What was TV like in the "analog" era?
 Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
 UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
What was TV like in the "analog" era?
What was TV like in the "analog" era?
Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
You didn’t know what was on or when unless you had a subscription to the TV Guide Magazine. Eventually they came up with a TV Guide channel and that was a real game changer, but even then you only knew what was coming on within the next three hours
This isn't true - and I don't know why you would say it. Being a smart-alec isn't a funny thing to do.
>Eventually they came up with a TV Guide channel
I completely forgot about this
It wasn't completely if you remembered it.
Fuuuuuuck, memory unlocked. It was channel 5 for me. Holy shit bros.
I do remember how, if you missed something in a series, you hope they played a repeat later in the evening or replayed the episode next week before the new episode. Or else you just missed that episode...
I've seen so many shows in their entirety but completely out of order.
>Seinfeld
>DBZ
>Sex and the City
my local newspaper had daily/weekly listings for broadcast and cable
>You didn’t know what was on or when unless you had a subscription to the TV Guide Magazine.
Simply memorize the television schedule.
What, not autistic enough for that? tch.
>TV Guide Channel.
Before that, it was the prevue channel. I watched this all the time as a kid because autism.
I was an adult when that came along, before that it was this, came in the mail every Friday
Just use videotext
Never heard of it
is that the blue box that would have a synopsis of the show you were watching?
most channels aired the same every day at the same time or the same things on the weekends so you could memorize when stuff aired. but for new things premiering you either had to see a commercial for it, word of mouth or get lucky channel flipping
My brother saw Blackstar (Prototype HeMan) once on tv while the rest of us were out shopping and we thought he made it up until years later.
Other people probably felt the same way when I talked about Johnny Bago.
Neighbors had Cox or whatever service with the TV schedule you could navigate with the remote. My dumb ass thought that meant you could select any of those shows, regardless of the time, and directly watch them. TiVo/DirecTV sort of like that eventually became a reality, for chosen recordings.
>always wanted to watch The Simpsons
>it was always just ending by the time our family sat down after dinner
>forced to watch 7th Heaven instead
Most newspapers had tv listings for the night. You only needed tv guide to plan for the week. Also networks would advertise the hell out of most their shows anyways.
For a lot of channels you'd have to frick around with the rabbit ears to get good reception. The best cartoons were on the UHF station which would go through random bouts of shitty reception to the point you'd pull the antenna off the top of the tv and walk it over to the window to get reception, then hope your dad wouldn't trip over the wires.
You would watch a show and it'd be the coolest shit ever but then the next episode would get pre-empted and it'd never air again until you found it on Youtube 30 years later.
When cartoons finished their original run, the local station wouldn't rerun all the episodes in order, they'd just play the same five episodes over and over every week because the station programmer didn't want to go digging through tapes.
TV shows would go into reruns in the middle of the season because they wanted to make sure any hype episodes happened during Sweeps Week.
Half the year you'd tune in to watch cartoons and there'd be a baseball game instead.
Sorry to hear your family didn’t have one of these. Ours was mounted on a tall pole. What we had to do was go outside and rotate it a bit to get the best signal. Ours was beat up from storm damage
We had one, but it was on the roof and we didn't have any way to turn it. Also, we had some hoodlum kids in our neighborhood and one of them probably shot it with a BB gun.
We had one of those indoor control knobs that could rotate it
In the civilised world we had teletext
There were newspapers too, that had TV listings
Glorious. If you saw a Black person you could just put it on literally any other channel.
You can still do that, pussy.
No, you can't, Black person. There's disgusting Black person animals in everything.
Knock out that racist shit. Final warning
Black folk aren't a race, you're a subspecies of Australopithicus.
ok satan
kek
they really weren't that bad...
