In episode 172 of the podcast, I talked about the Fox Network, and at one point, I played part of the “It’s on Fox!” promo that first ran in 1990 and was a showcase for their then-new five nights a week programming. I’ve seen promotions like this in the years since, like when the WB and UPN premiered in the mid-1990s, and old promos for the big three networks that made the rounds on YouTube. With the exception of “It’s on Fox!”, I don’t remember most of them.
On the other hand, I clearly remember some of the promotional commercials for my local television stations. Since I was watching the NYC stations, they were fairly well-produced, catchy, and reran a lot during commercial breaks, especially in the late afternoon when I was watching cartoons, sitcoms, and the news.
Syndicated stations usually had the most of these, and often ran advertisements for specifical programming blocks. You’d have “A full hour of The Simpsons every night on Fox 5″ or “The Brady Bunch Hour on Channel 11.” Then there were special movie months like Shocktober. In fact, Channel 11 was the best with these ads as well as station theming (they were “11 Alive” for a number of years in the Seventies and Eighties). My favorite had to be the commercial that was simply a montage of slows WPIX aired set to Huey Lewis’ “The Power of Love.” I’m sure nobody else but me remembers it; in fact, I can’t find it anywhere.
But what I could find were two ad campaigns from the late Eighties and early Nineties for WABC and WNBC, channels 7 and 4 in New York.
90210, The X-Files, The Simpsons, In Living Color,21 Jump Street, and … Herman’s Head? Join me this episode as I take a trip back into the late 1980s and the first decade of the Fox network. I go into the network’s origins as well as its early programming (some of which were hits and many of which were not), and then will talk about some of my favorite or most-remembered shows in various genres.
It’s the early ’90s. It’s my adolesence. And yes … it’s on Fox!
In the 1990s and 2000s, VH-1 declared itself “Music First” and began airing original programming. It began with music-related shows and eventually went fully into reality television. But during that time, it was appointment television. For this episode, Amanda joins me to talk about those glory days of VH-1. From Pop Up Video to Behind the Music to Hindsight, we go through the shows we watched, what we remember, and why we miss true music television.
So we all remember the Energizer Bunny ads from the mid-to-late-1980s, right? The first one were simply the bunny drumming and rolling and not stopping. Then, the commericals got creative; they’d start with ads for fake products and thent he bunny would interrupt (“Still going … nothing outlasts Energizer”). For its time, it was a pretty innovative idea for a commercial. I’m not going to say that it ushered in an era of humor or parody in commercials or anything; maybe it did. But there were definitely a few copycats.
The one I remember the most was, for, of all things, TV Guide.
It’s kind of weird to me that TV Guide had commercials. After all, it was one of those things that was always just … there. You know, that digest-sized magazine you threw around and sometimes read just beyond the listings (or in my case, always read the articles). But in the early Nineties, they launched their own ad campaign using fake commercials. I don’t know how many there were, but I do remember one, a music video named SKUM and the song “Screaming at the Top of Our Lungs.”
So in case you are wondering, the band in the commercial doesn’t exist. A comment from 11 years ago made by YouTube User @rhino6849 says:
This was written played and sung by Chuck Duran. We were in a band together called Loud and Clear which was quite a departure from this.Sorry to disappoint some of the metal heads but this was written with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. I was on the floor laughing the first time he played it. Funny stuff!
p.s. That’s an actor, not Chuck.
Another user, @painebobby, adds, “Chuck sang and played guitar But did not write it.”
And even Chuck Duran himself, whom I found on the website “Demos That Rock”, has posted about it in some places. He is also a working voice-over artist who has a podcast about that work. One of his guests was E.G. Daily, which is pretty cool.
For me, the commercial still holds up, especially because of the over-the-top nature of the video. I’m not sure if GWAR was getting any rotation on MTV (this is about a year or two before Beavis and Butt-Head premiered), but that’s what it reminds me of. With a … tap … of Spinal Tap (I’ll show myself out).
