Evolution of Television Photo Essay by CBS

This was so relevant to what I've been doing that I just have to post the link to it.  Thanks, CBS.  Evolution of Television

Dogies and Deuces

What the hell is a “dogie”?  And why do you have to keep them moving?

Frankie Laine had the answer:  your true love is waiting at the end of the line.  Each week,  a young and devastatingly handsome Clint Eastwood and the rest of the Rawhide cast drove “disapproving” cattle through the perils of outaws, Indians, the wilderness and each other and provided moral guidance to a generation of American boys (myself, of course, included.)  They were ubiquitous:  in 1959, 26 Western series competed for airtime, and eight of the top ten ratings went to Westerns. 

And I can still sing (privately, of course) many of the theme songs, complete with all the lyrics; so powerful was the influence of Westerns in the 50s and 60s that their songs and stories are indelibly imbedded in my mind.  I almost bought an expensive new hat the other day mainly because it was a Stetson.

A killer’s business card read “Have Gun Will Travel.”  Johnny Yuma was a rebel (and sounded an awful lot like Johnny Cash!)  I was introduced to classical music, the “William Tell Overture,” by Clayton Moore as The Lone Ranger and symphonic splendor by Wagon Train and Bonanza.

And, of course, who was the tall, dark stranger there?  “Maverick is his name.”

These were the male role models of the postwar generation—and a strong link back to the role models of our fathers, as well.  Westerns had, of course, been a staple of “B” movies of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s (and of radio as well).   For an entire generation who’d witness Depression and impending war, they promoted the virtues of independence, self-reliance, physical power and gunfighting skill—virtues that in real life had withered away along with the frontier that bred them.

   

The sudden emergence of a new medium, television, demanded a vast supply of stories, and immediately, and Hollywood was able to recycle ready-made matinee movies-- The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, The Cisco Kid—and “C” list stars like James Arness, William Boyd and Ronald Reagan (who, among other accomplishments,  hosted Death Valley Days).  The “Greatest Generation” thus passed along their myths and values to the succeeding baby boomers.

Or so they thought.  But something happened in the transmission; somehow, some subversive force crept in.

Nobody apparently thought much of it at the time, but a surprising number of these “heroes” were former Confederates (a conceit resurrected in Joss Whedon’s late, lamented Firefly):   Johnny Yuma, Rowdy Yates, The Lone Ranger, Paladin, Josh Randall (Steve McQueen’s character in Wanted Dead or Alive) and, of course, the Maverick brothers.

They were conveniently scrubbed of overt racism (at least as it was understood at the time), but they exemplified plenty of other anti-authoritarian, “rebel” values.  I even learned to play poker from watching Maverick—hardly a prevailing establishment skill.  They drank, smoked, and exhibited an evident contempt for corrupt or inept representatives of “respectable” society, including law enforcement.  Having lost a war, they were perpetual outsiders, true to their own internal codes of conduct but hostile to those imposed upon them.

Just saying: is it just coincidence that in the wake of this wave of Westerns, my generation elected two Californians (one a certified cowboy actor) and two Texans?  Or that, buried deep within my liberal consciousness, plays the soundtrack of rebellion?

Burn the land and boil the sea.  You can’t take the sky from me.

P.S.:  here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is a list of TV Westerns.

A Feast For the Eyes

Big slices of turkey (white meat, of course).  Mashed potatoes.  Cornbread stuffing.  And a helping of green peas.  The classic Thanksgiving dinner, the traditional meal of family gatherings around the ancestral dinner table (with the extra leaves inserted for more room and a smaller table nearby for the children.)

Except it wasn't Thanksgiving, and there was no family gathering, nor was there an ancestral table.  In fact, it helped tear families apart and change the dietary habits of Americans for generations.

It was the 1954 Swanson TV Dinner.

Bear with me for a momentary digression.  In 1992, Cecilia Tichi published The Electronic Hearth, an examination of a particular strain of early television advertising.  Her thesis was that television was introduced into the American home by a bit of clever and sustained subterfuge—marketers co-opted a traditional symbol of family and warmth and reassigned it to television:  the colonial hearth.  From before the Revolution, the fireplace hearth had been the center of the home, the source of physical heat and, often, the source of cooked food as well.  It was the focal point of the room, and all who lived there gathered around it for physical and emotional comfort.

But by the 1950s, with central heating, there was little use for the hearth except as a nostalgic entertainment on cold evenings.  Television, its promoters promised, could take its place.  

This substitution overlooked one fundamental problem, though:  television demands to be watched.  The glow from the screen with constantly shifting lights and shadows oozes into our consciousness even if we’re not looking directly at it.  Characters speak dialogue to each other (emerging out of rather tiny, imprecise speakers), and if you care about the program you’re watching, you need to pay attention.  And, since television was a “one-time-only” event in the early days, if you missed a plot point, you missed it forever (or at least until re-run season).

Leave the TV off and engage in a traditional family meal, with conversation and interchange?  Try to treat it as background and pay divided attention, both to it and to each other?  Or give in and eat meals in front of the TV, each in a separate attention bubble?

Swanson and others capitalized upon and encouraged the latter.  The war had inspired incredible advances in television technology (it was basically the same technology as radar) that transformed it from an expensive, pre-war novelty into an affordable device for the masses.  Advances in freezing and food preservation, plus the emergence of industrial agriculture in the wake of the Depression, had made the nationwide distribution of pre-packaged food practical.  Even the aluminum tray in which the food was set benefited from war production of aircraft.  And women, clinging to new-found freedoms and interests outside the home, no longer felt as compelled to spend hours preparing meals; 25 minutes at 425 and it was all ready.  It was the perfect marriage of two emerging postwar mega-industries:  Big Food and Big Telecom.  

