50th Anniversary of Rudolph on a CTC-11

[Kevin Kuehn]

Very cool! That Bumble the Abominable Snowman used to scare the wits out of me when I was a little tike. I'm actually the same age as the show.

[Tom S]

Hey Kevin, I watched it on my CTC10. Looks Great. Now if I could find a tube for my 11. I use the 10 daily. Love it. You ever need a hand let me know.

[jsowers]

Beautiful screen shots there. I watched it on a flat screen too, I'm sorry to say. I took time out of a busy night baking cookies for a Christmas party just to watch it. I wish they had done something special for the 50th anniversary.

I still have my family's first color TV, a GE 21" from 1969 in my living room. I had the party today and one person actually asked me if that was my main TV that I watched. Sadly, I haven't powered it up in years. I know I should use it and I still have analog cable, so I can still use the tuner to get the local stations. But something in me doesn't want to see it die.

I have fond memories of watching Rudolph on that TV. It was originally sponsored by GE and the elves in the show were also in the GE commercials. It was a first class job all around. For the show to still be broadcast after 50 years is nothing short of amazing in this day and time.

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by jsowers

I still have my family's first color TV, a GE 21" from 1969 in my living room. I had the party today and one person actually asked me if that was my main TV that I watched. Sadly, I haven't powered it up in years. I know I should use it and I still have analog cable, so I can still use the tuner to get the local stations. But something in me doesn't want to see it die.

If a VCR can tune more than the local channels, then you can tune the TV to the RF out channel of the VCR, connect the VCR RF out to the TV, and watch all the analog channels you can get on the TV through VCR...It also adds remote channel control if you have a newer VCR. I do this with all my vintage sets, and can attest to how well it works.
It should not be too hard to fix that set if the CRT and flyback are still good. Since GE liked to use as few parts as they could that means there is less to go wrong, troubleshoot, and replace...

[jsowers]

Originally Posted by Electronic M

If a VCR can tune more than the local channels, then you can tune the TV to the RF out channel of the VCR, connect the VCR RF out to the TV, and watch all the analog channels you can get on the TV through VCR...It also adds remote channel control if you have a newer VCR. I do this with all my vintage sets, and can attest to how well it works.
It should not be too hard to fix that set if the CRT and flyback are still good. Since GE liked to use as few parts as they could that means there is less to go wrong, troubleshoot, and replace...

Yes, I have done the VCR thing with that TV many times with a couple different VCRs over the years, to make it able to tune above channel 13. It worked very well. Playing tapes on it would sometimes yield the retrace lines at top, but cable channels were perfectly fine. I've had cable since 1988 and using a VCR was the only way I could get all the channels without the ugly converter box until I finally got a cable-ready TV.

I should have also said I have an entire working chassis and tuner from another KE chassis GE, but a 25" model. It has all the same tubes--all those Compactrons and likely the same flyback, but I haven't compared them. So I even have spare parts. But working on that monster is something I never liked doing. It's in a TV-stereo cabinet now and hard to remove. I've replaced the diodes in the power supply twice when it was hit by lightning (the instant-on always got hit) back when we still used it daily.

Back to Rudolph, thanks, Ampico-kid, for the info on the DVD including the commercials. I'll have to look for that. I didn't know the commercials were originally B&W because in 1964 we had a 1962 GE 19" portable as the family TV. I have a vivid memory of watching that TV intently in 1965 when the new fall season premiered in color, which in those days was a major event. I was 7 years old--what did I know? I thought that the shows would be in color on the B&W TV. I was one disappointed little boy!

When we finally got the color TV, it was glorious to watch those same shows like Rudolph, Charlie Brown, Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella in color. Children today will never know that thrill.

[Ampico-kid]

Originally Posted by jsowers

I have fond memories of watching Rudolph on that TV. It was originally sponsored by GE and the elves in the show were also in the GE commercials. It was a first class job all around. For the show to still be broadcast after 50 years is nothing short of amazing in this day and time.

Watching Rudolph has been a yearly event for me since it first started airing in the mid 1960's. But the version you all see today has been altered from the original broadcast.

About 7 years ago a fellow by the name of Rick Goldschmidt was selling an all original DVD version, including commercials and deleted/altered sequences, just as first broadcast on Sunday Dec.6, 1964. I was lucky enough to purchase one of those copies. It was part of the General Electric Fantasy Hour and consequently all of the commercials were for GE home appliances. The Elves used in the Rudolph story served double duty and also appeared in the GE commercials. Interestingly, although Rudolph was in color, the GE commercials were in black and white.

We had just gotten our Zenith color TV (chassis 25MC33) about 2 weeks before Rudolph first aired. With a beautiful new color TV in our house, we had plenty of company to watch the premiere of Rudolf. That was certainly a Christmas to remember. Bob