Muntz TV Commercials
 

Found these on You Tube and thought they were kinda cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOI8JYrYcsY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kTW3mzsPhk

This was neat to watch, Thank you for sharing the information. Now i have a problem !!! I guess I need to find a clean Muntz, and just when I thought I had enough of TV's. I hope you did not cut anymore parts from the TV , like Earl was famous for doing :smoke::

Nice videos. And here there's a Muntz TV from 1953 working:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEiqJ3tvp3I

Here's a 1953 Muntz up for sale for the low, low price of only $1,200 :D

http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-Muntz-21...110488789910QQ

Wow! What a bargain....Um where did I put that checkbook????:D

For that kind of money, the shipping should be free.

At the risk of preaching to the choir here: The term "muntzing" means something. Old Earl apparently went around through his factory, and carried a pair of wire cutters. He'd lean over the shoulders of his engineers, second-guess them, and snip out components in the prototype chasses that he felt could be done without. He would usually go a step too far, and admit that the last component was essential.

We all may have antique sets with five picture IF stages--many of these sets being dual channel. Most of Earl Muntz's sets were intercarrier--and had only two IF stages.

Muntz was a businessman. And an innovative one at that. And realized the no-brainer that money was the bottom line. And also realized that at least 90% of the TV watching public lived within an area where the TV signals could make your fillings ache--thus the dumbed-down TV set design that worked perfectly well in the CA coastal area--as well as other population-dense areas such as Chicago, DC, NYC, Boston, etc...The only time the buyer of such an inexpensive set would run into trouble was if he bought a color TV and took the old Muntz B&W to his country villa way out of town... uh-oh....

With such marketing technique Earl Muntz made sets at a price that made people leap out like lemmings to buy.

While I used to curse him as I tweaked an old Muntz set I once had I now know what matters, and tip my hat to him.

Money is always the bottom line in business. Just the way it is....

The discussion of how Muntz TVs work well in population dense areas(close to the transmitter) reminds me of a story I heard from a fellow radio/TV collector, a former TV repairman. Seems a dentist in Dallas owned a Muntz TV and it worked well there. The person telling the story was the repairman that the dentist used to repair the set. Well, the dentist retired and moved to the Lake Texoma area(about 100 miles from Dallas) and took the Muntz with him. Of course, the TV, being a Muntz, did not do well at all in its new enviroment and the said TV repairman was called. He had to tell the dentist that nothing could be done(except purchase a new TV-not a Muntz) due to the sets design.

Ah, a $0.01 Muntz - that's more like it :D

http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-Muntz-21...110501944518QQ

That's about where it is with those sets. While we needed a roof aerial for our Muntz down in Columbus, GA we had an Admiral portable that worked just fine on its own whip antenna.

I may also mention that other companies such as RCA, GE, etc made simple sets such as these. I have schematics for RCA color sets that have only two pix IF stages. If you live in or near NYC they're perfectly fine. If you lived in a rural area perhaps Zenith would've been your best bet back in the day.

V/V Zenith, my old roundie here in western MA picked up several stations from down in Boston. Granted I had a good aerial. My sister used to make requests on a music video station that came in from down there, and they couldn't believe we could get that station from way out here.