Pop Culture Quiz
QUIZ:
1. Why is our older Boomer talking about 34 weekly episodes in a season?
2. What’s a vacuum tube?
3. Why did the TV set have to “warm up”?
4. What’s the graphic with the circles and the Indian head?
5. What’s with the TV station “sign on” and “sign off ”?
6. What popular TV series is the beginning of this story a parody of?
7. Why does the opening title include the note, “IN LIVING COLOR”?
8. Why are the commercials and announcements in Black&White, and why are there so few of them?
9. Were the commercials and voice-overs really this hokey?
10. Were non-white characters really such stereotypes?
11. The sombrero scene just before the credits is a parody of another popular TV series. Which one?
12. What was “Duck and Cover”?
13. What was the “Emergency Broadcasting System?
14. What’s with “The Star Spangled Banner”?
15. TV show producers in the 1950s were bad about letting anachronisms creep in. Spot the three anachronisms in this story.
BONUS QUESTION: Who is the man in the statue at the park?
Scroll down for the answers.
ANSWERS:
1. A typical 1950s series production schedule was 34 half-hour episodes per season. The TV networks showed re-run episodes the weeks of Thanksgiving and Easter, two weeks at Christmas, and 10 weeks of summer because they (and their advertisers) figured fewer people would be watching. The other four weeks without original programming were to accommodate pre-emptions, specials, etc.
2. Vacuum tubes are obsolete electronic circuit components. They were replaced in newer circuit designs by transistors, later by integrated circuits, and finally by electronic chips.
3. “Instant-on” modern TV sets are ALWAYS on – the on-off control just de-energizes the video and audio output circuits. Vacuum tubes are power hogs, so the on-off switch on old-style vacuum-tube TV sets killed power to the whole TV. The room-temperature vacuum tubes had to heat up to operating temperature (it took a minute or so) before the TV would work.
4. It’s a “test pattern”. It was broadcast with a pure tone, to allow the TV station engineer to optimize his transmitter performance.
5. Digital electronics are maintenance-free. They either work or they don’t – if they stop working, you throw the defective module away and replace it. The analog equipment used in the 1950s was cranky, and required regular maintenance and adjustment. TV stations typically stopped broadcasting at 1:00 AM to do this. They broadcast the test pattern from 5:30 to 6:00 AM to do their on-the-air final adjustments, and signed back on with regular programming at 6:00 AM.
6. “The Lone Ranger”, a Western, starring Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels as the Ranger and his Apache sidekick Tonto. Like most early TV series, it was produced on a shoestring budget. It used “William Tell Overture” as a theme song because the music was in the public domain.
7. Color TV sets were expensive high-end electronics in the 1950s, so not many people had them. For that reason, most TV programming was produced in B&W to save on production costs. If a series was in color, they usually bragged about it in the opening titles.
8. See #7. Almost all commercials and announcements were B&W. Back then, the Federal Communications Commission restricted commercials to no more than 6 minutes per hour – you could actually watch a TV show and not lose the continuity!
9. Yep.
10. If anything, it was worse. People of color just didn’t get much respect back then.
11. “The Cisco Kid”, another Western, starring Duncan Renaldo and Leo Carillo as Hispanic cowboys Cisco and his sidekick Pancho. The “Goodbye amigos!” scene (without the tickling, of course) always ran just before the credits. Incidentally, this series was produced in color from its first episode in 1949. I never knew that until I got a video collection of episodes, because when I was a kid, nobody in our neighborhood could afford a color TV.
12. The Cold War between the USA and USSR was at its coldest in the 1950s. Picture yourself in your elementary school classroom. The PA announces, “This is a drill! Duck and Cover!” You and your classmates sit on the floor under your desks, knees raised. You put your head between your knees and hold an open book over the back of your head. This, you are told, will protect you from the blast of a Soviet atomic bomb. The Civil Defense Administration was real – I still have a radiation dosimeter (calibrated in roentgens) with their logo on it. “Duck and Cover” and Bert the Turtle are genuine early Cold War artifacts – a feel-good exercise to take the edge off the unthinkable. “Kiss your ass good-bye” was my father’s response.
13. Another early Cold War artifact. The Emergency Broadcasting System was a means for the US Government to pre-empt all TV broadcasting in the event of nuclear war. It’s a capability now lost, and that the Department of Homeland Security wishes it still had. The text of the first voice-over is genuine; the second one was altered from the original to reflect reality.
14. Back then, everybody “knew” that the Left took its orders from Moscow. The US House of Representatives had an Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) whose investigators actively hunted the agents, sympathizers and fellow travelers of the International Communist Conspiracy lurking within American society. Therefore, every TV station in the USA played “The Star Spangled Banner” with a patriotic graphic, immediately before the station engineer shut the transmitter down for the night.
15. First anachronism: the TV channel and broadcast frequency. The number sequence “4-8-15-16-23-42” had great significance on the TV series “LOST” (ABC, 2004-2010.) Second anachronism: the inscription “King Solomon” over the mine entrance. It’s in Yiddish, a language that didn’t exist until 2000 yrs after Solomon’s lifetime. Third anachronism: the African chant. It’s a song lyric from “I Wanna Take You Higher” (Sly and the Family Stone, 1969.)
BONUS QUESTION: Actor/singer Roy Rogers (1911 – 1998) had a successful career as a B-movie singing cowboy in the 1930s and 1940s. He switched to TV in the 1950s and starred in the long-running series “The Roy Rogers Show”, a Western for children. Rogers had creative control, and as a serious practicing Christian, he ensured that all of his TV plots had an underlying moral lesson.
Rogers turned his memorabilia collection into a museum after he retired from TV, and hired a film historian as curator. In an interview after Rogers died, the curator said that he had received numerous letters with the following general theme from men who grew up in the 1950s:
I had a horrible childhood. Any number of times, I could have gotten myself into serious, life-altering trouble. But I always asked myself, “What would Roy Rogers do?” That question was easy to answer, and the answer never steered me wrong.
“What would Roy Rogers do?” A man can leave no better legacy than that.
Strelnikov
Thanks so much for sharing it here. 
