Bewitched.
 

Hi all,

Has anyone else noticed that the televisions and radios in the show 'Bewitched' are all Zenith products? I was watching some of the dvd's that I have and noticed that the television in the living room seems to be a vintage '65 set. There is also a portable set in the den on a cart about the same vintage. Check it out if you get a chance.

Frank

Product placement isn't new ;)

If you notice when they were in B/W the Stephens had a Zenith B/W when they switched to color they now had a Zenith color set and as I remember with remote.

Does anyone know if Zenith was a sponsor?

I remember one episode where the color set in the first half was round, and rectangular after midbreak.

I'll have to check that out. Sounds like someone didn't check for continuity.:nono:

On the Dick Vandyke show, all the TV's and radios were Magnavox.

I see a nice roundie pop up on kojak now and then.

Sponsors for Bewitched were Chevrolet and Quaker Oats, for just two. I had noticed for years the Bewitched products were all Zenith. And like Dieseljeep says, all the electronics on Dick Van Dyke were Magnavox. They were for years on Make Room For Daddy. Dean Martin movies used Magnavox too.

The last of the Nelson family episodes, the college frat house had a Magnavox chassis for their daily watcher. The guy with the funny voice won a round tube Magnavox combo and Mrs. Nelson talked him into donating it to the fraternity. Corny at best.

There's a saying in movie productions: "If they're watching that, we're really in trouble!" There are some nuts like us that pick these things out after the fact, but if the show is any good, no-one notices while they concentrate on the plot.

Isn't that the truth...;)

In the episode involving the boy that makes his own racer, they are watching him on TV at the end of the show. From across the room, it's a roundie Zenith, but when they zoom in on the TV screen, it somehow changed into a rectangular screen.

My favorite Bewitched TV moment is when the repairman takes the set all apart, and she twitches it back together while he's on the phone in the kitchen. She's there watching it, and he still has the horz output tube in his hand!

Are you thinking of the charactor named Wally?

Corny, yes, but many earlier Ozzie and Harriet shows are very funny without being sickly sweet.

The owner of the 35mm negatives, Sam Nelson, is trying to have them restored. I wish him well.

BACK TO TOPIC: Zenith advertised on Bewitched, too. I remember the commercials. I probably still have some old Bewitched shows on audio tape recorded in the 1960's somewhere around here. I'll see if I can find anything. Back then, I recorded things, and played them later, pretending that I was running a movie projector... Corn, at its best!!

On several episodes of The Patty Duke Show, the family is watching a Magnavox TV with tape covering the Magnavox logo. On many episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the monitor set in the newsroom is a portable Sony, also with the Sony logo covered in tape. In Mommie Dearest (1981) the actors look at (I think) JVC televisions in hospital rooms and apartments with the logo obscured.

In the '70's, alot of TV stations used the Sony color sets. They looked far superior to the small color sets made by the other companies at the time.

Mary's TV at home was also a Sony.

The Odd Couple had a 1969 Admiral 19" color set on a roll-about stand.
A later episode showed a newer Admiral 19".
Not sure, but they were probably a sponsor. Admiral made refrigerators also.

Watching re-runs of Mr. Ed, I am having trouble ID-ing his 19" BW set in the barn.

Berverly Hillbillies
 

On the Hillbillies I seen more than one time RCA roundies on the show. Odd Couple had Admiral's. Laverne & Shirley, Packard Bell B&W Portable. Hazel was RCA Also.

One that always got me was Saturday Night Live. Watching episodes from the early 80s they will often use Sony monitors. Here they are, broadcasting from the headquarters for RCA, which I guess was still the world's largest electronics concern, and they can't come up with an RCA monitor that's good enough?

If you look in Margaret's tent on M*A*S*H, she has a white plastic RCA Victor radio from the '60's in the later episodes.

On M*A*S*H Shelly Long(guest star) had a 1970's portable radio with her.

So was Rhoda's.

On one episode of Star Trek Enterprise you can clearly see NEC on the back of the monitor, guess they have a lot of faith in NEC's future. :D

They used a lot of off the shelf props in that show though, with stick on buttons and paint to disguise them.

All the monitors are just flat screen 16:9 TV's or PC monitors, though those would have been a fairly new thing when that show started in 2002.

That Packard bell was the wrong era, they had a 58 RCA 14" in earlier episodes.

I don't believe any RCA monitor (especially a small screen) was produced any more at that time. Even Tektronix monitors used a Sony Trinitron tube.

Eric, You read my mind before I read your post. I noticed the prop change to a 70s 12" BW, back then even!

Now a real stretch is what TV did the Cunningham's have on Happy Days?
It looked like a 17" Motorola to me...then.

As a certain team I work for entered playoffs in a recent year, I found all my LG flat-screens in our conference rooms had their names covered up by black velcro strips. Seems our sets were not the official sponsors of the event who were using the rooms.

And the same year, Fox taped a look at the umpires replay box in a stairwell for replay if a call had to be made. Sure enough, a play came into question and Fox ran the tape prominently showing a set that was not the sponsor set. Heads exploded.

The lack of specific names is deliberate.

Not sure if I can come up with screen caps; if anybody else can to confirm or rebut that's great.

In early episodes, ISTR the Cunningham TV was a circa 1954 Admiral, 21" I think. Later episodes featured an early split-chassis Philco, a 16" round set with dome top. Both were table sets.

In the pilot (the Love, American Style segment) the Cunninghams were the first family on the block to get a TV set, specifically a Philco 48-1001. In 1956?! It had to have been set in at least 1953 as the visuals at the beginning established the action taking place in the Eisenhower era. The model fits plot device, but both are out of step with the chosen era by a good number of years.

There was a Gilligan's Island clip on a TV Land or Nick at Nite commercial, which had a couple of the characters in a room with some new Magnavox portables behind them. Someone on another site suggested that may have been the episode where they ended up on another island somehow, in a house with a mad scientist.

UPDATE: I find out that the mad scientist episode of G's I is not the Magnavox portables one. May be "The Invasion" which has a James Bond type plot.

FYI, by the early 1980's RCA Broadcast was all but out of making TV broadcast equipment so RCA Broadcast may not have had a color monitor available at the time. So, a reason why the Sony was used.