This morning I was eating breakfast and said what the hell, I'll put on some news while I eat, and first available option, Good Morning America, had FOUR black anchors sitting next to each other, and all three scheduled guests were black. Insta through a commercial break and every single fricking one was black focused, I shit you not. I decided to surf until I could find something that didn't have a black in it and I couldn't until I got to the channels showing reruns of like Murder She Wrote. It was shocking.
you can literally do that just now even better than before
>download every kind of old shows and kino's with no Black folk in them
>watch at your own leisure
stop consooming the slop you're given you fricking moron
>nothing good will be made ever again
>no..no no no you don't understand I *NEED* to consoom NEW content I REALLY DO!!
Sounds like you're coping with a dystopia.
The commercials were annoying.
no nogs tho
not in the 90's, 90's marketing was incredible
There were tons of annoying commercials, you just remember the good ones. I went from loving Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park and Independence Day to hating him for the iMac.
Also:
The same three anti-drug PSAs over and over when you didn't know what drugs are.
Mountain Dew snowboarders.
Art Institute ads.
Furniture store ads that went on forever just showing couches.
Puppy Suprise
Pizza Party
Operation
Tons of toy ads where they'd lie through their fricking teeth about the toy doing shit it couldn't do or hide the actual toy because it was a piece of crap. (The Animal, Manglors, Mouse Trap)
Oh, I also forgot the nonstop Pepto Bismol and Preparation H and Icy Hot commercials.
you should listen to raised by tv podcast for more commercial kino.
80s/90s kid here.
My ABC and Fox affiliates were so far away that I never saw ABC and Fox shows like, Home Inprovement, The Simpsons, and Married With Children, without static on the screen. Same for Star Trek because my local Fox affiliate is the station that carried all of the syndicated shows like Trek and Xena/Hercules. I grew up watching them all through fuzzy static. The NBC and CBS affiliates were crystal clear but never liked “Must See TV” and I only remember CBS had Dr. Quinn which my parents watched.
I wanted to add that my dad got a C-band Satellite setup around 1994 and we had that u til the early 2000s when the trees got too tall and the signal was bad. By then every satellite company had switched to digital satellite and my dad couldn’t find anyone to service the old big dish. So he got a digital system which he has to this day.
Soul
Fox only came in on the tiny black and white tv my parents had hidden in a back room. I remember waking up at 6 in the morning to watch new episodes of pokemon, so I feel this.
Similar childhood but I was almost about 16 and got job at blockbuster when I learned what Pokémon was. There was some VHS tape that was very popular.
Anyway, watching shows on old B&W tv probably has some odd nostalgia for both of us despite being born long after color TV.
I remember we could only get channel 3 when it rained. First and only time I saw Gargoyles.
I’ll log your anal.
It was fun because it was communal. There was no "Oh that show sounds fun, I'll add it to my backlog." Everyone saw all the same big stuff. You didn't want to just watch Simpsons because you liked it, you watched it because you wanted to talk about with your friends at school on Monday.
Very fricking boring except for a few different things such as Saturday morning or afternoon cartoons, Monster Madness on TBS, late night shows on USA, Nickelodeon in it's prime, and graphic anime on Sci Fi Sunday mornings, new movies on HBO Saturdays, Skinemax
>back then
>Press channel up or channel down button
>Instantly switches, clear picture, instant audio
>Now
>Press up or down button
>What feels like 10 seconds of lag seeing a black screen, sometimes audio is first or its trying to load the slow as frick UI
>It's like this Everytime you change the channel
I don't have that problem with Disney+. You can watch The Acolyte in crisp clear High Definition video
Shut the frick up you contemptible homosexuals.
THE POWER OF MAAAAANNNNNYYYY
You cant hear video, you can only hear audio.
And an old tv in the analog days usually only had one forward facing speaker and that was usually good enough.
There were always episodes you missed and would randomly catch later, felt like a slot machine every day.
My family was in the same place at the same time to watch the shows we liked. King of the Hill and then Simpsons every weeknight at 5pm. I think part of the reason people feel so disjointed is a complete lack of routine and ritual. We live in a world where any thing can happen at any time, if you feel like it. If I wanted to watch Simpsons back then, it was 5pm and 9pm, two random episodes per day, and a new one on Sunday. I had no control over the time or the episode. I watched the same episodes dozens of times, surely.
