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YouTubery '85: The Boob Tube

The following is a special Scratchbomb presentation.

What was TV like in the 80s? I think this clip covers it perfectly.

Yup, a news teaser for an update in the Bernard Goetz case, followed by a bumper for The Wizard of Oz . Juxtaposition!

In case you're too young to remember, Bernard Goetz was a mild mannered New Yorker who happened to carry a gun every where he went. Some kids tried to rob him on the subway, so he opened fire, paralyzing one of them. Oh, and he was white and his would-be assailants were black, so that added a whole other dimension to the sordid ordeal. Goetz wound up going to jail, but not before riling up Curtis Sliwa and his ilk, and Al Sharpton and his ilk to boot.

CBS had absolutely no problem pitting the promise of a Goetz case update right next to a bumper for The Wizard of Oz . You may think that the audiences for these two things would be diametrically opposed. But there was no ghettoization of TV audiences yet. There was no Goetz Channel and no Oz Channel to service the two separately. Network TV was still the only game in town. Prime time cable was 75% MTV, 15% HBO reruns of Beastmaster , and 10% Nick at Nite.

So you either sat down and watched Judy Garland, or you bided your time until the news came on. I suppose you could also just not watch TV, although I doubt many people took that option.

In fact, cable was still so little respected that it felt the need to buff up its image. Hence this PSA, wherein a distinguished college professor who demands quite a bit from his students relaxes at home with his family thanks to Cable TV. Was he watching Evening at the Improv or Remote Control ?

The 1980s also marked the true explosion of Celebrity Causes. I have very little evidence to support this theory, but I am also too lazy and disinterested to test the hypothesis. My half-formed, possibly incorrect opinions are good enough for me.

But I can enter this video clip as exhibit A for my case. It's a promo for a CBS special celebrating "A Year of Giving." It appears to be a collection of musicians patting themselves on the back for Live Aid, Farm Aid, and that paragon of self-congratulatory relief work, "We Are the World". Because no act of charity is truly complete unless it's documented by several dozen camera crews.

According to Wikipedia (and if you can't trust them, who can you trust?), "We Are the World" raised $63 million for Ethiopian drought victims. That is quite impressive, but it doesn't erase the fact that "We Are the World" is a horrible, horrible song.

Miniseries have gone the way of mixtapes, but once upon a time they were a network staple. You could count at least one 12-part epic every season. I believe miniseries began to fade when their cost grew too prohibitive, and when Hollywood scientists invented something called "editing".

Here's a promo for a CBS miniseries "Kane and Abel," based on the bestselling novel of the same name. Clocking in at a mere 7 hours, it represents tight pacing when compared to its peers in the genre.

Also now dead: the made-for-TV movie (at least for networks; Lifetime pumps out seven new movies every hour, thanks to outsourced labor and the plucky spirit of Nancy McKeon). But they too once littered the television landscape. This clip pulls together three promos for TV movies, starring Billy Dee Williams, Emmanuel Louis, Burt Young, Ken Wahl, James Farrentino, and very large ape who knows sign language.

Another now-dead television staple: the celebrity circus. Today, instead of making famous people walk tightropes, we force them to dance or pick a soulmate out of a house full of sociopaths. Surely there is still room in today's entertainment world for Phyllis Diller spinning plates?

I've got a soft spot in my heart for Edward Woodward. He starred in a British spy show called Callan, which I've never seen but is apparently awesome. (Tagline: "He has no friends, and all his enemies are dead!") He also starred in the original, non-hilarious version The Wicker Man and the fantastic war movie Breaker Morant , not to mention his great small role in Hot Fuzz as the neighborhood watch kingpin.

But I remember him most as the eponymous vigilante in The Equalizer. It was filmed on location in New York, and represented the city as a dark, crime-ridden pit where the weak and defenseless were constantly preyed upon by the powerful and violent, and police and government officials were too corrupt or incompetent to be of any help. In other words, it was practically a documentary.

