TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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<text> <title> (1960s) Colorful Television </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1960s Highlights </history> <link 06847> <link 06255> <link 03946> <link 02017> <link 00132><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Colorful Television </hdr> <body> [Americans watched as "the medium became the message" and television, its commercials as well as its programs, took over more and more of their lives.] (July 5, 1963) Color television sales are going up and prices are going down. Tabulating their midyear reports last week, the industry's leaders predicated that they would sell more than 750,000 color sets this year--nearly double 1962 sales. RCA, which went it alone during the colorless years, and now sells 55% of all the color TV sets and almost all of the color tubes used by other manufacturers, is spending $11.6 million to expand its plant at Lancaster, Pa. Challenging RCA with new competition, Motorola last week introduced a compact color tube that creates a 23-in.- long rectangular picture but is 5 1/2 in. shallower than the RCA tube. Motorola sets with the new tube will begin at $650. Color still costs 2 1/2 to three times as much as black and white. Even though prices of color sets drop as color volume rises, industry experts expect that this ratio will be maintained. (October 13, 1967) Is Man from U.N.C.L.E. a TV hit because people like spy stories or because they are fascinated with David McCallum's thatched hairdo? Does football draw better than baseball on TV because everything happens with simultaneous near-confusion on the gridiron as opposed to the slow sequential order of events on the diamond? The suggestion behind these questions goes to the root of Marshall McLuhan's theory that "the medium is the message." McLuhan, the communications gadfly who wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, (proposes) that television is a "cool, low-intensity" medium that projects a fuzzy image, compared with "hot" print and film. This means that the TV image demands the viewer's involvement by requiring him to complete the picture himself through his own imagination. Hence, there is no need for television to project an orderly or "linear" progression of a story: the viewer takes care of that himself. In other words, TV's first principle is that form counts more than content. Youngsters especially reflect the McLuhan notion that plot is less important than image. Says (NBC Audience Measurement Vice President) Paul Klein: "Television-oriented people don't care about stories. There's no need to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end. They care about people doing things, and all at once." What makes I Spy successful, adds Klein, is not plot ("They are silly or nonexistent") but an interesting and warm relationship that is projected by the two lead spies, Bill Cosby and Bob Culp. The Monkees' story line defies logic, but the show is a hit with the kids. U.N.C.L.E. swings chiefly through gimmickry aided by action--not to mention what (MGM-TV's Sales Coordinator) Herman Keld calls the "tactile, TV hair" of Illya Kuryakin. (October 10, 1960) One new situation-comedy series that arrived on television last week parodies all the others. Called The Flintstones, the program uses first-rate animated cartoons in place of second- rate actors, and its approach to satire of 20th century life is by way of the Stone Age. In prime evening time, the half-hour ABC show is aimed at adults, but how can children be asked to sleep while Runtasaurus (a sort of paleolithic Pekingese) is on the screen? Or while the Sunday News--a 90-lb. slab of carved stone--comes aflying through the front door and kayos daddy? (March 3, 1961) For years people have talked back to their televisions sets--"Why don't you shut up?" "Give'em hell, Harry"--but not until Mitch Miller came along did viewers sling an arm around the old tube and sing along with it. A three-year-old phenomenon of the record industry, Miller's eleven Sing Along with Mitch albums have sold well over 4,000,000 copies. Now appearing fortnightly on NBC with a 28-man chorus of bald basses and potted tenors--last week's show was that third of the series--he has set new rating highs with such material as Toot, Toot, Tootsie!, I've Been Working on the Railroad, and Beautiful Ohio. (November 30, 1962) The pone is the lowest form of humor. But in five short weeks, country corn sent CBS's The Beverly Hillbillies to the top of Old Smoky in Nielsen ratings. Its climb was one of the swiftest in the history of television. The program is dedicated to finding out how many times the same joke can be repeated. Mountaineer Jed Clampett and his family, worth $25 million because oil was found in their swamp back in the Ozarks, have moved to Beverly Hills to live among the polychrome celebrities of show biz. Pa bought a house built by John Barrymore; the place is easily large enough to be mistaken for a university. Pa takes an appreciative look at the smooth and gorgeous sweep of lawn and says, "Fine, we'll commence plowing tomorrow." "But this is Beverly Hills!" says a shocked Angeleno banker. "Dirt is dirt," says Pa. (May 24, 1968) In TV nowadays, it is not merely fashionable but an absolute advantage to be black. By next season, just about ever series will feature a Negro player. NBC, which will carry Julia, has had Diahann