Commentary

A Mostly-Sixties Media Quiz

Questions

Television

  1. What did the letters in HBO originally stand for?
  2. Which broadcaster called itself ‘the full-color network’?
  3. Which television network was a spin-off from another network?
  4. What where the two big Sunday night TV shows in the 60s?
  5. What were rabbit ears?
  6. How long was the original Huntley-Brinkley Report?
  7. How long were most television commercials in the 1960s?
  8. What was the biggest television screen generally available in the 1960s?
  9. Why did Rob and Laura Petrie sleep in separate beds?
  10. What were Dobie Gillis’ parents’ real names?
  11. Who hosted the original ‘Saturday Night Live’ in prime time on ABC?

Music

  1. What’s a ‘45’?
  2. Where did the word ‘groovy’ come from?
  3. What was the first all-news radio station in the nation?
  4. What was most unusual about Monty Python’s ‘Matching Tie and Handkerchief’ record album?
  5. Who came up with the term ‘rock ‘n roll’?
  6. Which America’s first commercially licensed radio station?

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General stuff

  1. What was a Princess phone?
  2. What did Gerald Ford’s ‘WIN’ button stand for?
  3. What does ‘modem’ stand for?
  4. What were the two original home videotape systems, and who made them?
  5. What were the three highest-grossing general-circulation X-rated movies?
  6. How were New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago assigned their original telephone area codes?

Answers

Television

  1. Home Box Office
  2. NBC
  3. ABC was spawned by NBC
  4. The Ed Sullivan Show and Bonanza
  5. A pre-cable TV antenna consisting of two straight pieces of metal, arranged in a V-shape, occasionally covered with aluminum foil for better reception
  6. 15 minutes. Only when it became successful did it expand to a half hour.
  7. One minute long. 30s only became the predominant spot length in the early 70s.
  8. 21 inches in diameter.
  9. Even though they were married, CBS censors wouldn’t allow them shown in a double bed.
  10. Frank Faylen and Florida Friebus
  11. Howard Cosell

Music

  1. ‘45s’ were 45-rpm records, one song to a side.
  2. Originally from ‘in the groove’, referring to the grooves on vinyl records.
  3. WINS-AM, New York. Before going all news it had been a top 40 music station.
  4. It had two concentric grooves, so (depending on where the needle was dropped) one would hear two completely different programs on the same side of the record.
  5. Boston disc jockey Alan Freed
  6. KDKA in Pittsburgh. It’s also the easternmost station whose call letters begin with ‘K’.

General stuff

  1. A telephone with the dialer (either push button or rotary) built into the handle. It was wildly popular among teen girls in the 60s.
  2. Whip Inflation Now
  3. Modulator-demodulator
  4. JVC made VHS, and Sony made Betamax
  5. Deep Throat, Last Tango in Paris, and I Am Curious (Yellow)
  6. The three biggest US cities were assigned area codes 212, 213, and 312. Supposedly their similarity was a deliberate ploy by Ma Bell to make it easier (and therefore costlier) for people to dial wrong numbers.

-- Michael Kubin is co-CEO of Evaliant, one of the web's leading sources for online ad data.

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