1948: Television's Year

 

1948: Television's Year

 

There was something special about 1948. That was the year people started buying TVs, though they were still called "television sets" and built into elaborate cabinets with swinging doors (sometimes incorporating a radio and a small refrigerator). The feeling was that the big, naked glass eye was going to see right into the living room unless it was covered up. At very least, all that exposed glass was somehow disturbing. In the ads for Dumont television sets, which were state-of-the-art, an attractive woman always walked into the frame and CLOSED the cabinet doors, instead of opening them dramatically to display the set. Something odd about that message: see how you can hide the whole thing!

                                                  Like so.

People didn't watch TV then: they "looked at television", a sort of parallel to "listened to the radio". The programming was primitive, the picture quality dark and smudgy. We must take into account, however, that there was no videotape then, and all we have left from those spookily magical times are kinescopes, filmed directly off the cameraman's monitor which was probably small, dark and unstable (a good description of the shows and their stars).

Variety shows ruled. This was a hangover from vaudeville that carried on into the late '60s with shows like Ed Sullivan and Hollywood Palace. But these programs were not much more than radio with pictures. In some cases, as with Jack Benny and Milton Berle, they were performed on a stage with curtains, and even with an announcer holding a microphone. 

Not that I remember any of that. No, I really don't.

This looks like satire, but it isn't. It's an example of the kind of programming you'd see during the day - filling time, mostly. Note, at the end of this, there's a little blurb for Kovacs on the Corner - one of Ernie's earliest TV incarnations. He had to fill four or five hours of air time a day, and did radio "on the side". 

 

 

This is a strange one, an example of the way TV had NO IDEA how to handle visuals. The opening credits are just a primitive, probably hand-cranked crawl with blocky white letters on grey. Carlton Emmy and his Mad Wags sound particularly frightening. And those 50 Olsen and Johnson Punchinellos sounds like about 48 Punchinellos too many.

So what exactly is that little symbol, anyway? A banana wrapped in some sort of tape? Auto-Lite must have been the sponsor of this thing, which MIGHT have been one of those shows that pre-famous actors acted in. In spite of all the rich programming in drama, it was considered a poor cousin and only a place for a screen actor to "start". That feeling still hangs in the air, maybe because of Netflix.

Until I find a stranger one, this is the strangest: Okay Mother, starring. . . Dennis James? A transvestite, perhaps, sort of like Mrs. Doubtfire. And three sponsors for what might have been a 15-minute show (a common format then)?

I never know where all these come from (though I make them from YouTube videos). There's something called the Prelinger Archives that must have gazillions of them, and an Internet Archive that has never made a damn bit of sense to me. Maybe people kept them in their basements? Some people buy old VHS tapes at flea markets and at auction in hopes there's something good on them. Do I miss the good old days of VHS, or, in our case, Beta? No. I love my DVR and would never go back. But Smudgeville has its charms. 

This logo is a prime example of "don't worry, folks, TV is really just your old familiar radio in a new form". The huge microphone receiving, then blasting out sound waves, the telephone pole emitting - whatever it is emitting, lightning bolts? - almost seems like a reassurance that this is something we already know. Sort of. Just keep it covered up when you're not looking at it.

I have a thing for logos, so I'll include this particularly dull one. The three-note chime was held over from the radio, though it took quite a while for NBC to come up with a good visual to go with it.

The NBC peacock in all its glory, before they dumbed it down into its current dull form.

 

Please Stand By.

Here are some more, from just a couple years later, perhaps 1950 - '52. Most of these are based on a YouTube series by MattTheSaiyan called Classic Commercials for Defunct Products. There are, so far, 119 videos, so you may be seeing these for some time.

Though these look like animated cellphone prototypes, I think they're supposed to be dancing cameras. Though they could also be remote controls. Early TV animation was primitive, not to mention strange in its concepts.

If you look carefully at this Dumont TV commercial, a rare instance of the cabinet opening rather than closing, you'll notice the "zoom" wobbles in a way that looks suspiciously like the cameraman is walking towards the TV. The bleary distorted picture is state-of-the-art and meant to inspire ooohs and ahhhs.

A particularly delightful ad for a hair-care product, Toni Home Permanent. The ads in this era showed women with lacquered, military-helmet-like hair which was touted as "soft and natural". The do-it-yourself perms, always described as quick and easy, were a mass of "pin-curls" all over the head which would be impossible to do on your own. The real irony here is that in the "before" pictures, the women have hairstyles much closer to what we see today,

Yes, yes, I know I devoted at least one entire post to Pream commercials. But this reaction is hands-down my favourite.