Carroll tied up for the title role since March. CBS signed Comic Flip ("Heah come de judge") Wilson for four Ed Sullivan dates next year, but NBC won exclusive rights to him for 1969-70. And CBS is reportedly trying to buy Bill Cosby away from NBC with a 20-year, $20 million deal. Unfortunately, few of the roles for Negroes that are being so hurriedly written into next fall's shows will have any individuality or credibility. Rarely does a Negro portray the villain: the networks are fearful of being accused of racism. As a result, the black character in the average TV drama is likely to represent what Belafonte calls either "Super-Negro" or "a button-down Brooks Brother eunuch." (October 11, 1968) Richard Nixon? Making jokes on a TV comedy show with a bunch of weirdos? You bet, as they say, your sweet bippy. Everybody and his myna bird wants to make a cameo appearance on Rowan and Martin's manic Monday night affair. Laugh-In is the smartest, freshest show on television. What appeals is the program's extraordinary ambiance: it has an artful spontaneity, a kind of controlled insanity, emerging from a cascade of crazy cartoon ideas. In yet another TV season of pale copies, Laugh-In is unique. It features no swiveling chorus lines, no tuxedoed crooners. Just those quick flashes of visual and verbal comedy, tumbling pell-mell from the opening straight through the commercials till the NBC peacock turns tail. [Television took on a new and international dimension with the development of the Early Bird satellite.] (May 14, 1965) In an age fast growing familiar with man's race beyond the confines of his own world, Early Bird reached back toward the earth and seemed to shrink it almost to room size. All by itself, the satellite blanketed more than one-third of the globe. If two more soar into orbit, for the first time in history it will be literally true that for every nation instant contact will be possible with every inhabited spot on earth. In Europe and the U.S., television's showmen labored to exploit Early Bird's versatility. At their best, the programs were as moving and immediate as a closeup of Houston's great Surgeon Michael Debakey repairing a human heart while fascinated doctors in Geneva looked over his shoulder. Europe watched troop movements in the streets of Santo Domingo while bullets still ricocheted across the Caribbean town. The Town Meeting of the World turned international as Barry Goldwater in New York, Dean Rusk and Sir Alec Douglas-Home in London, and Maurice Schumann in Paris joined in a transatlantic gabfest. A mug shot of Canada's most wanted man, relayed by Early Bird and recognized by a televiewer in Florida, gave accused Bank Robber Georges Lemay the dubious fame of becoming the first fugitive nabbed by satellite. NBC teamed up with the BBC and, for a refreshing few minutes, Huntley-Brinkley became Huntley-Dimbleby. Between the best and the worst that TV had to offer, imaginative men could pick the promise of a dream born more than a century ago, when the first crude telegraph suggested that man might some day far outreach the limitations of his speech and hearing. [A new epoch of communications expanded the television fare to include the brutal images of the Vietnam War.] (December 1, 1967) A line of G.I.s snakes cautiously through the underbrush. The sudden chatter of a machine gun sends them scrambling for cover, and for several long tense minutes there is a furious exchange of small-arms fire. Then, just as suddenly, all is quiet, and out there in the elephant grass a young recruit lies twisted in the grotesque posture of death. He had been with the company for a month, someone recalls, but sadly, no one can remember his name. Says one G.I.: "He had freckles...I think." The brief drams, shown recently on CBS evening news, has been replayed in a hundred variations since TV turned its cameras on the war. The TV correspondents say that U.S. casualties have risen 15% over a previous month, that the Army uses more than 10,000,000 sheets of paper each day in Vietnam and, endlessly, that war is hell. The verbiage may even be informative, but what tells the story--and more--is the anger and frustration on the faces of a team of medics as they try unsuccessfully to save a shrapnel-torn G.I. with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Gradually, TV's war coverage became more daring and more disturbingly realistic. Fifteen months ago, a CBS film showing G.I.s setting fire to a Vietnamese village with their Zippo cigarette lighters stirred a furor that was splattered across the pages of the nation's newspapers. A few weeks ago, when the network ran the more shocking scene of Viet Cong bodies whose ears, according to the reporter, had been cut off by souvenir- hunting Marines, there was barely a ripple of response from viewers. Last week alone, the TV coverage of the Dak To fighting could have been viewed as a brutal combat drama in serialized form: night after night, the screen reeled off pictures of American soldiers exchanging mortar fire with the enemy, and medics carrying the wounded to shelter. The cumulative effect of TV's first war, says University of Chicago Sociologist Morris Janowitz, is that it "has hardened and polarized public sentiment. Those people who are skeptical of the war now have a vehemence in their skepticism. Those who are for the war see Americans being killed and they don't want the sacrifices to be in vain." </body> </article> </text>