Newsday TV Book, October 28-November 3, 1973.

For this installment, I'm looking at a mid-autumn TV Book from 1973, and right off the bat--a typo! A big one! I'll give you a hint: Sunday was indeed the 28th, so...

...November 1st was Thursday, not Saturday! Eastern Standard Time returned that Sunday morning, but then Newsday went and robbed you of two whole days! Which would probably be okay with Barbra Streisand, who, in the cover story, declared that she'd rather stay home anyway, so who the hell cares how many days are in a week?
(Click pics to enlarge, otherwise good luck reading them.)

The TV Line column was the closest thing we had to a search engine back then. How else could we have known Dick Clark's wife's name, what Susan Olsen's family was like, or how many times John Wayne died? (For the record, the last time would be about six years later.) The Susan Olsen query came from my hometown of Plainview (woot-woot!), and I really hope P.D. was no older than 13.

After the reminder to fall back, Davey and Goliath's "Halloween Who-Dun-It" aired on at least one channel, Abbott & Costello met the Mummy, and the Bowery Boys took the day off so WNEW 5 could bring you Wilde and Winters.

On Thursday, WLIW 21 (the local PBS station that would later transmit and then broadcast out of Plainview--woot-woot-woot!) began airing Seven Thirty: The Long Island Newsmagazine. It was hosted by John Miller, who would later go on to work at other NYC stations. In fact, his Wikipedia page doesn't even mention his decade at 21, claiming he started his career as a journalist at channel 5. He's also been spokesman for the NYPD, countered terrorism for the LAPD, and oversaw FBI communications. I can't seem to dig up when the show ended, but news is listed in that time slot in the last TV Book of my collection, Christmas week 1985.
(Ned Levine drew the close-up, plus the one for some CBS specials on Friday.)

Here are the listings for all of Friday and Saturday (despite Newsday's insistence that they don't exist), with lots of neat stuff to seek out, including the usual spate of mordant John Cashman reviews, and Gary Viskupic in his element, providing an illustration for a World War II flick that may or may not turn you on.

Same damn back cover they've had for weeks now, so instead, here's your Holiday Spas cheesecake for the week. (Please note that, although it would close down before long, at this point they still had a location in... that's right, Plainview! Wooty-woot-woot!

Not only was the back cover a dud, but most of the ads were pretty insipid this time out. However, I couldn't help but rescue part of an otherwise banal notice for Roberts Exterminators in North Babylon. I don't think this is clip art, so I hope that means some LI artist conjured up this cartoony-yet-nightmarish vision of a hissing Zanti Misfit chasing down an appropriately horrified woman.

Until next time, Happy Halloween! Unless you're older than 16, in which case you've hopefully grown out of it because an adult celebrating Halloween is embarrassing! Yes, I say so!

Thanksgiving 1958, and What the Heck Was on That Tee-Vee?

I guess you could call this an early Thanksgiving post, but it's really more of a small, personal mystery.

I just started working on a project using my family's home movies. I transferred them to disc years ago, so I've watched this one clip I'm about to play many times. In the past (just as now, stumbling over it yet again), I've analyzed these distant seconds of obscure footage, done Internet searches about what I think I see, and still I have questions.

To be clear about this "mystery," this ain't the Zapruder Film. I know already that the answers are inconsequential, but I believe their resolution will be of interest--however dubious--to nerds of my ilk. (And yes, that phrase is currently playing in my head to the tune of "Peg O' My Heart." Hey, listen to that--now it's playing in your head too!)

Seriously, nerds o' my ilk (but not really, because they are clearly worse off than me when it comes to pointlessly scrutinizing arcane minutiae) regularly leave comments on my YouTube channel to let me know I was, say, off by a day when I wrote the description for an old piece of video I've uploaded. "This couldn't have been a Saturday," they assert, "because the promo for the syndicated run of The Ropers says 'tonight' and it was only on weekdays at that time, although the station would add a Saturday showing some three years later." I can't tell--are they seething when they write such comments, not demanding an apology but perhaps expecting one? Or maybe they're declaring them haughtily, like "You didn't know that?!? And you call yourself a television expert?"

Of course, I would never claim such a thing, although some commenters seem to think I own everything ever aired on television, and thus send me requests for a specific news story as aired on a specific channel on a specific day, like, forty-eight years ago.  <cue sarcasm> Oh yeah, I'll just proctologically produce film from that time your grade school burned down under suspicious circumstances and made it to the local newscast (and yes, just as you feared while sending the request, I totally know you want to see it because it was you, wasn't it, you did it you demented little pyro freak!).

