Changing Times

[FreeThinker]

This isn't really funny, just something I found interesting. This is a video from American Bandstand on ABC in 1967, still in black and white, showing teens dancing to The Letter, by the Box Tops. What struck me is that every boy in this video is wearing a coat and tie and except for a couple of rebels, who are still in coat and tie, every guy has perfectly cut and combed hair. But, these boys are getting down! Especially the boy in the cardigan at 00:33 in the video.

Dear God, these kids are retiring now! And I was only 9 when this was first broadcast.

[The Pecman]

Christ, all I see are the wrinkles in the cyc and the dirt on the floor! What a ratty studio. It's incredible for what passed for TV 45 years ago. This was all shot at ABC's Prospect & Talmadge studio in East Hollywood, which is a crap area today. Note that this is just a kinescope, because ABC wiped most of the videotapes from that era (and Dick Clark was way, way too cheap to pay to keep them all).

Jesus, most of the boys have short hair and Brylcreem! My memories of 1967 are not like this, even though I was only in 8th grade by then. I got to work with Dick Clark years later, and he looked remarkably good (late 1990s) and was damn near perfect on the air. I can recall doing a bunch of promos for ABC in 2004 around September with Dick, and he was having a lot of problems getting the words right. At the time, I thought it was kinda odd; three months later, he had his tragic stroke. The saddest thing about that, to me, was that Clark had a lot of pride in his voice, and had just an impeccable delivery and a wonderful tone. That was gone in the last years of his life, and it's sad that that's what a lot of people remember today, seeing him struggling to get through the New Year's Eve countdown in Times Square.