Over the last few days I've been screening one of the hundreds of VHS tapes I have. Back in the day, I recorded everything, it seems. Now I'm glad I did. I'm even happier I finally stopped editing out commercials at one point, for some of these things really let me immerse myself in yesteryear.
The tape I've been watching, off and on, is from the summer of 1989. It contains three television specials related to the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11. The show I've been watching was aired by CBS and titled "The Moon Above, The Earth Below," with Dan Rather and Charles Kuralt. The concept was to re-tell the Apollo 11 story alongside some vignettes of what life was like on Earth while the flight was going on: an emergency room team treating a little girl who's seizing, a Montana rancher breaking a mare and riding her for the first time, a potter at his wheel crafting a bowl, etc.
Some of the Apollo 11 story told in this special is oversimplified, overexaggerated, or of dubious accuracy (i.e., the story told of how USS Hornet was selected as recovery ship), and I can't tell if it's in the name of "a good story" or whether it's because the writers just didn't understand the material. (Look, we understand that every point in the flight was a potential dance with death. We get it.) And the segments with Rather, the ones about the flight itself, are the Rather you probably remember, just a little too intense. The segments with Charles Kuralt, though, about life back home, remind me so much of why I miss him: that wonderful, deep voice and laid-back manner, the voice of a born storyteller who puts it all into a bigger perspective. Television news could sure use more like him. But I'm not sure they make any more like him. And I'm not sure anyone would hire a Kuralt these days, nor would they provide the time needed for his kind of quiet, little-picture stories.
The commercials are intact on this recording, and in some ways they're even more compelling than the documentary. IBM ran several long-form institutional pieces about its efforts to develop tools for those with speech and hearing difficulties, and about its programs to help schoolchildren develop reading skills. (Although somehow there crept in a commercial for the PS/2, whose "PS/2 it!" musical jingle, performed by that guy who performed just about every song in every commercial during the 1980s, has to rank among the most annoying compositions ever written during that whole decade.) There are a lot of Kellogg's commercials, and a lot of AT&T spots too; that's fitting somehow, since Kellogg's and Western Electric were sponsors for CBS color coverage of the flight of Apollo 11. There's even a couple of promo spots for "The Pat Sajak Show." (Remember that?) The local breaks are interesting, too: local news anchors with huge hair and big shoulder pads, commercials for now-defunct retailers (Circuit City), and local IDs with yesteryear's stylings.
What's most striking about this? What you don't see. You don't see the watermarked network ID at the bottom of the screen; you don't see the constant on-screen pop-up promos; you don't see all the other constant crap that clutters the screen these days. It was back before the induced short-attention-span style that's beaten into us now. You can actually concentrate on the program you're watching.
The scariest part is that I can remember taping this special when it aired. I remember it very well. So well that it's downright scary for me to realize that it's been 20 years. Where does the time go? I get so busy thinking of "old television" as stuff that happened before my time, only to realize that the older I get, the more the stuff in my collection starts to qualify, too.
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