But one more element was necessary.  You can’t easily watch television at the same time you’re eating off of a heavy oak table—too much neck craning, turning, and spilling involved.  It’s far more convenient to face the TV directly, with the food at stomach level while sitting.  Thus, another product of wartime advances in aluminum and fiberglass:  the TV tray.

So it was that, growing up, I ate most of my meals in my own room, watching my own programs (The Mickey Mouse Club, of course, Combat with Vic Morrow, The Twilight Zone, etc.) while my parents and sister did the same in other parts of the house.  

So before you complain next time you see a group of friends sitting together, but each immersed in their own smartphone world, remember:  it’s a process that started over 60 years ago.  

The Wild Rainiers

Why was Washington one of the first two states to legalize marijuana?  Those like me who came of age with Rainier Beer and Ivar's Acres of Clams commercials understand.

The End of Broadcast Television

There's a terrific analysis of the societal changes since World War II that are dooming broadcast television in the October 25 online Newsweek.  Check it out at http://a.msn.com/r/2/BBb9Lb4?a=1&m=en-us.

Weather as a Graphic Novel

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows …”

                        Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

            There’s a storm blowing in from the southwest, drawing moisture all the way from the remnants of a hurricane near Hawaii.  It will arrive in my neighborhood in about three hours.  Winds will be blustery, and I can expect at least a half inch of rain this evening.

            I know all of this because I have access, whether on broadcast TV or my computer, to the most sophisticated, high-tech meteorological equipment on the face of the earth.  I have multiple radar stations lighting up my screen with shades of green, yellow, orange and, occasionally and worryingly, red; I have satellite images of cloud patterns far out into the Pacific; I have live weather cameras scattered around the state; I have graphs and charts from Federal agencies and the University of Washington; I have an app from the Weather Channel that tells me, minute by minute, what’s happening and what will ensue in the immediate future.  I have video and GoPro pseudo-experiences of tornadoes, hurricanes and blizzards.  Weather is a certifiable obsession, not just for me, but for many of us who live in the Northwest.  I used to do content analyses of local television news broadcasts for my Mass Media class.  In every broadcast, around 11% of the time was devoted to weather (25% was commercials, another 11% was sports—that doesn’t leave much time for actual “news”).

            It’s colorful, scientific, entertaining—such weathercasters as Jeff Renner and Steve Pool are local icons—but it’s not fun.

            It used to be.  I grew up with weather presented as a graphic novel.

            Early television news was, quite frankly, pretty boring.  A reconstructed radio or newspaper reporter read copy from a paper script, often with a backdrop of analog clocks set to different time zones.  “Video” was really film clips (usually days out of date) from movie newsreels. The tone was straight-laced and somber, and the coverage (local broadcasts lasted fifteen minutes) superficial.  But television, as early producers were discovering, is fundamentally more than “radio with pictures”—it’s a visual medium.  You have to see things, not hear about them.

            But just how, in a pre-satellite, pre-weather radar, pre-remote video world, was one to show a low-pressure area?

            For KING TV in Seattle, the answer was cartoons.  In 1951, when they were still the only station in the Northwest, they hired a local commercial cartoonist, Bob Hale, and commissioned him to illustrate the weather.  Although his was hardly an effervescent personality, Bob Hale quickly became a star.  He had little scientific or meteorological expertise, but that wasn’t necessary; the U.S. Weather Bureau supplied the forecasts.  Hale’s task was to make them comprehensible to the rest of us, and he did so admirably, with a happy sun (“Old Saul”), grim, glowering clouds and puffy wind gusts.  It was like a high-school magic show every night—a bespectacled, balding, geeky guy (reportedly not infrequently fortified by liquids from the nearby Doghouse bar) with an easel and grease pens.  His segment often drew more viewers than the news itself, and his cheery, simple style inspired some of us to try our hands at cartooning. 

Bob Hale

           

  I was one of them.  At the height of his popularity, Bob Hale offered a correspondence course in cartooning, and I prevailed upon my parents to pay for my tuition.  Each week I’d receive a lesson and send my “homework” back to be evaluated.  Unfortunately, my evaluations revealed that I had little talent and nothing in particular to say in graphic art, and a future career in cartooning weathercasting was dashed. 

            Hale’s wasn’t.  He attained national notice and, in the early ‘60s, was lured away to San Diego, to be replaced by another cartoonist, Bob Cram.   Cram was actually funnier and had a more complex style, and he created a cast of recurring characters like Onshore Flo and Milli Bar to dramatize upcoming events.  For nearly another decade he carried on the cartooning tradition on KING, even after Hale came back for a brief comeback attempt.

            But it was a new age, a Space Age, and new technologies left little room for folksy guys with grease pens.  Sexy weathergirls in front of green screens, yes.  But cartooning weathermen…not so much.  By the early ‘70s, even KING became serious and scientific, and the weathermap became increasingly colorful and graphic in a far different way. Weathercasters increasingly possessed advanced degrees and scientific credentials and actually prepared their own forecasts from an increasing array of tools and data.  And weather became a serious, sober subject.

            Is it just coincidence that in this new age we have a flourishing culture of Know-Nothing climate change deniers?  Maybe they’d benefit from a cartoonist to explain it all to them.

           

J.P. Patches--Icon of Seattle Children's Television