I love the element of surrealism here! It's for a dishwashing liquid called Kind (very defunct now).

Blogger's note. I re-posted all these gifs from several years ago, because it took so long to make them (and I'll never have that recipe again, OH NOOOOO), and recently got a new comment from someone on the original post. I love it when that happens!  My gif program is far more sophisticated now, and I can make compilations, crop away the black borders, etc., so I cleaned them up a bit - but left some of them as is, to keep that sense of crude magic.

BTW, the YouTube channel from which I derived almost all of the vintage ads is now "disappeared" - it vanished without a trace a couple of years ago. Copyright issues? Let's hope they don't come for me next.

FROM HELL IT CAME: Little Miss Echo (hello?)

From my ongoing series of "Devil Doll" videos. This is probably the scariest. 

Smoking. . . unsmoking. . . smoking. . . unsmoking. . .

This is an example of the way smoking was viewed "back then": not only elegant and sophisticated, but downright sexy. Bette Davis exemplified this weird behaviour (at least, that's how we see it now), but it did not stand out as unusual back then. Now people must smoke in back alleys, but I find the idea of it, let alone the foul stink, too dire for me to feel much sympathy. 

Hell, I know all about addiction and battled it for years. BTW, just as an aside, I have 30 years of sobriety this month, but spent 15 years doing AA meetings almost daily, sometimes several a day. I'd be doing them now if any of them were "on". So I fully appreciate the harrowing nature of addiction and how ruthlessly it kills people. I am doing even more YouTube than usual during the pandemic, and one channel I watch is The Life and Sad Ending (cheery topic), capsule bios of celebrities who died young. Most don't make it much past 50, and most were of that sexy-cigarette generation and smoked three or four packs a day. Heart attack, stroke, COPD, many types of cancer. . . 

We know better now, supposedly, but smoking didn't disappear from Western society. It transformed itself into vaping, which is still delivering nicotene to your lungs and ultimately will do every bit as much harm. Big Tobacco is doing better than ever, though - the Third World relies on cigarettes as a way of making life bearable in dire conditions, and the tobacco companies are delighted to supply them. I don't know if people try to stock up when they're over there - not unlike the pedophile tourism in Thailand and other places, in which people stock up on child abuse. But I digress. I made this little animation just for the heck of it.

WAFFLING! (Trump falls over like a soggy waffle)

 

WAFFLING!

"Time will tell': Trump comes closest yet to admitting defeat 

US President Donald Trump came close but stopped just short on Friday of acknowledging he lost the November 3 election to Democrat Joe Biden and said "time will tell."

Trump, who has refused to concede he lost the election, was speaking at a briefing at the White House on the Covid-19 pandemic.
"Ideally we won't go to a lockdown," he said. "I will not go. This administration will not be going to a lockdown.

"Hopefully, the, the whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration it will be, I guess time will tell but I can tell you this administration will not go to a lockdown," Trump said.

Trump then stood by while several other speakers addressed the administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic which has left more than 243,000 people dead in the United States.

Trump then left the event in the White House Rose Garden without responding to reporters who were shouting questions such as, "When will you admit you lost the election, sir?" 

The remarks were Trump's first since November 5, when he falsely claimed to have won and said the election was "rigged" against him.

US networks projected on Friday that Biden won the state of Georgia, giving him 306 votes in the Electoral College that determines the White House winner. Trump finished with 232.

The circuit-breaker: how long can you hold your breath?

My brilliant daughter Shannon Paterson reports again. Here are my thoughts from the comments section.

These two-week bursts of severe restriction are called "circuit-breakers", and what they generally do is force everyone to hold their breath, figuratively speaking. But sooner or later you have to breathe again, and when normal human social impulses are kept suppressed, they tend to burst out again as people try desperately to re-connect. It's so hard-wired into us that I doubt if we can adhere to such brutal abstinence from the way we have evolved as humans. 

Besides, statistically, the circuit-breaker method is a desperation ploy which so far shows no clear signs of working. It's a fire-break against a raging blaze. Health experts are trying it, inflicting it experimentally on populations, because THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO. This is all just one big seething petri dish of experimentation, worldwide, and it has never happened before so NO ONE knows what to do. But they can't say that because they need to instill trust in people so they will "believe the science". If only it were that simple!

