Our Personal Movie/Cable Channels History..............

[Scott]

An earlier post had me thinking about early days of cable.

We had HBO in our neighborhood in Horseheads, N.Y. about 1974-1975. We didn't have it ourselves, but our next door neighbor had it and they would tell me about scary movies like BEYOND THE DOOR. They even had color TV next door. The cable company would use orange tags to allow HBO to come in to paying costumers homes. We would look up at the poles and say "that's HBO".

We only had 13 channels and a b/w TV. We moved to Osceola, Pa in 1977 and about 1978 this small town of about 500 people recieved satilite channels from WTBS in Atlanta and WGN from Chicago and I could watch Braves, Cubs, and White Sox baseball along with our usual diet of Mets and Yankee games.

Didn't get a color TV till 1982-83 when I had my first full time job while in Ocean City, NJ and I also picked up a beta tape player/recorder along. Then I subcribed to HBO, SHOWTIME, and a local movie channel from Philadelphia called PRISM. Spent a lot of time taping Pro Wrestliing and my favorite Music Video's.

There is a really good documentary about one of the first movie channels from Los Angeles called CHANNEL Z.

Now we have all kinds of special channels. Food, Home, Golf, Movies, News, Sports, History, Fashion, Music, Science, and more.

[Yaddo 42]

We had the standard three networks (both got NBC from two markets) and PBS in the late 70s. According to station histories online and Wikipedia ther was a lot of of network affiliation swapping a few years earlier but I would have been too young to understand it. Different local station showed movies late and night and during non-netwrok time on weekends. My relatives and kids at school in town had cable and used to tell us about all the great stuff they got like WOR, WGN, WTBS, plus the pay channels like HBO, Showtime, and Movie Channel. I used to hear about stuff like Superman reruns, bizarre movies, and some anime (but we didn't know it was) or live action stuff like Ultraman. there's still some show that the other kids saw that I've never been able to figure out which one they were all obsesed with and I was left out since I didn't know who the characters were.

Around 1980 or 81, cable began to head out to my neck of the woods, but it went down a street a block away that we could see across a neighbor's yard and didn't arrive at our house until a year later.We got the regluar set up by then we got to see USA Network, and most of the Birmingham local stations as well as the stations mentioned earlier. Lots of movies, good and bad but it was a hoot. I can remember My dad and I laughing our asses off at Octaman one afternoon during the WOR afternoon movie or staying up late with him to watch "The Professionals" on WBRCduring the summer, they always had big movies on Sunday night after the news.

Then a few years later the cable company began to remove most of the Birmingham stations, and WGN and WOR. We got crap like Lifetime (befoer it went all-woman but still not a great channel beyond Richard Belzer's show). A&E went to a full channel, before it was Nickelodeon until 7pm, A&E most of the night, TNT came along. we had the three tier cable box with one row of bottoms and the dial on the side you switched to toggle another row. We had a top loader VCR that could only get the first row of channels 2-13.

Somewhere in here two independent channels (one in town, one in Huntsville) came along. WZDX, had the cool movies and lots of great cartoons, like Robotech. The local one WTRT, had lots of cheap and public domain movies but fun shows like Mannix and The Saint.WZDX became a Fox affiiliate and never was as much fun, although they kept showing late night movies, often uncut for many years. WTRT ran into money troubles and a damged rep after a major sexual harassment lawsuit, became affiliates of stuff like FamilyNet and later managed to join with WB and then later UPN, and get dumped by both. The station would go off the air for weeks amid stories of money trouble, the owner would deny it and promise equipment and signal upgrades. The station would come back and still look and sound lousy even over cable. They would move locations about every other year. They went to mostly infomercials, then all infomercials, Their website was away under construction or full of broken links. Then they promised new programming, which turned out to be FamilyNet. Most people ignored the station or watched their talk show to see how inept it was. The crooked owner died, his wife runs the station the same way.

Since I moved I decided to go without cable, to cut down on my TV watching. But I may go back to get the price deal on cable modem since the phone lines where I live are wonky and screw with my dia-up connection worse than they do with regualr phone service.

I left out when I lived in Arlington, VA, but I've rambled too long and may post it later.

[Scott]

I'm thinking now that cable with WTBS and WGN came to my small town of Osceola, Pa late 1979 or early 1980 instead of 1978.

When I moved to Ocean City, NJ in late 1982 the town would have a fall festival (still do) and some company with the big satilite dish was there and what I remember most is WWF on USA network because we couldn't get it yet in our area, but then about 1984 our cable company picked up USA Network. What was weird about this larger town of Ocean City was the poor cable system they had in 1982-85. Because we in our very small town of of Osceola had a great set of channels as early as 1979. What I liked most was my discovery of GEORGIA CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING. We use to go to the Drive-In every Saturday night in the Summer and I just couldn't miss GEORGIA CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING.

Pro Wrestlers were kinda like superhero's as they would come back week after week after taking punishment that would kill a normal person. WOR also had a WWWF at Midnight and I always had trouble staying awake for that show and Saturday Night Live, but occasionally I was able to catch one or the other.

What I remember most as a teenager was getting HBO free weekends once a year and watching the movie "10" with Bo Derek and Dudley Moore.

[Ash]

I remember my family getting cable around 1980-81.
I would've been 6 or 7 at the time but I remember it vividly.

The cable box was this big black thing that sat atop our television set and you had to get up out of your seat to change the channel.
The box had nothing on it but this single big silver & black dial in the front & center that made a clicking noise everytime you changed the channel.
And yes, we had HBO back then!
I fondly remember the HBO Shorts that would play in between movies when a movie didn't fill the entire 2 hour slot.

[Scott]

Yea, getting up to turn the channel. Imagine that ! ! ! Sometimes when my remotes batteries run low and I don't have extra in the house I might have to turn the channel manually for a day or two.