RCA Victor TV - Slender!

Hi, spoiled brats! It's time to stare in wonder at the "slender" televisions of 1957.

So slender! Knock nine inches off of the Longport and you have a cabinet only (estimated) eighteen inches deep! What will you do with all that extra space? Put in a sun room? A dance studio?

While we may scoff at the sheer bulk of these old TVs, they were nice and stylish. This gives reason to wonder if there's a market for more stylish flat panel TVs? Yes, current designs want only to disappear completely behind the all-important screen, but could somebody design a 56 inch LCD whose cabinet (what there is of it) looks interesting? Maybe just the stubby legs underneath your TV could look "atomic", or be made of walnut-finished formed plywood. The stand underneath my gigantic future-TV is shiny black plastic. I don't have any other shiny black plastic stuff in my living room, so it's not like the TV stand jives with anything else. All you can say for it is that it wants to be invisible... but it just isn't. Hmm. Maybe there's a niche to be filled? Maybe there's room for aftermarket TV legs of a stylish nature? If one or two manufacturers would standardize the swivel socket underneath their TVs, there could be a healthy third party market of cool looking TV legs.

These are pictures of coffee tables that I found, but you can easily imagine a set of TV legs made in a similar way.


If I were about to spend a thousand dollars or more on a TV, and I had the option to spend maybe a hundred more on a nice set of legs for the thing, I think I'd definitely choose to spend a little extra. Would you?