The Philco Predicta was quite possibly the ugliest piece of electronic equipment ever made, let alone the ugliest TV set. Yet its "futuristic" design appealed to a lot of people. Instead of being suffocated inside a coffin-like wooden cabinet (and the earliest ones even had DOORS on them, since people were not comfortable having all that exposed glass in their living room), you had this - thing - that swivelled around, with no discernible cabinet to it at all. It just sort of hung there, looking exposed, naked. The base could not have been more utilitarian, minimalism taken to the ugliest extreme. BUT - and this is a big but - the Philco Predicta yielded one of the most gorgeous TV advertisements ever made. It has everything - men and women standing around in awe, all beautifully dressed (and remember how formally people used to dress on TV?), with euphoric choruses exclaiming, "Wow-wow-wow-WOW!" The Philco Predicta was the future, with the thinnest, flattest screen since. . . all right, it looked like a waffle iron, but no one had anything to compare it to, so it was just great, do you hear me? Just great!
Showing posts with label TV sets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TV sets. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 3, 2021
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Down the tube: the first luxury TVs
Why am I sitting here in a state of ecstasy? you may ask. Because it takes so little to make me happy.
From somewhere, some hidden trove, some archive, some musty vault, has come a moldy treasure the likes of which I've never seen on YouTube before. Classic Commercials for Defunct Products: 107 videos in all, each running about 15 minutes.
Do you know how many minutes that is - nay, how many HOURS? of musty, fusty, dusty old flickering black-and-white ads, many of them peeled off of kinescopes older than Egyptian cuneiform. . . ?
Some of the best TV ads are ads for TVs, and the earliest ads showcased the television as the central piece of furniture in the living room, if not the whole house. Dancers whirled ecstatically around it, almost as dizzily as if they were in a Tarreyton cigarette commercial. Though this one looks super-high-tech, it's not so remarkable, since Ernie Kovacs was using similar "camera tricks" in the early '50s. The tiny-screen TV on the right is one of the very earliest models from the 1940s.
But this is my favorite: a wobbly, grainy zoom shot of a bleary little screen in a cabinet that looks like it once housed a giant radio. The doors opening on this marvel made for a desperately modern effect. I am not sure what the people are doing onscreen - perhaps dancing at a funeral? It is, of course, made by Dumont, first on the scene and first to go extinct.
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