Anyway, no, I am not a TV expert. I am merely the humble Curator of "Hugo Faces," an intermittently-viewed-but-largely-ignored Vintage Video Nostalgia Channel (capitalizing words makes them Important), albeit one which is currently blowing up thanks to a compilation of Loretta Lynn's 80's Crisco commercials. Thanks for the posthumous boost, Loretta! (Oh, and RIP. You did us proud every time!)

Okay, the home movie. The date was Thursday, November 27th, 1958, which was Thanksgiving. The scene we witness is my family's Long Island, NY living room (but this was eleven years or so before I came along), with kids gathered on the floor, watching a good-sized B&W set. (I don't think color sets were common at this time--at least not enough for my family to have one.) For just a few seconds, something is visible on the screen to the right side, but it's hard to make out. To me, it looks like a T. Rex roaring, before it's obscured by something dark which comes from the right. Then the full screen quickly fades into the logo for Ideal Toys.

(This is just a photo, not the video, so you can stop clicking on it, grandpa. I said THIS ISN'T THE VIDEO, THE VIDEO IS AT THE END OF ah forget it.)

Is the dark thing that moves onscreen King Kong? I know the "traditional" Thanksgiving airings of Kong on WOR 9 didn't happen until the 70's and only lasted ten years. But I've heard KK was played on their "Million Dollar Movie" feature, which ran daily showings of a flick, with extra showings on the weekend. So was this like a special, MDM holiday-week programming of Kong? Also, the Ideal logo coming up so fast makes me think it's a "this program is brought to you by" slide and not the beginning of a toy commercial. Would the old MDM go right to this sort of slide from the movie, without one of those familiar "Tara's Theme" bumps? (Maybe that was only a thing in my day.) Obviously, I can't even say what channel this TV was tuned to, or even what time of day it is, so I may be presuming a lot.
(And again, who in their right mind could possibly care about such minutiae. Ahem.)

Here's a link to the clip (times three, slower and slower), on my YouTube channel.
(Hey, while you're there, why not check out one of my thoughtfully-themed playlists? Here's the latest I've assembled, spookyish stuff for Halloween!)

Or just watch the embedded clip below.
I didn't add the rattle of an old projector like I often do. Isn't just silence nice sometimes?

Newsday TV Book, October 21-27, 1973.

I posted the cover to this week's issue a long time ago (in a look at the previous October '73 issues) but never bothered to write up a more detailed take on the contents. Well, let's remedy that right now! We don't even need a reason! This whole blog doesn't!

Here's that cover again, with a Telly Savalas-shaped alien spheroid menacing the Big Apple.
(Pics clickable to make legible, unless I screwed something up.)

The cover story is remarkable, not because of Aristotle Savalas' upbringing in Garden City, but because I don't think I've ever caught Newsday printing the word "bullshit" before! Carol Burton, really! (And the phrase “slightly faggy” is in there too, oy…)

This week, poopymouth TV Line editor Carol Burton chose to answer the queries of K.G. of Massapequa Park, who wants Alfred Hitchcock to come out of the shadows, and reprinted Bob Johnson's familiar warning to Mr. Phelps for A.D. of Mineola.

Sunday morning, with A&C comin' round the mountain, B-Boys going to war, Wonderama riveting sleepy kiddies with grainy old baseball footage and Bob McAllister squinting at smudgy fingerprint whorls, and WOR channel 9 airing the 7th game of the World Series (or not, I really can't be bothered to check).

The caustic John Cashman snarks up some Monday late-night reviews (actually most of these are pretty nice), and Gary Viskupic sends up the country opera.

Here are listings for Tuesday evening, just because it's another chance to present that super-cool Hicks Nurseries (of Westbury) Halloween ad, previously presented in a slightly different context (namely, 1974).

More Cashman for late Thursday, and another Viskupic take, this time on Disney's Golden Anniversary.

Now, without commentary (not because it's not merited, I just got things to do!), here's all day Friday and Saturday. Please note the switch back to Eastern Standard Time, which meant Viewpoint on Nutrition was going to end thirty minutes before it started. Which, without ever having seen it, I'd bet is the ideal way to watch Viewpoint on Nutrition.

Whoops, I almost forgot that I wanted to note this great Viskupic portrait for "The Return of Phoenix" on CBS' Festival of Lively Arts for Young People.

Lastly, the back cover is, sigh, yet another dull bank ad, I mean like zzzzsville for real, baby. So to liven up this here finale, here's... Westrock Beef with a Veteran's Day sale!!

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---hnh? You still here? It's late! Like Viewpoint on Nutrition late! Hit the bricks!

'til next time, absurdly specific nostalgia junkies...

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