Magnavox Radio Phonograph Television - A little entertainment.

Holiday magazine was clearly a rag for the rich. After all, it was a magazine all about travel and perpetual vacationing. The ads that fill the pages are those for luxury items like his and hers luggage, high-end booze (LOTS of ads for booze), and boats. It's no surprise, then, that in 1949 a television was kind of an expensive indulgence. Just for fun, let's run some numbers.

I did these calculations using the online inflation calculator, which is a fun little tool. Okay, hold on to your hats. First, you buy the radio-phonograph for the modern equivalent of $1,598 to $7,968. At any time after the purchase, you can add a TV receiver for anywhere from $2,667 to $8,458.

So, depending on how cushy your postwar job was and how much you liked your Howdy Doody, you could have one of these in your living room for as little as $4,265 for the base model or $16,427 if you wanted the really nice one. I wonder if the "scared robot face" cabinet was only available on the expensive model. Maybe the robot face just found out how much you paid for him?

But look what you got for your (median price of) $8,213. First, there's what looks to be a ten inch screen. Then there's the tube-based receiver and amplifier. By the way, tubes are still used today in guitar amps. They have a particular sound that some musicians find irreproducible by any other means. That's as may be, but tubes were horrible for anything other than gathering lint and burning your fingers.

My family had a tube TV that my dad built from a kit. They looked like sausage shaped light bulbs, and if I recall, our TV had maybe ten of them back there on the circuit board, and they were perpetually covered with fuzz and dust. Tubes generate a lot of  heat, and you had to keep them relatively clean or they could overheat and burn out prematurely. If a tube burnt out, dad had to pull the set away from the wall and take the back off the cabinet. Sometimes you could tell which one was dead just by looking at it, but more often than not, you had to pull out each one and put it in a tube tester. Yep. There was a special instrument that would tell you if a tube was good or not.

Tube testers cost the modern equivalent of $360, and many people couldn't justify the expense of owning one, but that was okay, because the local hardware store usually had a tube testing station right next to the display of replacement tubes. So, you pulled out all your tubes (probably) and carried them down to the Ace store where you tested each one, bought a replacement, and humped the whole mess home and reinstalled them in your $8,213 television... hopefully NOT knocking loose some other component in the process. Whee.

So what was on TV in 1949? Bozo the clown debuted, for instance.Then there was the aforementioned Howdy Doody. There were variety shows, usually involving singing or comedy sketches. Various dramas, Candid Camera, which is basically still being imitated today, and Godfrey's Talent Scouts, which is basically still being even more imitated today. All in all, Wikipedia lists 73 different shows, which is more than I expected.

By contrast, you can buy a 26 inch LCD high def TV today for $500. That's about $55 in 1949. Plus, the thing will basically run for a decade, which is much longer than you'll want it to. Most people with six thousand pound CRT TVs can't wait for them to die so they can get a better, lighter flat panel TV. Few people will replace a CRT TV before it dies because they dread the ordeal of trying to move it. CRT TVs were made out of neutron star material, which has the density of the entire human population condensed into the size of a sugar cube. When it failed, my old 32" CRT simply underwent gravitational collapse and became a black hole. I ran like hell.

Hilariously enough, color TV was introduced in August of 1949. This Magnavox ad is from January of the same year, so the lucky people who spent $16,000 on a premium black and white TV console could look forward to it being made obsolete by the first color sets that appeared later that year, and cost $1000 (about the same as the "premium" B/W tuner from Magnavox) at the time, or $8,900 today. Ouch.

Magnavox TV Credenza - Yee Haw!

In the era of Gunsmoke and Bonanza, is it any wonder that televsision sets looked like they were built by the Apple Dumpling Gang? Everybody's couch had twisty armrests and everybody's kitchen table had wiggly spindle legs. At the time, colonial styling was so popular that you could buy pants with wainscotting around the lower legs and crown moulding in place of a belt.

 

In 1968, if you wanted a home theater experience, you probably bought an all-in-one package like many people do today. Unlike today, after lugging home a giant box in your Rambler, you dragged the thing into your living room, had spinal surgery, and then opened the giant box. You then pulled out... a giant box only a few inches smaller than the box it came from. This box wasn't made of cardboard. It was probably made of wood and some plastic that looked like wood. If yours was a real fancy family, it maybe had barn doors on the front that could hide the screen, for when cowboys come to visit.
The screen was no bigger than about 24" measured diagonally, and was roughly hemispherical, like watching TV projected on the surface of an astronaut's helmet. Not only did this make you feel more excited about the upcoming moon landing, it also allowed people to view the screen from 90 degrees to the side of the TV set. Also, it reminded you that you were futuristic, because, as anyone will tell you, by the year 2000 everyone will live in domed cities.

In the top of your new entertainment console was a record player, for all your Johnny Mathis needs. Or, you could watch I Love Lucy while listening to The Doors in case you wanted to go insane. If the turntable broke, you had to call in a carpenter to come fix it.

In 1968, entertainment was simple. Cowboy shows and family comedies for mom and dad. A picture of balloons for the kids. This was mostly because they were all hopped up on "the drugs". It hardly mattered what was on. They'd be just as happy watching a box of cereal. Just to mess with them, mom and dad would apparently lay down some sod in the family room instead of carpet. This way,  the kids would think they were watching TV in the back yard. Don't ask why - it was the sixties, and the seventies wouldn't make much more sense.

Magnavox - Children, Obey HypnoClown.

Wendy and Eggbert stared, feared and continued to stare. HypnoClown seemed to see them right thruogh the glass of their spectacular 400 square inch screen. Their hearts quivered. It seemd like days since they had felt  two evenly spaced  heartbeats. Blood barely crawled through their little veins. Jaws slackened, and a thin filament of spittle shivered in their otherwise imperceptible breath.

HypnoClown would tell them when to breathe again. HypnoClown would reveal the wisdom of their next heartbeat only when they were worthy. An age passed and they fell into the inky depths of his loving eyes. They fell for days it seemed and still they continued to fall. No bottom to those knowing, understanding eyes.

Surely HypnoClown would reach for them. His fingers would inevitably grasp the edges of the screen and he would step beyond the bounds of the Provincial Fruitwood cabinet, and then he would be with them, possibly forever. Then HypnoClown would preotect Wendy and Eggbert from mother and father. Protect them from the cold light of day. Protect them from the terrifying agony of ever making a decision again. HypnoClown would decide what was best for them. Wendy and Eggbert would simply live forever in the warm, loving mind of HypnoClown. Then everything would be okay forever. All they had to do was... just.. let...go.