It’s time for the fifth annual Uncollecting episode. This time around, I take a look at an episode of the A&E show Hoarders that features a couple named Claire and Vance, whose enormous book collection has taken over their house and their lives. Then, I look at the “Where are they now” update episode from 13 years later.
My generation’s weekends always began with The Smurfs.
Or maybe it was The Snorks? The Shirt Tales? The Super Friends?
No matter what the show was, we all share a common memory of sitting in our parents’ TV room every Saturday morning watching cartoons. I’m not sure when this particular tradition started–children’s programming had been part of Saturday morning television since Captain Kangaroo and The Howdy Doody Show in the 1950s–and I knew that it died out in the Nineties and 2000s as cable networks started becoming the place to go for endless hours of cartoons. But Generation X can lay a significant claim to sitting ont he floor in your PJs–possibly while eating some sugary cereal–and watching nearly four hours of cartoons. I mean, they’re such a part of our childhood that we remember even the more random ones that didn’t have a toy line, like Camp Candy or Kidd Video.
But when I think about my Saturday mornings, the often began a little earlier that 8:00. Sometimes by a couple of hours.
Maybe it’s just me because I have never been able to sleep in on Saturdays (well, with the exception of when I was in high school and college), so for much of my childhood, I would be up way before the ffirst cartoon started and because nobody else was awake, I had to fend for myself. Sometimes, that meant making myself breakfast or cleaning my room (for some strange reason I remember emptying out my dresser, folding all my clothes, and then putting everything back). Sometimes, I played with my toys. Very often, though, there was television.
Look at Wikipedia’s listings for daytime television int eh 1980s, and pre-cartoon Saturday mornings are listed as “local programming.” I didn’t have the luxury of cable as a kid, so I made do with seven channels: the three networks, WNEW (which would become WYNW, the Fox affiliate), WWOR 9, WPIX 11, and PBS (WNET 13). WPIX was usually the best bet for early morning cartoons because they’d run shows that had falled out of their afternoon lineups, so you’d catch Voltron or later seasons of Transformers a couple of years after they’d faded away. On the networks, though, the programming was completely random.
When Brett was little–and I mean preschool-aged–they used to think that seasonal graphics on the weather report were the most hilarious things ever. The winter forecast had a snowman. Thanksgiving had a turkey. And Christmas, of couse, had a tree.
It doesn’t take much to keep a four-year-old entertained, but it made me think of when I was younger and I used to look for the same thing when I was watching the local news. I wasn’t a news junkie or anything when I was in elementary school, but for some reason I came to know who all of the personalities were, especially the sports and weather guys.
The other thing I always loved seeing were the holiday bumpers. If I happened to be watching television on Thanksgiving Day, there would be a “Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at channel 5” message at some point during a commercial break. The same could be said for Christmas and New Year’s. It got to the point where I was such a dork that I looked forward to seeing them every year.
I haven’t been watching television on the holidays in recent years, although I do see them from time to time. So, in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d look at a few that I found on YouTube. They’re all from the New York area, which is where I grew up.
The first is from WNBC 4 in 1977. Obviously, I never saw this when it aired because it’s from the year I was born. But in itself, it’s an interesting relic of television past–the quick bumper for a show that will be on later in the week. There are still some iterations of this around, but they usually have to do with local news shows and not locally programmed specials. I guess it’s also a fun fact to point out that up until I think about the mid-1990s, the Rockefeller Center Tree lighting was a half-hour show that wasn’t cheaply produced per se, but didn’t have the “network special” aspect it does these days. Plus, the feel of this–a still and a muffled narration due to 1977 television quality–has the feel of staying up past your bedtime.
Next up is WPIX 11 from 1984. I’m nto sure when this was first recorded because I found it on YouTube in several places, all with different years listed. I’m not surprised that it appeared several times over the years; WPIX was one of those stations that recycled stuff like this -and would re-air stuff from the Eighties way into the Nineties. What makes this interesting to me are three things: its length (it’s nearly four minutes long), the overtly religious content, and the fact that the guy speaking at us is the general manager of the station. Who these days–or at any time, really–knows who the heck the general manager of a television station is? I mean, for a second, I thought this was the PathMark guy.
