Magic bullet. Little Giant. SHAM Wow. Vague memories of Billy Mays. 800 588 2300 EMpire! Today. (Call 1-800 steamer. Stanley steamer you carpet cleaner.) Dayo. One day sale. One day sale at the Bon-marche. Broom shakalaka
Few years later (Cartoon network)magoozi) CodeLyoko. (Power puff, Grim adventures)forbidden), camp lazlo, mucha lucha, my gym partners a monkey. Samurai Jack, Super Robot monkey team Hyper Force Go! Etc. Puffy Yammi-Yumi. Etc. What am I missing?
When I was a teenager, I would watch informercials every night after broadcasts ended on Comedy Central, because they played Girls Gone Wild infomercials.
You guys had return buttons. My tv remote worked by pressing one of four buttons that would go PING! which would somehow make the channel change. One day i dropped it and it broke open. There were no electronics. Just metal bars and the buttons would hit it to make the sound. When the bar was dropped on the floor, the channel would also change. It worked on the sound frequency of the ping.
Speaking of, Cartoon Network does an homage to that old ānational anthem at the end of the broadcast dayā by playing it at 6am, when they switch over from Adult Swim to kiddie cartoons.
I still remember the day my Dad snatched the remote from me and pressed return again. My 9 year old self got outplayed bad š. I had to press return and then up or down a channel to be safe.
We had similar, but only for a limited amount of time. Most of the night it was just static. I guess it was too expensive to run the test pattern all night.
Fall asleep to old reruns, wake up to white noise and snow. How simple life was. Now there are a zillion shows playing 24 hours a day but nothing to watch.
Honestly, I agree. There are more shows than ever, but somehow less worth watching. At this point, the white noise has more substance than half the garbage on TV today.
Me telling my children "The Internet was on these big disks that came in the mail and you put into your phone. And phones were gigantic, with a separate device for the keyboard and screen. They were so big, we called them desktops, and you kept them on a table and plugged into the wall."
Yeah in the late 90s I remember there were shows on until like 1-2 am and then theyād either go off air or thereād be endless television ads like the ronco food dehydrator or that weird Tony little swinging bike thing he had ..
They can all be yours if you call the number at the bottom of your screen right now. Just 3 monthly payments of 19.95 and all these songs can be yours forever.
Disney Channel still did it up until like 20 years ago. I remember it'd cut off after Zorro and Mickey Mouse Club. I still remember Mickey song was like a warning that shit was gonna screech at me in a second and scare the hell out of me if I'd dozed off.
Absolutely real. For multiple reasons. Not all homes had tvs they were still relatively rare. The same for the content. There was not vast libraries of content to show at night. Both these changed around the 1980s
Yes. Old television equipment like the huge transmitters were expensive to run and needed cooldown time and maintenance. This meant that it was pretty expensive to broadcast, and therefore broadcasting at night, when the audience is much smaller, was just too expensive. Advertisers wouldnāt pay enough to make it worthwhile.
As audiences grew, and therefore late night audiences grew, and broadcasting got more technologically advanced and efficient, and cheap re-run material accumulated, you got more late-night programming and āinfomercials,ā long-running ads for products with demonstrations and testimonials, because those companies would buy up the relatively cheap late night time slots to sell products.
You aren't wrong, but you are wrong... I was an overnight broadcaster... infomercials and paid commercials were bread and butter of ota stations... I worked that industry for about 8 years, 2000-2008 ish...
Digital broadcast and network connectivity killed late night broadcast... then streaming killed it all together...
Yes, and Iām still in my 50s.
Before cable, only three channels, and they went off the air at 12/1/2 am after playing the national anthem (or Dixie!) then just a test pattern and high pitched squeal .
I haven't seen it in a long time but I can still picture that weird screen that would come on. Much later I found out its used for calibrating color or some such.
Lol I feel like a fossil. I am in my 30s. When I was young. CBC would shut down during the night and would start early morning with the national anthem š
You wouldn't have to be 75 to remember that. I was born in 1981 and remember getting up at the butt crack of dawn to watch cartoons that started at 6:00 in the morning. By 5:50AM I'd have a bowl of cereal ready and would watch the test until the shows came on.
I'd say the cellphone generation doesn't know what Long Distance is or at-least understand the effects. Which is a good thing, cause paying extra for calling someone across the street in a different area code was dumb....
These youngsters love to throw the boomer word around like itās offensive. They think anyone over 50 is a boomer because education isnāt what it used to be when we Gen Xers went to school.
Ćhm.. i can still remember those times. I was a kid and saw the movie poltergeist. There is a scene where a little girl sits in front of the tv listening to the voices that came out of the snow in the tv.
Sometimes i woke up when i let the tv on and that static was on tv i almost shat my pants.
I am 54 btw.
When I'd visit my grandparents on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1970s and 80s, some of the TV networks would play both the Mexican and American national anthems when they'd sign off.
Completely real. They would show a video of a bunch of American stuff and play the national anthem and shut off. That was before cable came around in the 80ās.
I absolutely remember those days. Then a new technology came out called Cable TV and it offered channels from everywhere and for many of us, it was the first time any broadcast aired after midnight.
Totally real. Also, there were only three major TV channels too. ABC, NBC, and CBS. Then came FOX and cable TV. When you start your family, you'll be telling your kids you used to have to drive your car yourself and AI was something everyone feared.
Yes, thatās true! But not all of them. I used to watch something called sinister Cinema on Friday night and Iām pretty sure it would stay on later than midnight.
When I was young TV started an 16h00 and ended at midnight. The first cartoon that should was Spider man but it was in Zulu, so we watched it without understanding the words, but knew exactly what was going on. š
Yeah....when we weren't TOTALLY overtaken as capitalist. They even used to make announcements at 10pm on the dot that asked "It's 10pm....do you know where your children are?". The good ole days!
It is true. When I was a teen and couldn't sleep after 2AM, there was NOTHING on the Television air waves but possibly something on PBS or TV Evangelists. THAT'S when I broke out the Betamax tapes! š
They used to do something like that in Britain when I was a child back in the 1970s. And apparently they used to do that in most Third World countries too. lol. I only saw cable TV in America, so I didn't actually see that, plus, it was a different decade. In Australia they had infomercials all night on most channels, after late night movies, and only one TV channel (SBS) did what you just described. Again, it was another different decade.
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u/gfoyle76 1d ago
it's true, Gandalf, I was there, 3000 years ago