Some of the more popular content on video iPods these days is hardly new. Jackie Gleason, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Red Skelton, Dinah Shore, Milton Berle are all singing, dancing and hamming it up, digitally reliving the early days of modern entertainment on the latest take-it-anywhere mini-screen.
Experiencing television history this way can feel simultaneously cutting edge and vintage. Savor the time-warping effect of watching via cellphone as Soupy Sales and White Fang do a bit about snipping the phone cord.
Everything old is new again, retrofitted to the latest platforms as proof that one of modern technology’s best uses is delivering memories. As copyright issues are sorted out, the medium is again the message, digitally.
The result is riveting cultural anthropology. The fact that we are plugging into this pop archive has prompted movie and TV studios to rethink their traditional business policies to get in on the action.
Many of the Internet’s tastiest streaming videos are classic television shows, cataloged and posted for easy access by new generations of users to whom black-and-white television is as archaic as cuneiform.
A young Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis perform a sketch about a Peeping Tom, Steve Allen introduces Bob Dylan to the mainstream in 1964, Milton Berle ad libs with Bela Lugosi on Texaco Star Theater, and Joel Grey makes his television song-and-dance debut on Eddie Cantor’s show. A treasure trove of memories unspools at the click of a mouse.
Gleason lives on as Reggie Van Gleason, dancing with Audrey Meadows in 1954, demonstrating both that an overweight comic could be light on his feet and that a nation not yet traumatized by Vietnam and the Kennedy assassination could be so easily entertained.
There are Lucy and Ethel, forever falling behind the chocolates on the factory conveyor belt, demonstrating the timelessness of a simple sight gag.
Ira Gallen, a self-described aging baby boomer with an impressive collection of vintage clips online, says boomers are delighted to find their childhoods making the transition to new, on-demand technologies.
“I have 600 items on YouTube, 200 on tvdays.com, and a directors’ series,” Gallen said, “all free to watch, all original material from 16mm prints.”
In the five months his material has been online, he says he’s gotten hundreds of thousands of hits. “When YouTube put me on their main page, I got 50,000 hits for ‘Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer’ at Christmas.” He’s collected program material since his teens.
The National Baseball League and Sinatra family representatives have complained about copyright infringement, but Gallen contends he is quite “legit.” Furthermore, “I’m blatant about it, going on talk shows to announce I’m looking for the owners of this material.”
The appeal extends well beyond boomers. “University and high-school kids call, they’re making videos and want clips,” he said. “You should see my short subjects. A 1924 film of capturing a whale and chopping it up. … I’m sitting on one of the last of the private collections.”
A picture of Gallen and ’50s puppet phenom Rootie Kazootie (“yesirootie!”) graces the tvdays.com homepage. The site offers toy and car commercials, kids’ shows, sports classics, sci-fi, variety shows and more. Princess Telephone commercials from the ’60s have their own category. (“Boomers phone home!”) Gallen sells the restored material on DVDs.
Elsewhere, a jingle for the 1960 JFK campaign sings the candidate’s praises. Also under the vintage heading on IFILM.com is the classic Abbott and Costello skit, “Who’s on First?”
For cowpoke nostalgia, “The Lone Ranger” and “Bonanza” are among the old Western series offered on the Gold Buckle Network, an online subscription service.
How we lived then
Ron Simon of the Museum of Telelvision and Radio enjoys finding folk music rarities online, like a Pete Seeger performance with Mimi and Richard Farina on a local TV station.
Simon likes “the idea that you’re yanking these things out of context. The museum’s job is to put it back into historical and aesthetic perspective. It’s a very post-modern concept, juxtaposing eras and viewing (classic clips) in a new technological way.”
Parents bring their kids to the museum to see Howdy Doody videos or the Beatles, Simon said, noting that the kids are more interested in the old commercials. “They speak about domestic life and communicate more quickly,” he said. “The small-ticket items tell us a lot about the time.”
The cultural anthropology of American life is on display online in the classic Kellogg’s Corn Flakes commercial, a takeoff on Grant Woods’ American Gothic art classic. Google has assembled numerous vintage commercials – Alka Seltzer’s “no matter what shape your stomach’s in,” Lustre-cream shampoo’s “creamy lather,” the broadcast lobby’s promise to make sure Junior learns from TV that crime doesn’t pay. These spots are considered public domain, available for download. All amount to an American pop-culture history lesson from an age before irony.
Depending what you call “vintage,” some material on Warner/AOL’s “In2TV” might qualify. The online TV service offers “Welcome Back Kotter,” “Sisters,” “Lois & Clark,” “La Femme Nikita” and “Growing Pains.” In2TV boasts more than 3,400 hours of old-time TV on the Net including the “Gilligan’s Island” unaired pilot with a different (forgettable) theme song and oddities from Japanese TV.
AOL’s service is not entirely free. Users must sit through a 15-second commercial. But the setup marks the latest wrinkle in the way technology is changing the rules of the business.
In the old days, studios like Warner Bros. did everything they could to guard their old programming, withholding it for the lucrative syndication market. But as entertainment companies scramble to find new ways to reach audiences beyond the initial TV run, they’re emptying their vaults onto the Internet in hopes of tapping new armies of consumers.
It remains to be seen if flooding the Internet with vintage TV fare will diminish the value of the old material. For now, the sites are content to be giving competition to vintage fare on the Viacom cable networks Nick at Nite and TV Land.
In2TV runs a nice feature, “before they were famous,” tracking early TV appearances of George Clooney on “Sisters,” John Travolta on “Welcome Back, Kotter” and Leonardo DiCaprio on “Growing Pains.”
TV4U is an ad-supported site with categories of programming ranging from news bloopers to secret agent shows (“I Spy” and “Man From U.N.C.L.E.”) to animation (“Gumby”) and rock star clips. Chick TV4U.Com, a broadband channel for women, includes “The Loretta Young Show,” “Life with Elizabeth” starring Betty White, and “Get Christy Love” with Teresa Graves.
Joost runs old series from Sony Pictures Television and Hasbro, including “Charlie’s Angels,” “Starsky & Hutch” and “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero.” Joost.com, which bills itself as the first broadcast-quality Internet television service, is on a mission to deliver “next-generation TV, wherever in the world you may be.”
Judging by the popularity of certain items, “next-generation TV” is another way of saying really-old-TV on a computer.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
Links to the past
Click on these links to see examples of classic TV moments online:
