter-hour show was used for genres other than music (such as news and interview shows), but the combination of genre and length was an easy one to fill with a a handful of songs and call it a show.

TFTP Will Be Back After These Messages: Commercial Block from WBBM (Chicago) (Dec. 9, 1980)

Posted to YouTube by user 'The "New" Fun & Games Channel'

Here's a mostly unremarkable block of commercials from Chicago's CBS affiliate WBBM from December 1980 (unremarkable is OK, though, as that's what the vast bulk of commercials have been since the beginning of commercial television!). The highlights are: a rather peculiar commercial (the first one in the block) for Santa Fe Industries featuring a grizzled prospector and a businesswoman who has (literally) helicoptered in to speak with him; a rather charming commercial for Mattel's Electronic Gin game, interesting in that it is a good example of the handheld electronic game craze that was nearing its peak at this time; and a rather intriguing commercial for Chicago Sting indoor soccer team that features legendary Cubs announcer Harry Caray. Also found here are a local WBBM promo for "The Rockford Files", an Olympus camera ad featuring actress Cheryl Tiegs, and two different commercials for local Chicago department store McDade's.

The block ends with an announcement that the CBS Late Movie would start after a special broadcast. That special broadcast was a news special about the murder of Beatle John Lennon, which had occurred the previous day, on Dec. 8, 1980.

TFTP Special: TV Test Patterns (1950s/1960s)

Posted to YouTube by user 'MSTS1'

For today's Labor Day holiday, we've got a post that will give the normal old TV clips the day off. This is not a TV program clip per se, but it is a type of TV content from the past that was very prevalent in TV's early days and has completely disappeared now: the TV test pattern.

Test patterns were used by television engineers to make sure that the transmitted and televised image being broadcast was adequate from a technical standpoint. This is why these test patterns have the patterns of lines of different thicknesses and lengths, the concentric circles, the areas of different gradations of shading--so that engineers could tweak settings and make adjustments prior to a station signing on for the broadcast day.

The test patterns featured here are reproduced from versions found in print books, but since they were a stationary element they are more or less as viewers would have seen them on the air. Test patterns would have appeared for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours before the station actually signed on with programming (which in the early days of TV may not be until mid-morning, midday, or even in the earliest days early-evening). Most test patterns had call letters or some other identifying mark for the station, as can be seen in most of the test patterns featured in this clip; these are all from varying periods in the 1950s and 1960s.

TFTP Flow: MTV (Music Television) from Nov. 1983

Posted to YouTube by user 'phxlefty'

A few weeks ago, TFTP featured its first post of a clip from a cable TV network (some promos from Showtime); here we have another clip of early cable TV--the legendary early MTV. MTV Music Television was one of the proto-cable networks that helped establish cable television as a medium after it launched in August of 1981. Early MTV, of course, featured mainly music videos, with a number of different kinds of segments as interstitials between the videos.

This extended (25 minute) clip is of those interstitial elements (the music videos themselves have been excised). Included in the clip are: VJ (video jockey) segments with original MTV VJ Mark Goodman; promotion of concert dates by The Police and Black Sabbath (and a taped intro to a Police concert by VJ Martha Quinn); classic MTV network IDs with the shifting-colors MTV logo and the iconic spaceman; promotion of the network's "Friday Night Music Fights", in which two music videos were pitted against one another; a spot for one of the network's famous giveaway promotions (here for Neil Young's pink Cadillac); and a "World Premiere" video announcement for Bob Dylan's latest music video.

The clip includes several commercials as well, and there is no mistaking the channel's adolescent target demographic based on the commercials featured here: compilation record albums, the Atari video game system, Panasonic boom boxes, and Compound W wart remover (!).

TFTP Will Be Back After These Messages: TVs from the Past -- Early Television Set commercials (1950/1954)

Posted to YouTube by user 'MattTheSaiyan'

In watching old TV commercials, it's always interesting to see what the sellers of products thought buyers were interested in, interests that then became the selling points in the ads themselves. Based on these two commercials for television sets, one from 1950 and the other from 1954, potential TV set buyers were really worried about how well a TV set could show close-ups.

The first ad, for a 1950 Westinghouse TV, has something called an "electronic magnifier" that you could somehow overlay on the screen to take a TV image and magnify it. The fact that they don't actually show this feature in operation and that the images they show of wrestlers are clearly not authentic images off of a TV screen should have made potential buyers of this set a little wary. The peculiar shape of the screen on this set is a good example of just how different early TV sets were from the ones that viewers became used to just a few years later.

The second TV set ad is from 1954, and by this time apparently there were already some people who were ready to replace their first TV set with an upgraded model. So the RCA television set being advertised is shown to have a much better ability to show close-ups than earlier TVs with smaller screens. A 21" inch set was a large screen in those days, and you can see why compared to the older 10" set! The price comparison between the 1950 set and the 1954 set in these ads is interesting, too, and shows the way in which technology improves and becomes cheaper at the same time; the 1950 Westinghouse model has a retail price of $259.95, while the much bigger and better 1954 RCA set is only $199.95.

TFTP Comedy: "Kovacs on the Corner" (1952)

Posted to Internet Archive

Ernie Kovacs was one of the great geniuses of early television comedy. He had a relatively brief but wide-ranging career--as a talk-show host, game-show panelist and host, morning-show host, and comedian--before dying prematurely in a car accident in 1962. This clip is a complete episode of a very short-lived Kovacs series called "Kovacs on the Corner", which was on NBC on weekday mornings for just three months in early-1952.

"Kovacs on the Corner" featured Kovacs in a slightly more laid-back style than that for which he is best known. Kovacs' pioneered a style of visual comedy on television that was not seen before or much since, utilizing sight gags, technical tricks unique to TV, and absurdism to create comedy. Here, in "Kovacs on the Corner", he is much more subtle and situational in his comedy. The "corner" of the title is a city neighborhood corner that comprises the show's sole set and on which Kovacs--assisted by singer and future wife Edie Adams--encounters different characters of the type one might meet on a street corner (policemen, street sweepers). Several musical numbers are featured, showing the easy facility with which early TV comedy shows crossed over into musical variety and back again.

Kovacs does show glimpses of his legendary humor here. A segment called "Swap Time" in which two ordinary people swap odd items (a torn bowler hat for an eight-pound block of ice) offers Kovacs the opportunity for some clever ad-libbing. An advertisement spoof in which Kovacs and Adams pitch "food" (holding a brown sack with the word "food" written on it) is a trenchant critique of TV commercials that foreshadows his later comedy. Although this episode is not typical of Kovacs' later comedy, it is both a good peek into his early career and a good example of a particular type of early musical/comedy variety show.