Do you remember when TV Stations signed off late at night and broadcast a test pattern....

[WCGreen]

Or the Farm Report on way too early in the morning.

Mass for shut-ins, only three broadcast stations, bad reception during thunderstorms, playing with the rabbit ears to get a better picture.

Do you remember seeing your first Color TV or when AM radio played music...

Just a few things that come to mind as I sit in front of a high def television that cost less than my first color TV just a few decades ago.

[In_The_Wind]

1. Yes, WCGreen. I remember all of those things.

[sheshe2]

31. And here I was going to say, I plead the 5th.

[url=http://postimage.org/image/mo4jfnq0d/][img][/img][/url] Curtsey

And Yeeah! I had a Shirley Temple doll too. I just loved her ringlets

[In_The_Wind]

38. And I was going to say I remember my father teaching me how to ride a bicycle

I was a mouseketeer. Yes, I was.

Where did all those carefree years go.

[IMG][/IMG]

[sheshe2]

41. Ah the memories, I_T_W...

I remember leaving the house, and playing all day in the woods. Cowboys and Indians, building forts and pretending. No cell phones, no fear. Sigh!

?

[In_The_Wind]

49. I cannot top your perfect addition to this thread.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

56. God, that brought me to the edge of tears

That's probably my favorite TV memory of all time. I also loved Captain Gallant. I was about four when I sent some box tops off for a foreign legionnaire's hat. What I got back in the mail was nothing like what you saw on the show and it was my first real experience with the fact people lie. Today, the idea of a little kid informally adopted by and living with a bunch of grown men in the military as their mascot might seem strange. But I loved this show.

[ret5hd]

2. Let's hear more about these thongs you speak of.

[Renew Deal]

3. Yes and it wasn't very long ago.

Rabbit ears went out only a few years ago.

The only thing on your list I don't remember is the farm report.

[WCGreen]

4. It came on at about 5:00. This was in Clevland, mind you....

What now is suburban wasteland iwas once farmed.

[Auggie]

10. I miss the locally produced shows ...

Some in Cleveland were The Gene Carroll Show, Academic Challenge, Polka Varieties, and my favorite, Hoolihan and Big Chuck.

[WCGreen]

21. Goulardi...

[Auggie]

22. Oh yes ...

I remember watching but was just a tad too young to really understand.

[LiberalEsto]

11. We got the farm report and we lived 15 miles from NYC

I suppose that's because a good part of our North Jersey town was still farms back in the late 50s-early 60s.

[Taverner]

20. We still have rabbit ears

The HD signal is better on those than on cable

[HarveyDarkey]

35. How about the Farm Film Report?

Then it changed to:

[RevStPatrick]

5. Here ya go...

[Hoyt]

6. Yep. Also remember TV screens about size of my cell phone.

There was also some perception of color they would produce with flashing grey lines.

The test patterns were better than some of today's programs - - FOX comes to mind.

[WCGreen]

7. Or when they announced The following Program is brought to you by.....

[pipi_k]

8. One of the local stations signed off

with this...

and yes...Sunday morning mass for shut-ins.


The horrible rabbit ears antenna that were usually decorated with aluminum foil in an effort to get better reception.

Three main broadcast channels


The first color TV I ever saw was sometime in the mid 1960s at an aunt's house where the family gathered for Thanksgiving dinner that year. The quality was horrendous, but hey...it was color!!!.

Nowadays we can watch TV with a picture so good that closeups of football players, for example, show every pore in the QB's face.

amazing

[WCGreen]

9. I remember some of those jets providing the backdrop for the Star Spangle Banner

[TheMightyFavog]

48. Ahh the F-104 Starfighter Beautiful plane.

Germans had a couple unfortunate names for that bird: Erdnagel (tent peg) and Witiwenmacher (widowmaker)

But still. To fly a plane like that. Must have been magical.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

12. You had to dial in the UHF channels on the TV

whereas the 13 VHF channels were built in to the dial and you could click them on. In Madison, Wisconsin in the late 50s, the local NBC affiliate was on UHF, channel 33, and you had to roll the dial precisely to receive it (like on a radio) while adjusting the rabbit ears and it was still very snowy.

