Now showing on Channel 33…. scrambled porn!!!
Oh my… for the second straight week, I’ve started out my Flashback Friday post with 
some archaic looking device that anyone born since Ronnie Reagan left office has most likely never seen before, and is probably frightened of. Relax, kiddies… back in my day, this was one of several old relics that we used to tune in cable TV. Yes, we had cable TV back in the 80′s… and a number of those stations are still with us today and at some point in the recent past have likely celebrated 30th anniversaries.
Back when MTV’s acronym actually had some meaning!
I scoured and scoured the vast openness of Google to find an old cable channel lineup from the 1980′s, but came up empty… which is too bad, because it would have pointed to one of the first oddities a youngster might notice about that old cable box. Why does it only seem to have 37 channels? Heck, these days, most basic cable packages come with around 100 channels. Well, even though cable TV was first getting a strong foothold on the country back in the early 80′s, there still weren’t very many channels of national prominence. When you factor in that about 10 of the spots on that box were reserved for local network and local access (not to mention three set aside for FAA access, which my 9 year old mind couldn’t comprehend at the time), there were only about 20-25 actual cable channels back then.
The only possible explanation for how Mother Angelica became one of the biggest cable TV stars of the 80′s.
That simple, but clunky box sat atop many televisions three decades ago. Here’s an even older version of a cable box that was the kind I saw the first time I laid eyes on this curiosity that gave us more than 7 channels…
Is that AM or FM?
Notice that neither of these boxes had an eyehole to make them compatible with a remote control. So even if you did have the luxury of changing channels on your TV without leaving the couch, you still had to wriggle your ass out of the seat to switch from The Nashville Network to The Christian Broadcasting Network. That was one of the small prices to pay to have access to music videos any time, any day instead of just on Friday nights, or to get the weather whenever you wanted it from trusted names like Dale Dockus and John Hope.
John Hope practically invented hurricanes!
Today, cable TV is a vast wasteland of hundreds of channels with a ridiculous amount of content. What’s truly sad about the state of CATV is the way many classic niche channels have allowed their very identities to be stripped so that now there is very little actual variety on anymore, and the programs offered are essentially just heavily edited “reality shows” involving almost any theme you can imagine. MTV is the most infamous example of this devolution, but so many other stations have followed suit. Does anyone out there really believe that TLC stands for The Learning Channel in these days of pageants and Honey Boo Boo? What could possibly be Artsy and Entertainmentlike about a bunch of hillbillies or bounty hunters? Since when are modern dramas considered to be American Movie Classics?
Just try and hock this, Pawn Stars!
The early days of cable bring back so many memories for me… and I’ll be sure to share some more of those in detail in future Flashback Friday posts. But until then, I need to get up and press a new button after the umpteenth night of some silly reality marathon. I can only pray my shiny 21st century cable box can become a time machine, and allow me to stumble across some semblance of coaxial sanity. This looks like a job for the greatest secret agent in the world…..
Oh, crumbs!
