The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
Wide Wonderful World of Media - A Look Back At Television
Phillip Dampier:
The Hello campaign section closed tonight with the insertion of two audio playlists containing the balance of the "city songs." See if you can find your city in the "Hello Everywhere Else" post found two replies up.
Phillip Dampier:
Some Background on WOR-TV:
If you had cable television in the 70's and 80's in the USA, there is probably a fair chance WOR-TV was the second station from New York City found on your cable dial. While WPIX was the more popular choice of system operators, a large segment of Americans living east of the Mississippi had both to choose from.
WOR-TV was an RKO station, and competed heavily for viewers with WPIX and WNEW. WOR's schedule was heavy with tons of sports, movies, news, and even some talk shows. While WPIX spent a lot of time running sci-fi reruns and otherwise appealing for a younger audience, WOR's programming definitely slanted to an older audience, especially with a lot of their movies. Those of us with shiny new VCR's in the early and mid-1980s would definitely favor WPIX over WOR, especially overnight when you could record several hours of Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Space:1999, and other syndicated shows.
NY'ers generally saw WNEW as the best choice for light-hearted sitcoms, children's programs, and 30-minute shows -- WPIX as sci-fi off-network series and movie-heavy, and WOR big on hour long TV dramas, movies, British imports (especially from Thames TV) and loads of sports.
On WOR late night, you'd find two staples: Mr. Joe Franklin and movies, movies, movies.
The story of Joe Franklin is uniquely New York. Here was a man who could have been the Larry King of his day, only Franklin did more. Well known among the locals (and the diaspora of tri-staters who moved elsewhere and were pushed to sign up for cable in part just to watch this man), Franklin was part talk show, part variety show, part throwback to the earliest days of television.
Franklin's show ran for more than 40 years, mostly on the fuel provided by desperate-for-exposure washed-up talent that couldn't get on anywhere else. He was like the "Love Boat" of talk shows, and was an excellent barometer to know whether that star of a show you watched 20 years earlier was still alive, because if he or she was, they'd be on Franklin's couch soon enough.
Some of his shows were simply bizarre - with punk rockers sitting on the couch hobnobbing with Broadway types, classical musicians, and perhaps some Vaudeville kitsch-act he found usually doing Bar Mitzvahs. They'd do their five minutes of fame performing whatever, and then they'd sit and chat with Franklin and each other. It often was surreal, but Franklin had an incredibly loyal following (along with a lot of non-fans who could never figure out what the hell was so appealing about this guy.)
WOR went though turmoil from the 1970's into the 1980's. WOR's owner, RKO, was in trouble with the FCC and managed to get its license renewed only if it relocated its city of license to Secaucus, New Jersey (a whopping seven miles from where it was before). WOR-TV New York suddenly became WOR-TV Secaucus, but honestly in name only. Virtually everything important about the station remained in NY City, until "9 Broadcast Plaza" was built a few years later. To people in metro NY, it really made no difference. Whether in NY City, New Jersey, or Connecticut, you were still a part of metropolitan New York.
All this, along with the program philosophy of aiming old made them the least popular of the three independents, which made it surprising that WNEW didn't get more "superstation" status than it did.
RKO eventually put the station up for sale and MCA bought it and made huge changes. First, it became WWOR-TV. Second, most of the programming commonly found on WOR was gone, replaced with edgier stuff. One man would change the concept of talk TV forever, and he started on WWOR. Morton Downey, Jr. was a chain-smoking (on air as well) bully who ran a show so confrontational, it would later be ripped off by the likes of Jerry Springer. His studio audience was often filled with thugs, and occasionally furniture and fists could fly on the program. It was hardly enlightening television, but it was a spectacle and got a lot of attention nationwide.
WWOR's days as a superstation began to dwindle as syndicated exclusivity took its toll. This allowed local stations to block out the broadcast of programs that aired on stations outside of the area that they also had a contract to air. Programs often ended up replaced with a video screen saying "this show has been blocked." WWOR had a lot of shows affected, and the company that put them on satellite, Eastern Microwave, tried to keep the station running by replacing blocked shows with their own syndicated programs they bought on the cheap, such as Adam-12 and Emergency. But those shows were considered stale a decade before they showed up on the "WWOR EMI Service." When the WB and UPN networks started, the show was really over when WWOR affiliated with UPN (WPIX went with the WB). Today, with the merger of those two networks into the CW, WWOR lost again, stuck with the awful My Network TV network, which airs English language telenovelas and other ultra-cheap shows. Throughout its history, WOR always seemed to end up in last place, and that lives on.
They might do better with Joe Franklin reruns. :)
Over the next day or so, a WOR retrospective begins, with some things I'm sure you'll remember!
Ellemeno:
I'm the right age to recognize about 2/3 of the guests on that Joe Franklin montage. :)
Phillip Dampier:
Television in the 1970s operated at a FAR slower pace than it does these days. There was no such thing as a "soundbite" back then, and news reports might accomodate more than a minute of straight talking from an interview subject before moving on. These days, you're lucky to get ten seconds of what someone had to say before they've moved on.
Even in NY City, which remains the nation's largest TV market, the 1970s offered the opportunity for taking some time to show viewers the lighter side, and not be worried about getting on and off the air as quickly as possible.
On Friday's WOR-TV's newscasts would close with several minutes of what might be called the first "music videos." Usually containing a montage of video clips from folks around the city mixed in with the news credits, these vignettes would run for up to four minutes! Just watching these and realizing they are part of a newscast probably makes most folks think these are incredibly long.
We start with 1976 - An Example of WOR-TV's "Folk Friday" News Close:
WOR-TV News At Noon (Folk Friday's) Close - 1976
Uploaded by dampier
Now to an inventive way to doing the news credits - as if you're selling one of those K-Tel record collections!
WOR-TV News At Noon Close (Record Album Parody) - NY
Uploaded by dampier
Phillip Dampier:
Notes About This Clip:
- Apologies for the fluttery audio. This was originally a Betamax tape (the earliest Betamax videocassette recorders for home came out in the mid-1970s, long before VHS came alone), and one thing the earlier generation of tapes were known for is their penchant for quality variability. When you got a "squealing tape" that wasn't properly seated in its shell, it would squeal while playing or recording, and the vibrations that caused would literally shake the tape enough to create this kind of flutter effect.
- This was the last year WOR used actual film for its station ID's and many of its promotional and advertising clips. The ID music came from the mid 1970s and would be retired in 1979 for a whole new image campaign.
- "Straight Talk" the show that opens in this clip, came from an era when stations were required to air public service programming. This assures me that this clip came from first thing in the morning (probably on a weekend) when shows like this were typically buried. This is an ultra-low-budget presentation as well - akin to today's public access cable shows. The other thing at play here was quota hiring. Stations at this time in this country had one or two token black or other minority employees that almost never appeared prominently on the TV stations that hired them. Instead, they were given the task of hosting shows like "Straight Talk" or even worse as you'll see in the days ahead, special newscasts just for black audiences, usually called, "Black News." Segregation in pop culture well into the 1980s was readily apparent in all areas of the country, even in New York City.
WOR-TV Promo, Station ID, Straight Talk Open - 1978
Uploaded by dampier
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