[LiberalFighter]

40. Try getting the Madison channels in Janesville at the time.

Required big antennas.

Try getting the channels in Whitewater using rabbit ears in a college dorm room.

[hobbit709]

13. And that test pattern is more intelligent than 90% of what's on TV today.

[lastlib]

16. **Ding-Ding-Ding!** Winner!!

you got THAT right!!

Test pattern has fifty IQ points over "Honey Boo-Boo" or whatever-the-hell they call it. And forty-five points over Fox Nooze.....

[cloudbase]

52. That's no test pattern,

that's an Indian show!

[CaliforniaPeggy]

14. I remember those as though they were happening yesterday...

It's been decades.

Our high def TV is part of our Fios system...

[lastlib]

15. That Conelrad was a helluva detective! :D

(Bill Cosby fans will know what I'm talkin' about......)

.

[Gorp]

17. Other than the Farm Report, yes, all of them. And AM also had different song versions.

For example, the AM version of "Devel Went Down to Georgia" had the lyrics "you son of a gun". The FM stations played the album version. I'm pretty sure we only had 3 or 4 VHF stations and you could only get Benny Hill on an upper-channel UHF station. I still mess with rabbit ears, but they're on my wireless router, not a TV.

[RebelOne]

18. I remember it all very well.

And yes, my first color TV cost about $400 more than my 32-inch HD color TV. I also remember when there were only 3 TV channels in Miami to choose from. Yes, and wrapping the rabbit ears with aluminum foil to get better reception. Ah, those were the days (NOT).

[Taverner]

19. I'm a little younger...

I remember the test patterns, but Color TVs have always been around in my life

Granted, I remember STATIONS that broadcast only in B&W....

[HoneychildMooseMoss]

44. I remember when TV Guide had a special symbol

to denote a program that was in color.

[livetohike]

23. Didn't they play the Star Spangled Banner before the test pattern came on?

My best friend's family was the first to have a color tv....they lived next door to us and I was over there all the time anyway, but the tv was a big draw. Speaking of reception. I remember my Dad telling me to hold the rabbit ears for better reception!

AM radio....best rock station in the Pgh area at the time (1960's) was WZUM and one of the DJs "Mad Mike".

[WCGreen]

24. I do remember that.

[Graybeard]

51. The opening scene of 'Poltergeist'.

The opening sequence of the film, 'Poltergeist' shows someone who has fallen asleep with the TV on. The station is signing off for the night by playing the National Anthem. This was 1982.

[mrmpa]

47. In the '70's..........

I remember KQV in Pittsburgh. If you were downtown you could go by the building where KQV was based and in the big window at ground level, you could watch the DJ working. I don't rember if the music was piped out to the street or not.

[benld74]

25. Oh yeah I remember those days, we tell the kids about them,,,

3 channels, and them 5, then 6 counting PBS.
And NOW?

[progressoid]

54. Now it's 357 channels and nothing on.

[union_maid]

26. Oh, yes. All of that.

I remember when we got our first TV, too. I'd get up real early and watch Farmer's Market (we lived on the upper west side of Manhattan at the time) and Sunrise Semester. Had no idea what those two were on about, but it was TV and that was enough. Then after that, Farmer Gray cartoons would come on and the good times would roll. As would the picture on the TV.

[Honeycombe8]

27. Ummm...and if I do...does that make me (shudder) old? nt

[WCGreen]

29. Well seasoned....

[kentauros]

28. They're here!

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

30. Living in Morgantown, WV

I always enjoyed the fact that the local PBS station signed of to Copeland's "Appalachian Spring." It was worth staying up every night - I've always liked that tune.

[Brigid]

32. Captain Kangaroo.

Lucy's Toy Shop. Bugs Bunny. Underdog. Mighty Mouse.