This. We had supper and the family sat in front of the one TV together. When my parent bought a new TV they put the old one in their bedroom. When we got a SNES, the NES went into their bedroom. Around this time in my childhood my parents were getting close to divorce. Mom stayed in the bedroom and played Tetris and Dr. Mario. Dad sat in the living room watching TV with us if we weren’t in our bedrooms. I had a little black and white TV like Picrel I would turn on and watch fuzzy static on because it wasn’t connected to the big outside antenna. Only the one built in. We lived in a rural area and no cable was available until.
I spent my entire young life watching TNG either in black and white or in color with static. I guess it made the FX more convincing because they look worse than I remember on Blu-ray
I bet my friend could get Disney Plus to run on that lol. He's into retro tech and really likes The Acolyte on Disney+
Your friend is a homosexual.
Did they end up getting divorced?
Yeah they divorced when I was 13. I still have that NES too. I replaced the 72 pin connector and it works fine now. Mom has arthritis now and can’t play Tetris and Dr Mario anymore. Dad played Star Tropics on it.
Fast forward to today and I’ve been married longer than my parents were married. My wife is glued to Netflix and I shit post here. Modern version of my parents back then. I don’t think we are getting a divorce though.
Much better
Why do you keep making this thread, Ivan?
Because it's fun.
Go back to rëddit homosexual
Kek it’s kino!
Cram it, fundies!
Some gays are gonna say SOUL, kino, or other buzzword.
But the truth is any kid in 90's would sell his soul to get the stuff we have now. Instant internet and unlimited supply of free entertainment, games, books, culture, worldwide communication, anywhere and anytime.
Not having to go to your friend's house to game.
Instant access to quality porn for my 12 yr old self, I'd never leave my room.
I wouldn't have. The only thing I liked about the internet was how easy it got to get games and videos for free. And I had that by 99 while still having real life friends.
Basically pre-social media it was the best of both worlds.
Of course they would, that's not the point, a lack of limitations has its own problems
Because they'd have no idea at what cost it comes. Things were better before, when we still lived in the real world.
based and reality pilled.
if you didn't have a good vcr, know how to set the timer on it, and blank tape back then you were fricked.
I know there were tons of jokes, but did people seriously have trouble programming the vcr? I figured it out as a kid.
later on with VCR+ it got easier. the shows listed in the newspaper and tvguide had codes. just put the code into the VCR, a tape, and the machine would do the rest. before that, you had to set the time right on the vcr, set a start time, set the end time or let the tape run. it was usually buried in the menu many buttons deep.
one thing i do miss about that time was some of the silly bumper skits on some tv networks like nickelodeon and mtv and others. they would be run between the show and the commercial. sometimes advertising the network or the current show or totally random.
daria had instrumentals of hit songs for commercial bumpers.
if you saw cheesecake kino on tv you had to have the remote ready because the vcr had a 5 second delay before the magnetic heads started to record. had driver 2 and final fantasy 8 cinematics recorded along with commercials like britney spears selling pepsi in her little cardigan.
So much dogshit I watched because I was a horny teenager. University Hospital. Thunder in Paradise. Kindred:The Embrace. Bikini Open.
and yet we are still miserable. think about that
Having access to anything at any time ruins the novelty of it.
I miss monoculture
What did you think about the monoculture featured in The Acolyte?
Pretty comfy. I remember calling the movie theater to listen to the movies and times listings. The scramble porn channel sometimes came in clear.
I recently watched an anime that was only on VHS, the quality was awful.
>watching anime
Lmfao
What one?
Drew Carey show is great not enough threads on this wonderful show
sometimes you play with rabbit ears, sometimes you bang the top of the tv
Hahaha kakanmd you know bros
Not bad once you memorized the shows you liked
The worst thing was to be continued/cliff hangers it's bullshit that they made you wait
Obviously commercials weren't great but they gave you a chance to get up to do whatever
I usually played table shuffle board or solitaire
Infinitely better. We were fricking clueless.