Anyway, I wonder if this would even fly today. Because aside from the message, who is going to devote this much time–this much ad space–to something like this?
This one, from WNYW Fox 5 in 1998, is an example of a type of promo I’d see frequently–the idea that the people on the local news were a kind of family (and maybe by extension your family?). Like I said at the top of the post, I developed a knack early on for recognizing the people who were on television, and over the years I remember noticing when someone on one station moved to the other or even moved up to the network, like Al Roker or Sam Champion.
I live in a much smaller market these days and for a long time, the familiarity of the people on the news is still a valued commodity. I don’t know for how long, though, especially since local news stations keep getting bought out and staff is being reduced (my local weekend news has completely disappeared, for example). While I’m not going to flip a table if the weather guy changes again (because they change all the time), promos like this are nice in an age where the news seems less and less friendly.
And finally, there is the WNBC Sing-Along.
WNBC — 4 New York — is the New York City area’s undisputed champion of station promos. There’s more to write about at a later time, but right now is the time to look at one that’s been a tradition for a very long time. Granted, I have not watched television in New York in a few years, so I can’t tell you if that’s true, but I know that well into the 2010s, the entire WNBC staff would gather outside of 30 Rockefeller Center (which is where the station broadcasts from) and sing Christmas carols. The promo would air in 30-second and one-minute forms and would be just another commercial in a commercial break. And me being the dork that I am, would always look to see who I could name whenever it came on. This one’s from 1994 when I would have been a senior in high school.
Seeing this and all the reast always meant that Christmas break was coming and for a little more than a week, I’d be able to turn school off and enjoy a lot less structure in my day. Thinking about them now helps me recapture that feeling as I leave work behind and try to have a happy holiday season.
Sometime in the Nineties, before the Lifetime Network took complete ownership of suspenseful TV movies, the networks–especially NBC–ran a slew of them and several were aimed at teens. They’d had success during the late 1980s with a bunch of kids/teen TV movies, such as Crash Course and Dance Til Dawn, but I would imagine that the shift to drama happened because of the popularity of teen television drama in the first half of the decade. The biggest things on television for adolescents were MTV’s The Real World and Fox’s Beverly Hills 90210, both of which provided enough drama (and in the case of the latter, soapy drama) that the network probably thought they could pull an audience.
I’ve seen bits and pieces of a number of these movies over the years, many of which star Tori Spelling, but also featured actresses like Tiffani-Amber Theissen, Kellie Martin and Candace Cameron and had titles like The Face on the Milk Carton or Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? In the fall of 1996, they put another one out, Lying Eyes, although this one stars Cassidy Rae, who at that point was probably best known for a recurring role on Melrose Place as well as its spin-off Models, Inc. She plays a high school senior named Amy who gets involved in an affair with a much older guy and then someone starts stalking her and …
… I honestly have no idea why, but I have not only seen this movie three times (once for the sake of this blog post and twice prior), but it’s stuck with me ever since it first aired nearly thirty years ago. I’ll try to get to that after I run through the plot.
It’s been more than a decade since I wrote about it, but my high school had some random elective courses and the one that I have some random memories of was You and the Law. I took it thirty years ago durin gmy junior year, and it was one of those classes that existed to give me a break from APs and a nightmare of a physics course. We went to the Suffolk County courthouse in Riverhead to see some proceedings, and we visited the county jail where we could get yelled at my inmates–I mean, “scared straight.”
It’s time once again to dive into The Uncollecting! In this year’s episode, I take a look at the PBS series Legacy List With Matt Paxton along with articles that explore the “legacies” of our generations’ past, like brown furniture and memorabilia collections that are left behind. I also give my own update on how this now long-running project has been going.
Pop Culture Affidavit 