[WCGreen]

37. I loved Captain Kangaroo...

All the local kiddie shows, the Friday Night Horror movies complete with hosts.

Here in Cleveland we had Ernie Anderson as Goulardi who went Hollywood and became the voice of ABC for almost three decades.

His son is Paul Anderson director of movies such as Magnolia and There Will be Blood.

[union_maid]

50. The Captain started kiddie weekday prime time around here

After the Farmer Gray stuff, there was Crusader Rabbit and then, I think Captain Kangaroo came on. My memory might be a little off, fifty-something years later, but it went something like that. And then there was Saturday morning. Howdy Doody, Pinky Lee and later on, Fury, Sky King etc.

[Tabasco_Dave]

33. i remember when they showed old movies

in the late evening and early morning. They showed edited grind house movies as well ,we just called them B horror flicks.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

42. In the early 60s, they had science fiction/horror on every Friday at midnight

My parents let me stay up until 2:00 once a week to watch it (a local show called Science Fiction "Weird"Theater). They had all the classics: Cat People, Night Of The Demon, Village Of The Damned, It The Terror From Beyond Space, The Beast From Hollow Mountain, The Deadly Mantis, Them, Forbidden Planet, The Thing From Another World, Dracula, The Abominable Snowman, Earth Versus The Flying Saucers, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, Invaders From Mars, Black Sunday, The Bad Seed, The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, It Came From Outer Space, The War Of The Worlds, The Quartermass Experiment, The Gamma People, Beginning Of The End, Kronos, The Blob, The Killer Shrews, The Fly, The Incredible Shrinking Man. They would re-run the movie on Saturday afternoon so I could watch it twice.

I wanted to see how many of these I could remember. I wish I had paid as much attention at school as I did to those old movies.

[kentauros]

34. I always liked this farm report:

[vanlassie]

36. Ours was made by Disney. I always loved the way the Bee said

"GOOD Night!"

&feature=youtube_gdata_player

[NightWatcher]

39. Now the tv never goes off. They'll just sell shit at 3am

There's even a show that comes on late where they sell sex toys in a qvc format.

I long for the days when the tv would just go away late at night

[MrScorpio]

43. I remember too nt

[struggle4progress]

45. Those who never had the experience may enjoy watching this:

Five whole minutes of test pattern goodness with soundtrack!

[Paulie]

46. RCA, Zenith or Quasar?!?!?

There was also over the air pay TV, where they scrambled the audio and horizontal hold unless you had a box. OnTV I believe was the brand in Chicagoland.

Oh and wrestling with Dick the Bruiser, Baron Von Rushke with his Claw and The Sheik.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

53. I was just thinking about those test patterns

two days ago. I wonder what triggered the memory.

[Spike89]

57. Weird, two days ago the wife asked me about them

She wanted to know if I remembered the sign-off and the test pattern. She grew up in the Modesto area (but born in Oregon like me) and she wondered if we had the same indian head test pattern here in Oregon...we did. We also talked about the old indy TV stations, specifically the one out of Oakland, CA that ran dialing for dollars and a bunch of monster movies (one of the first cable stations we got in Eugene).

She said she didn't know what made her think of test patterns, but weirdly, I ran across a TV sign-off just the night before. The local Fox affiliate (not Fox news!) I happened to be channel surfing and was surprised that any station still did the sign-off. They played the anthem, had a brief voiceover stating when and what would be on in the morning, then went to a static screen with an "off air" message--not the test pattern.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

58. That is weird...

There must be something that triggered those memories and we just can't remember what it was.

[AngryAmish]

55. It is much better that the shut-ins have MSNBC now...

[Scruffy Rumbler]

59. I remember all that as well as...

When we got our first color TV and new antennae. We could get PBS from Albany, NY as well as Rutland, VT. We had channels 6, 10 and 13. Channel 4 was PBS. Depending on weather, VT came in better then NY and with some fussing, we could get a Canadian station.

One piece of our childhood, a cabinet we used to play house, was the old cherry cabinet with double doors from my parents first TV. My father gutted it and added shelves.