A Life Well Watched
The Touching Story of a Boy and His Television
“It’s just three stops away now.”
The “it” in this case, was a new color TV. Not just any color TV, but an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) TV.
And the Amazon driver was just three stops away from delivering it. My wife, working at home, was postponing her lunchtime trip to the library to wait for it.
I was at work and worried it would arrive damaged. That would utterly ruin my week. Thankfully, even though my wife had to drag the 55-inch monster through the door and between the cats, it arrived in good shape.
I think often about my life and television. It goes way back.
When I was five-years-old (in 1967), one Saturday morning, while watching the basement TV, for reasons I’m still never quite sure of, I poured the melted ice water of my parent’s previous night’s drinks down the back of our RCA Victor black and white console TV.
The screen went out, never to come back again.
Up until I binge watched Bill Burr’s animated series “F is for Family,” I never knew anyone on earth would come up with the idea to pour water down the back of their TV. I’m still floored that was a plot point for Frank to get a new color TV.
Watching “F is for Family” was like watching an animated mirror of my own family at the same time in the 70s.
Anyway,
I thought my father was going to kill me when he got home. No, seriously, I really thought this. Strangely he did not, because for reasons inexplicable, my sister took the rap. Dad would not hit his little “peaches and cream,” so no one was killed that day.
What did happen is that my father dug deep down into debt and bought a news Sears color console TV, a 27-inch marvel that back then, cost over a months pay.
I was warned gravely never to touch it, and I didn’t for at least a few years.
TVs come and go, but the fascination with them never waned in this boy. To this day, I’m still a geeky kid when it comes to tech.
See, when I was a kid, a color TV was a Very Big Deal. Color programming only really started in the fall of 1964 and the sets were hella expensive. Heck, even black and white TVs would set you back a few week’s pay. The kids would all come over to your house if you had a color TV and they did not.
Kids. They don’t get that nowadays. They see the $695 prices in ads from the 60s and think that electronics were cheap back then. That was literally what my dad made in a month and a half selling drapery for Sears.
Now TVs are relatively cheap. Hardly anyone ever gets a set repaired, which was a career field 50–60 years ago. TV repairman. He was God. He’d come in a truck with a bunch of vacuum tubes. He’d come into your house and remove the back of the TV and see which tube needed to be replaced.
He replaced it and all was right with the world again.
Kids don’t know. . .
So as time went by, TV pictures got better but not by much. The gold standard in the 80s was the Sony Trinitron and that cost a fortune. Still, it was the same basic color screen with a few new bells and whistles.
Then two things happened. Americans stopped making TV sets and then flat screen digital high-definition TVs changed the game.
If you’re old enough, you might remember the Zenith commercials about how proud the company was that they still made TVs right here in the good old US of A and they made them the right way, not like the Japanese who just copied our technology. After all, “the quality goes in before the name goes on.”
Zenith filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999 and were absorbed by South Korean electronics company LG (which made my new TV), which had been a minority shareholder for almost a decade. They had long since stopped making TVs in the US.
Later, TV manufacturing shifted from Japan to China and South Korea. Even Sonys are made in China now. Sad, I know.
So the Chinese made our TV’s and they became cheap enough to fight over on Black Friday.
The first public HDTV broadcast in the United States occurred on July 23, 1996, when the Raleigh, North Carolina television station WRAL-HD began broadcasting from the existing tower of WRAL-TV southeast of Raleigh.
I bet you remember where you were when you saw your first HDTV. I was at a county fair actually. I remember just staring at the screen in wide wonder. Truly a new age had dawned.
It took some time before HDTV came down in price so people could afford it. I started with a 720p (1280 horizontal pixels × 720 lines: 921,600 pixels) TV from Wal-Mart in 2009 and then on to a first generation 1080i (1920×1080) interlaced scan: 1,036,800 pixels) in 2013 and then on to 4K (3,840 horizontal pixels and 2,160 vertical pixels, for a total of about 8.3 million pixels) in 2016 and then, finally, we come to OLED.
I’m almost 60 but I get like a kid again when unboxing a new TV.
After carefully removing the new 55-inch TV from its box and attaching the legs and carefully putting it on the TV stand, the big moment came. I hit the remote and a billion pixels assaulted my senses. I heard the “Allelujah Chorus” playing somewhere.
The entire unboxing and set up took almost an hour.
I thought back to the 60s and our first color TV. The delivery guys would bring the set in, put it where you wanted it; you’d plug it in and turn it on. Boom: TV.
I would have had to explain to 1967 dad that nowadays one does not merely turn on the TV. It must be properly set up, connected to the Internet and adjusted for the best picture conditions in all kinds of light. My set also gets connected to a five-channel home theater surround sound system.
I also now have four HDTVs in the house. I am a lunatic.
So, was it worth it? Judge for yourself:
In truth, the picture is noticeably better than the 1080p set from 2013 that it replaced. But if you’re expecting an LSD-trip type of experience where you get sucked into the tube, you’ll probably be slightly disappointed.
I think, perhaps, we have come to the end of history as far as television is concerned. From this point on, screen resolutions will continue to be improved but the differences will be all but impossible to see with the human eye. We’ll but them anyway because. . .well, because.
As a child of the 60s and 70s, this is the world we were promised. Glorious color TV with 1,000 (literally) channels to choose from. If I had this as a kid, I would have never left my bedroom.
The world is truly going to Hell in a handbasket but I have a new HDTV. For all my criticisms of modern America, in the end, I must admit, I’m little different than anyone else when it comes to tech wonderment.
And I have to admit, I feel a little ashamed of being so bougie.
But we all have our hidden shames and adult junk food. Tonight I will spend another hour trying to get the perfect life-like picture. The stuff that dreams are made of - for some of us who never grew up.
