fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2946 ]

[ SECRET POST #2946 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2946 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 038 secrets from Secret Submission Post #421.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

So, I have a theory and I'd like to see if it's backed up at all in real life.

What was TV viewing like back in the 50s, 60s and 70s (etc.)? Movie-going in the 50s,+?

My theory is that for movies like musicals with Judy Garland and Rooney (?) where they basically retold the same story over and over again with a little change here and there, they were popular because there was no VCR or DVD -- there was no getting the movie to own. So, having basically the same movie repackaged was like being able to watch the movie you love on repeat -- it ensured the basic bones of that movie would be at the movie theater pretty constantly.
Does that seem like a thing?

For TV, I wanted to know how did pre-VCR fandoms watch their shows? By which I mean, how did they get all the little details? Were reruns pretty constant or could you only really glom onto shows that did make it to reruns and you had more chances to see the episode again? Or if you missed an episode, were you screwed? How did you connect with fans before internet? Did people have a way to go over each episode? It seems like the Starsky and Hutch fandom has a really good grasp of what happened in which episode, and I was just wondering if that occurred right away.

Honestly, if there were reruns I don't recall them in the 60s and 70s; If you wanted to watch a show, you gathered around the TV at the appointed time and sat quietly and watched (and only talked during commercials)/

And when it was done you called your friend on the phone to discuss it.

Yeah, this.

I don't know if it's because I was younger and my memory was ~~better~~ different, or because I watched more attentively, but when I re-watch those programmes now -- a lot are available on YouTube, DVD or as re-runs on obscurer channels -- I often remember huge chinks of them word-for-word, even though I only saw them once.

Didn't most shows go into reruns in the summer? I might be misremembering...

Yeah some did, though I'm not remembering which decade that started. O.o

Not in the UK. The production companies had some sort of contract with the actor's Union that severely limited the number of repeats they could show (and until the '90s there were only 4 channels), so only the 'top class' dramas got repeated. Classic Dr Who, for example, was never repeated at the time.

I remember reading the TV Guide, especially during summer, to see if a show was being aired for the first time or it if was a re-run. The TV season ran September through May and the three networks: ABC, NBC, and CBS, had to fill their air with something. There was no cable then and it wasn't until the local affiliates started showing up that syndication arose and shows from the 50s and 60s went into perpetual reruns.

In the era JUST before videotapes came out, yo hoped that popular shows would be picked up for reruns on channels 5, 11, or 13 so you could see your favorite shows a few more times. Sometimes you even got lucky and TV Guide would print a synopsis of the episode so you knew in advance whether it was one you wanted to watch or not. Otherwise, it was just the listing and the time.

By the time ST:TNG was on the air, the UHF bands had filled with more channels and a lot more shows were being re-broadcast. If I recall correctly, and I'm OLD so there's a chance I don't, that was right around the time of the Sony/VHS wars and people started taping off the television. I wasn't in fandom them, but I know there were Star Trek conventions even back then. And 'zines. It was definitely a different era.

I remember reading a newspaper article when Star Wars was finally pulled from the last theater still showing it. It was in the late 1980s. Think about that for a moment.

You could record from tv on those old top loading vcrs (my dad was an early adopter to the technology)--the remote was connected by a wire AND you could only switch between pause and record or pause and play, my memory is fuzzy. But that's because as the youngest child, I WAS the "wireless" remote for the tv AND vcr. hahaha. I'm thinking we go that first vcr around 81/82--I know we had one by the time I got into Duran Duran in 83--cus I taped the crap out of music videos...on the few vid shows we had in Canada at the time.

ST:TNG came out later than I thought. Wiki says the Betamax came out in the mid 70s, but I'm pretty sure we didn't have one that early. We didn't tape many TV shows, but we did rent movies and pirate them. I still have a few old Beta tapes around (and a few shelves full of VHS tapes) as well as a Beta player. Right now, we use it as an expensive clock and that's about it.

I remember trying to pause during commercial breaks and starting the machine about five seconds too late Every Single Time. It took a couple of seconds to actually start recording after pressing the right combination of buttons.

heh, yeah I remember that part for sure.

One time I managed to press pause just as the scene was fading out to commercial and press record again just as the show was fading back in again and when I re-watched the tape, it was absolutely perfect - like watching a re-run where they don't put the commercials in the same places and you can tell where a commercial was meant to go but there's no interruption. I'm still stupidly proud of this 25 years later.

We had that top loading vcr for ages--in fact, after we got a new one, my parents used it as a rental at the corner store they owned. We'd probably still have it, but one night, one of the clerks rented it out without getting the guy's id/credit card info and it was never seen by us again. And because my parents had the store and bought the videos for rental I almost never pirated stuff. Of course, pirating made more sense back then, cus new releases were NEVER under a 100$, sometimes way more (200-300$). I remember looking at the catalogues from the company we bought from and thinking I'd never get my faves on video (Dad would sometimes accept my teenage input on what to buy...sometimes).

And now...my how things have changed.

My mom, born in 54, says I Love Lucy reruns would be on sometime after school. Lucy was finished with new episodes by then, having been run in the early 50s. So at least some popular shows reran to fill network time.

I wasn't alive during those days, but from what I've researched, movies were sometimes re-released (for example, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was re-released eight times before the invention of video), so you could see your favorite movie at least a few times during your lifetime.

That's an interesting theory about retelling the same story over and over; I don't entirely buy it, but movies probably were able to get away with more similar plots (that today would be seen as "rip-offs") precisely because the general public didn't have the entire exact plots of their favorite movies memorized.

It'd be interesting to hear what people who actually lived during those times have to say; hope you get more responses, OP.

For TV - most of the shows in the '80s weren't particularly continuous in their storylines, so if you missed some episodes, it wasn't that big of a deal.

Yeah, but if the episode had THE HUG or THAT LINE or THE EYE-FUCKING, then it is a big deal.

I'm just comparing today's fan to back then, and fans still love those little moments. Reading Starsky and Hutch stuff, I was just surprised at how well they could quote their episodes, even back in the fanzines. Right now, people can watch and rewatch stuff forever and pick up all the little details but if you only had once chance to watch the episode you were basing a fic on, how much would you remember?

I'm actually very impressed with their dedication, but maybe it was easier than it seems.

I have no memory before 1980, but I've met people who used to make audio recordings of Star Trek TOS episodes (like, just set up a tape player with the microphone near the TV speaker) and listen to the recordings. In fact, I think I read something by Lois McMaster Bujold (not one of the people I've met) where she describes having to miss an episode of Star Trek for some reason and a friend's sister or someone made an audio tape for her and then kind of mimed/explained what was going in the episode while they played back the tape and I thought that was absolutely adorable.

As for interacting with other fans, there were cons (I used to go to cons as a kid long before I ever had any internet fandom interaction) and things like letter columns in comics and magazines.

My mom recorded some TOS eps like that!

And that old fan habit is the reason we have audio for early Doctor Who eps that were destroyed by the BBC. They burned the tapes and then regretted it decades later when the show became really popular and home video was a thing, so the audio recordings made by fans is all there is of some eps. (They made animated versions of a few episodes in recent years, reconstructing from set pictures and fan-recorded audio!)

My mom also did stuff like this. She was a huge Dorothy L. Sayers fan, and recorded several of the 1970s tv serials-- "The Nine Tailors" for sure, and I think "Murder Must Advertise." She also had the soundtrack record for "Sleuth" (lots of Cole Porter), and that had big chunks of dialogue that she can now recite on cue.

For some of the older shows, they did TV broadcasts and then went on the radio and did them there too and if it was live TV, they did several broadcasts for different timezones. Some shows didn't even tape and some of the ones that did sometimes didn't think the tapes were important (some got taped over) and so sometimes reruns weren't actually possible.

There were some camera buffs out there that used them to film the shows on their television screens. Recorders were introduced for home use in the 60s, but didn't get a lot of use until the late 70s and then became much more wide spread throughout the 80s. And then there were LaserDiscs.

But I think that getting all the little details was sometimes a group effort. Everyone would watch the show and talk about it later, some people catching some details, others catching others. Memory is a funny thing, though, sometimes you can be reminded about what you saw and then it sticks with you, but sometimes someone will tell you about something and you think you actually saw it when you didn't, especially if you already have a foundation memory there.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2946 ]

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