Right now, most of us are shoving the thought to the backs of our minds that there won't be any Christmas this year - and there won't, not like we have ever known it. People are carrying around, not just resentment at what they're having to do without (human contact being the most desperate), but a lot of shame if they feel angry about it or don't want to adhere to it or feel they want to rebel. Myself, I've had wild, subversive, "wrong" thoughts that this is all a bad joke and an attempt to force people to obey and toe the line, a la Big Brother. Then I give myself a shake and say, What is wrong with you? and feel shame. So the anger gets pushed under. 

There are teeny peeps here and there, sparsely-written and infrequent news items about how some "vulnerable" people who are already in heavily-marginalized categories (chronic mental illness or addiction) are having negative emotional effects, but they are people who are going to get more depressed anyway in the winter, or are never going to get better. Then, quickly, comes another stat - we HAVE to have stats every day, you see - that suicide rates are actually DOWN, so everything is obviously OK unless you're one of "those" people (who would be messed up anyway, and we all know most of them can't be saved. Harm-reduction is the best we can do.) If these remedies turn out to be as effective as society's remedies for addiction and mental illness, then God help us all.

Wednesday Addams, all grown up.

 Nice doggie.

The NBC Peacock: best gif of all time!

With sound. As a small child, the music and narration scared the living hell out of me! It still sounds pretty intimidating. Logos are really dumbed down now, and the peacock looks like a fan of those awful wooden ice cream "spoons" that came with the tiny tubs of vanilla ice cream. I think there's now some sort of streaming service called Peacock which is likely an NBC offshoot, but I am so far behind the times that I still sit there and stare at an actual TV screen with ACTUAL network TV playing on it. Likely on NBC.

Glorious, glorious

HEIDI HELL: the doll that WAVES at you!

My sometimes-morbid fascination with dolls just grows and grows, like Tressy's hair. My thing these days is to take old doll commercials from the '60s, slice and dice them by making gifs, changing speed and direction, and cobbling them together to make a "new" commercial with elements of the surreal. Just add music, and post. It's lots of fun and gets my mind off the direness of everyday life right now (though Biden's win lifted my mood more profoundly than anything I can remember). 

Hope you have fun watching it. Or feel creeped out, either one.

Bone music: x-ray records from Soviet Russia

In Soviet Russia, Forbidden Music Was Smuggled on X-Ray Records 

Music may transcend borders but, in an oppressive place like Soviet Russia, it was easier said than done. First, music had to be smuggled across borders and dispersed without its carriers getting caught. The morbid artifacts of this underground enterprise are now on display at an exhibition in Moscow called Bone Music.

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, a subculture of young music lovers devised a way to sneak forbidden music around Soviet Russia by writing it directly onto old X-ray films. Adorned with images of skulls and bones, the discs were given names like "ribs" and roentgenizdat, and held within their grooves the sounds of Elvis Presley and Louis Armstrong. 

During Stalin's rule and for decades following World War II, the Communist Party clamped down on outside influences, particularly those associated with principles celebrated in the West. Music was a top concern for the regime, so entire genres and artists were banned. Blatnaya pesnya, or "criminal songs," depicted the dark side of Soviet life, and had no place in the Party's system. White Russian émigré's like Pyotr Leshchenko were seen as traitors for not returning to the motherland and their songs were subsequently outlawed. And then there were Western sounds—tantamount to propaganda. 

"Jazz and rock 'n' roll were obviously censored because they were Western," British musician Stephen Coates tells Creators. "But a big chunk, probably most of it, was Russian music that was forbidden." Coates recently helped revitalized roentgenizdat after discovering a circular X-ray at a flea market in Saint Petersburg. The musician asked his Russian friends what it was, but they had no clue what he'd found. The seller even acted shady when Coates inquired more about it, but he purchased it anyway, brought the disc back to London, and eventually discovered it played Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock." "I was intrigued," he says, "and did more digging."

Coates found some information about the discs online and was eventually introduced to a Russian academic, who turned him onto The Golden Dog Gang, two young music lovers named Ruslan Bogoslowski and Boris Taigin who secretly used a record duplication machine to etch songs by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and The Beatles onto discarded X-rays.

X-rays proved to be an suitable medium. They were cheaply and easily (albeit illegally) acquired from local hospitals that were required to throw out the flammable sheets. They took the groove relatively well, though nowhere near as well as vinyl—some X-ray discs apparently sound like listening to music through sand—and they were easy to fold into a shirt sleeve of pocket for a quick transaction. The X-rays were also stunningly beautiful. 

