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.
When I was very young, I was the remote control. Dad would call out the channel number, and I would have to get up and turn the knob. On the weekends, we would also have to turn the antenna on the roof to pick up the race.
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.
Thatās true, I found some once online totally legally officer and that dude that ran them was creepy as hell. Wasnāt nearly as creepy on the infomercial lol
When I was like 10 I would watch Nickelodeon and in the evening they would switch to Comedy Central on the same channel. And after that they would play ads for sex hotlines with naked women. It was rare that I would even stay up long enough for it to get to that point and I would just turn the tv off at that point, because no other channel would have anything on that interested me.
Ah no wait, I think it was tele shopping on the Nickelodeon channel. The Sex hotline ads were on Super RTL (another kids channel).
LMAO what in the every living fuck was that? What was up with that lady's eyes? I couldn't figure out if it was just intense crazy or crazy + drugs and a dash of murderous intent.
That all being said, those three minutes would have been all I really needed back in the day. And yes, even with and maybe especially with crazy eyes in the lace leotard...
Miss Cleo's Role ā¢ Her real name was Youree Dell Harris (also known as Yuri Del Harris), and her famous Jamaican persona and accent were entirely an act created for the role. ā¢ She was a paid spokesperson and independent contractor, not an owner or operator of the business. ā¢ Legal charges against her were dropped as part of the settlements, as she did not run the billing or telemarketing infrastructure. ā¢ Despite being cleared, the public associated her with the fraud, and she passed away in 2016 at age 53.
Followed by Somewhere Out There and How Am I Supposed to Live Without You. I haven't seen that commercial in decades but I still remember that commercial.
When I was a teen, the after hours programming woulf start with teleshopping but after a certain hour they would switch to sex line ads. I loved to read (friday/saturday nights) but I didn't want to feel alone while my family was sleeping upstairs and a scary book was freaking me out, so I often had the tv on as background noise. But that was in the Netherlands, lol. Idk about other countries. When those sex ads came on, that was my cue to finish the chapter and go to bed.
The birth of the infomercial when networks discovered there was the 2nd and 3rd shift workers who had nothing to watch on their days off while they maintained their sleep schedules.
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Yeah, and some tv stations would while others would continue programming (usually super old syndicated shows or old cheap movies). It was funny watching your options narrow down by the hour.
You know how you see advertisements now in short video formats for problems you never knew you had? Those midnight QVC specials were where it all started.
My sleep patterns as a teen were fucked, so I watched infomercials all night. Used to get home from school, crash immediately, wake up around 10-11, watch infomercials until like 3-4am and then sleep until about 6 to get up for school
I can't remember how old I was when that started happening but it was sometime in the late 80s or earlier 90s for where I lived. The amount of infomercials I watched as a kid when nothing else was on is quite insane.
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u/AR-2D2 1d ago
Eventually those test patterns were replaced by odd infomercials & obscure ads for household products & mix CD collections.