
Boston’s most radical TV show blew minds in 1967 - tintinnabula
https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2018/03/01/boston-most-radical-show-blew-minds-stoned-generation/krAJFSHtyGcl4p9RHQc8KO/story.html
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dang
Speaking of radical TV from 1967, this was pretty radical, and still worth
watching:

[https://dangerousminds.net/comments/this_is_marshall_mcluhan](https://dangerousminds.net/comments/this_is_marshall_mcluhan)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9404250)

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Nition
Reminds me a lot of a bit from Edmund Carpenter's anthropology book They
Became What They Beheld (1970). I'll have to copy it out of the book so please
forgive any transcription errors:

"In the 1968 elections the McCarthy campaign staff was approached with a
suggestion for crossing media. In the United States no law prohibits the
mating of radio and TV. In Southern California, for example, Spanish-speaking
sportsfans watch the picture on TV but listen to a Spanish-speaking sports
broadcaster on radio.

So it was proposed that the New York-New Jersey area be offered a night of
radio sound & TV picture. Five commentators were to provide the audio; John
Culkin, Jean Shepherd, Marshall McLuhan, myself & Tony Schwartz, who
originated the idea and had a sound studio equipped to handle the project. A
bank of small TV sets offered simultaneous coverage of all principal TV
stations in the area; each would be kept on its particular channel. From these
the connentators would select programs shown on a master TV set & toward these
programs would direct their comments.

The plan was to announce in the New York-New Jersey newspapers that at 7 P.M.
on a certain night a local radio station would provide that evening's TV
audio. For example, the audio for a TV cigarette commercial would be one
minute of coughing via radio. If there was a laughshow, it would be pointed
out that the laughtracks were copyrighted in 1935 & that most of the people
one heard laughing had been dead for some time.

Then listeners would be asked to turn to a channel showing Walter Cronkite, at
which point they would hear a taped "countdown," first in English, followed by
a A-blast; then in Russian, then Chinese, each followed by blasts & more
blasts & finally only a child's cry.

Finally, and this was the point of the whole project, listeners would be
encouraged to turn to a channel with Hubert Humphrey speaking. Instead of his
speech, however, they would hear - on radio - the four letters he wrote to his
draft board gaining exemption from duty in the Second War - one letter citing
two lectures he had delivered to an ROTC class, while in the background would
be played Hitler's ranting, bombs & screams; then Humphrey's pro-Vietnam War
speeches - "A glorious adventure and great fun, isn't it?" \- while in the
background the guns & screams continued.

The McCarthy team, mostly literate men, saw something profoundly immoral in
the suggestion. New forms always seem immoral or chaotic since they are
unconsciously judged by reference to consecrated forms. But a curious
contradiction arises: New forms are condemned, but the information they
disseminate is believed, while the old & valued aren't even seen."

~~~
jackfoxy
Wikipedia reports quite a different story about HH and WWII service
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Humphrey#Marriage_and_e...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Humphrey#Marriage_and_early_career)

~~~
Nition
I'd make a couple of guesses there:

#1. Edmund Carpenter's writing style always seems a lot like he's writing
things from memory and potentially embellishing a bit along the way to make a
point. Fact checking for writer and reader wasn't so easy in the pre-Internet
days.

#2. This was a proposition from the opposition, and even Wikipedia says "all
through his political life, Humphrey was dogged by the charge that he was a
draft dodger", so the team may have intended to bend the truth on purpose.

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pmarreck
These should be put online before they are lost, seems like it was an
innovative time in TV

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smrk007
Where can I find this show / episode? I've been looking but to no avail...

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meatsock
experimental media is important, and so is a public-media world it can exist
in. support shows your local public stations motives other than profit are
necessary for culture.

~~~
gowld
Is TV important for this, nowadays when we have YouTube / Vimeo / Dailymotion?

~~~
jkFeiwi
No but who's going to fund the non-commercial streaming videos?

Public (in the American sense, viewer supported) broadcasting like NPR and PBS
develop excellent digital content that we would not otherwise have because
it's not advertiser friendly.

If you hate clickbait, fake news, and spam, you should support public media.

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chomp
Unrelated:

    
    
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Haven't seen this one before. No, I don't want you tracking me, and no, I'm
not going to view your article because of it.

~~~
protonimitate
You can still get around it by disabling javascript completely. Will load a
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