The Golden Dog Gang were caught selling the discs in 1950 and were thrown into the gulag until Stalin's death in 1953. When they got out, they got back to work, this time making more elaborately designed discs, until they were caught again and sent back to the prison for a few more years. Coates has since connected with some of the bootleggers, producing a documentary and book on the topic.   (From Vice.com)

Blue Danube animation

Beautiful, beautiful girl

 

 💗💗💗💗Lovely Caitlin💗💗💗💗

Best death scene in film history!

Really and truly, this is the best. 

New girl in town: trolls 'n dolls in Trollandia

 

Mug shot: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS APE?

 

It's not Bigfoot, though if Bigfoot looked this scary I'd be crashing through the bush trying to get AWAY from it, not chase it to ground in order to capture grainy, indecipherable footage which would be analyzed frame-by-frame on the History Channel. 

No, it's a reconstruction of Paranthropus Boisei, one of the earliest and most primitive human ancestors, with intimidating apelike faces and the upright bodies of hairy, stocky humans. You know - men. 

BTW, this photo from an anthropological museum display has been mislabelled (by ME, including) as Orang Pendek, a Bigfoot variation from somewhere, oh who cares. They're all fakes anyway, except for THIS one. We know it's real. . . 'cause it's on Wiki.

Paranthropus boisei is a species of australopithecine from the Early Pleistocene of East Africa about 2.3 to 1.34 or 1 million years ago. The holotype specimen, OH 5, was discovered by palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey in 1959, and described by her husband Louis a month later. It was originally placed into its own genus as "Zinjanthropus boisei", but is now relegated to Paranthropus along with other robust australopithecines. However, it is argued that Paranthropus is an invalid grouping and synonymous with Australopithecus, so the species is also often classified as Australopithecus boisei.

(So's your old man.)

Martin Scorsese, Martin Scorsese

  

 

A little Italian let’s praise today:

The Topo Gigio of pictures, let’s say.

 

When Taxi Driver comes on TV,

I always drop what I’m doing, you see,

For Travis Bickle is my main man,

Because of DeNiro I’m such a great fan.

 

When first I saw this story bleak,

I had to through my fingers peek,

For though the end was a gory mess,

I couldn’t stop watching, I must confess.

 

 

 

 

Then I saw a picture of Marty,

Who supports the Italian Munchkin party.

Like my Uncle Aubrey his eyebrows were dense,

And his movies didn’t always make much sense.

 

But to the soul they spoke without fail,

For Raging Bull's a morality tale.

And fluids red from DeNiro’s face

Went gushing and flying all over the place. 

 

 

 

When we saw Jake LaMotta bash his head,

It filled us all with horror and dread.

But for our director, comedy was king,

For sociopaths were Marty’s favorite thing.

 

I can’t tell you all the movies he did,

For I’d be here all day, I do not kid.

But some of them were a big surprise,

Like Age of Innocence, pure sex in disguise. 

 

 

And Alice by Bursteyn, my what a trick,

For feminist views he laid on quite thick.

And when he did that movie of Jesus,

He went far out of his way to please us.

 

Then there was Goodfellas, my what a pic,

And I can’t say it was my favorite flick.

Every time I try to watch this thing,

It doesn’t exactly make me sing. 

 

 

 

No, there’s pictures where human flesh does rip,

And he and DeNiro seem joined at the hip.

It’s an odd sort of duo, a big guy and small,

With both of them Cosa Nostra and all.

 

Real genius is rare, so let's praise this guy,

And hope that his pic on Sinatra will fly.

His turkeys are few, though with Liza Minnelli

He went on a coke binge and turned into jelly. 

 

 

Martin Scorsese, Martin Scorsese,

Your pictures are great and drive film students crazy.

So some day I hope, in my brief mortal span

I can call you just Marty: cuz you is de man!

 

On a magical Halloween night. . .

 

A little girl was born. I watched the miracle happen on that Halloween night, and have seen her grow and change, struggle and rejoice - and now she's a young woman, so all these photos I collaged for her are kind of out of date, but still beautiful. What a lot of work I put in on these projects, but it was the best time of my life. Happy Sweet Seventeen, Caitlin! 

After a hectic day. . . kick back and drink some bromide!

 

At the watering hole

A fountain in the desert draws all manner of fauna, even in the middle of the night. (CLICK ON BOTTOM RIGHT for full-screen).

2020: The Year in Review