Fox 32 in Chicago used to air 3 Simpsons episodes a day.
bags of sand
it was terribleeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Olympics and infomericials the bane of working class who was stuck with tv as an entertainment venue. can't wait for ai to reach the working class and destroy network tv.
Honestly? Better than it is now (except for the ads).
But at the time we all thought it was mostly shite. How little did we realise how bad it was going to get.
t. 43 year old.
terrible
if you missed a show/episode, you'd either never see it ever again or you'd have to wait months or years for a re-airing of it
saw the ending of hackers close to 4 times before a got lucky and saw the beginning of the movie on a weekend. I was ecstatic and it is one of my happiest memories as a kid. like when I came home from school and they had a new channel called fox kids.
My face when I missed the beginning of a film.
The shows were actually good so it was worth tuning in. In general less stuff was being made but the stuff was way better in quality. Life also felt better abd less confusing in general.
The action of changing a channel was instantaneous and had no load or buffering time.
true. the recall button on the remote let the viewer switch between two channels instantly without having to input the digits or channel select. iirc, it had other names like back or previous. so while you were waiting on the commercials to finish for one show you could flip to another and back again, instantly. cable tv was really fast.
one thing I miss is the little 3 or 4 second snippets of stuff like fox night at the movies and other such presentations where they'd go "KINO TITLE'' starring "ACTOR NAME" will return in a moment.
saw the crow and alien 3 on fox. it was a gret feature. they don't play films on network tv except on spanish channels. titanic and ice age marathons all throughout covid
I loved rubbing the top of my head against the cathode ray tube and filling my hair full of static.
Waiting for televisions to warm up was annoying.
>LOTR was often marathoned on TV, even to this day
>always have the worst luck of timing and only ever managed to catch the latter half of Return of the king
>took ages before i finally got to see the reason why Aragorn jumped off a boat and summoned 10,000 ghosts from nowhere
Stuff had to be good or it wouldn't be made
mate, i followed sports results (LIVE) with teletext
>teletext
holy shit I just got transported back through time. I miss it.
I can't remember the last time I rewound a tape
Having to watch DBZ from the beginning again for the next few months just to find out what would happen after Goku went super saiyan
>saw every episode of the Simpsons, Seinfeld and Wonder Years a billion times
>get tv guide on Sunday and look for nudity on HBO
>tiny b&w TV in kitchen that hangs down from cabinets
>bigger tv in bkfst nook
>every room had a tv
>in 80's we hada box that was attached to TV by a cord
>earliest tv memory is watching Threes Company
>Atari in spare bedroom on old b&w TV from before I was born
>Spice channel, daisy Fuentes & real sex on HBO
>watched MTV constantly after 1990
>Nickelodeon before that
>always remember some weird TV movie called fuzz bucket
You ended up watching a lot of shit you didnt like, but it was the least bad option. Sometimes you were surprised of liking something you werent supposed to or started to expand your tastes. Sometimes everyone watched the same bad shit and it became an analog meme of sorts with evyerone quoting it IRL
Having less options was good in some things. Its like how twitter forced creativity when it was locked on 140 characters
good take
>Sometimes everyone watched the same bad shit and it became an analog meme of sorts with evyerone quoting it IRL
I remember this
>You ended up watching a lot of shit you didnt like, but it was the least bad option
thats why zoom-zooms will never understand the magic of MST3K shows
analog tv sucked if there wasn't something on you wanted to watch. when my parents got divorced and i had alternating weekends with my dad (who only owned a tv and nothing else) i had to watch like 9 hours of car racing every weekend because i had nothing else to do
i fricking hate car racing
there was hardcore porn every few hours
Johnny Depp's Hair.
There was only one place to find leaked nudes: your local news stand.
>Susan Sarandon, Samantha Fox and a bunch of dudes
>move into house that had cable but we didnt have a subscription
>try plugging the cable straight into the tv
>get extremely scrambled disney channel
Remember when homosexuality wasn't the state religion?
>News
>Weather
>Sport standings and results
>TV Guide
>Lotto results
I think there were even games.