changing of the ears

by Art Chantry (art@artchantry.com)

i’m trying to pin down exactly what year this ad appeared. i think it must have been late in the star trek tv show’s original run, because of spock’s ears (they changed over time). so, i’m figuring that it’s maybe the final season (1968/9). it was about to get cancelled, so it’s odd that RCA made the choice of using the show to try to sell their new RCA cabinet tv models. RCA didn’t even have any ownership or business connection to the star trek show that i can find. but then, with RCA at this point, lord knows what they were thinking anyway, eh? they didn’t survive much longer. so,maybe it was two loser dinosaurs ganging up to battle – just like kirk and the zorn.

artchantry.com

my other thought is that, perhaps, RCA was trying to actually demonstrate how great their color tv’s were by using star trek – maybe the most garishly colored television show in history – as their on-screen example? that makes more sense. but, for most of america at this point, color tv was still an very expensive luxury. growing up, i personally didn’t even KNOW anybody who owned a color tv. it was a status symbol of the wealthy. so, pushing start trek as a color spectacle to sell color tv to the masses could make sense – if anybody ever saw star trek in color. i didn’t own a color television until the mid 1990′s.

it’s sort of a catch 22 – showing us a wildly colored show like start trek to sell us crazy color television by showing us a show most of us had only seen in b&w – in a PRINT AD. but, then, how else were they going to show the potential customer anything? how else could they possibly trick us into making the effort to visit a store and LOOK at color tv? it’s a dilemma. the honest truth is that i never ever saw the original star trek show in actual color until i started watching re-runs of it only about ten years ago. i was blown away at how weird and crazy the color actually was on star trek. i really had NO idea.

maybe if color tv had been easier to get back then, the original star trek show may have not been cancelled and instead enjoyed the long long run that it eventually had in syndication and spin-offs. live and learn, i guess.

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