For a while, the Sleuth channel showed reruns of The Equalizer . Looking at it with adult eyes, I can see that the plots and general writing weren't that great, and the bit characters suffered from Bad New York Overactors' Disease (a condition that afflicts 90% of the casts of the various Law and Order shows). But the look of the show is intense, gritty, and arresting. And Edward Woodward is a fucking badass. Like Javier Bardem-level badass, without thecattle gun.

Here's a promo which doesn't quite capture the darkness of the show, but does offer a brief appearance by Meat Loaf.

For pure terror, nothing eclipsed the 80s revival of The Twilight Zone . The opening credits haunted me as a kid. It was pants-soilingly scary. Spiders, slamming doors, a disembodied fetus for some reason, and a ghostly Rod Serling. I'm pretty sure seeing this at the age of 8 fucked up my soul for good.

The show itself? Meh. Apparently most of the budget went into the opening credits and hiring Guest Superstars like Danny Kaye and Robert Klein, leaving little dough left to hire decent writers.

To be fair, the original Twilight Zone was about as subtle as a jackhammer, and the acting was very actory. But its atmosphere was much more genuine. You didn't really question whatever crazy scenario was going on in front of your eyes. Whereas in the 1980s version, you'd see a Name Brand Actor in color on what is clearly a soundstage or a streetcorner in Burbank. That made it a little hard to believe you were witnessing an alternate universe.

That said, here's three promos for the 80s Twilight Zone. Just hearing tiny snippets of the updated theme song is enough to send shivers down my spine.

Seeing a promo for a failed series makes me sad, in the same way that seeing a GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign makes me sad. Someone's dreams have been crushed. Cue the violin.

This collection of CBS promos starts off with a series I have no recollection of, Otherworld. I don;t remember it because it evidently lasted a grand total of 8 episodes. But I was intrigued by this promo. The weirdly misogynistic first scene made it look like some long-lost TV project by Neil LaBute.

Wikipedia describes Otherworld as Lost in Space on Earth with alternate dimensions. That's the short version. The long version is so convoluted and full of sci-fi-ey convolutions that it's no wonder the show got shitcanned. Although it clearly had an ardent (if small) fanbase, and I can certainly empathize with fans of a doomed franchise.

After Otherworld , you'll see promos for Airwolf , Murder She Wrote (co-starring Bruce Jenner and Dick Butkus), and the aforementioned Equalizer , plus promos for Peanuts and Garfield Halloween specials, and a MISSING CHILD bumper that was ubiquitous in the 80s.

Whatever happened to those? Do fewer kids disappear now, or do people just not give a shit about missing kids?

Sports coverage was once much more simple than it is today, mostly due to a lack of competition. ESPN was still concentrating on bowling and kickboxing from the Philippines. So as you'll see in these series of promos, the networks do little more than say, "Here's a huge game we're showing, sit down, shut up, and enjoy it."

Witness this promo for a Bears-Cowboys game. No football-playing robots, no exploding graphics, no strobe lighting. CBS would just like you to know they're showing a football game. The narrator wonders if "payback" will be imminent, as the Cowboys had "owned" the Bears for 10+ seasons up to that point. The Bears won the game 44-0, so I'd say payback was achieved and then some.

Here's two similarly low key promos for college basketball on CBS. Am I nuts or does it look like there's nobody in the stands for that Boston College-Duke game?

And here's a typically no-frills promo for a major college football game: number one-ranked Iowa versus Ohio State.

Did you know that VH1 stands for "Video Hits 1"? And that there was once a time when it showed videos instead of brain cell-destroying reality shows? This commercial will attest to both.

Wanna know why people were moving away from New York in droves in the 80s? Watch these news breaks and wonder no more. Rapists, Bernard Goetz, social club fires--there's enough monstrosity here to fuel eight James Ellroy novels.

The national news was a little better, as you'll see here. As long as you ignore the hurricanes. And the earthquakes. And the volcanoes. But hey, Reagan's meeting with the Soviets; that's gotta be good! And that couple seems to have learned a valuable lesson about deodorant.

This is one of my favorite "scare" news teasers ever, and comes from CBS-2 News. The mortal seriousness in the narrator's voice is offset perfectly by the absurd idea of deadly poultry. Comedy gold.

Posted 12.20.07 9:15pm * Permalink

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