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captainsblogIt was 53 years ago today, on October 10, 1953, that CBS debuted a kids' show that's so obscure even I don't remember watching it. Yet I loved it all the same when I saw reruns years later, thanks to the values it stood up for: creativity, problem-solving, and destruction of private property.
It was called Winky Dink and You, and was the original televised creation of that future game-show fixer, Jack Barry. The premise was simple: the cartoon character stumbled through the usual Saturday morning adventures with his usual Saturday morning sidekick, Woofer the Dog, but things were missing. Doors, for instance. Bridges. Rubber padding to soften the fall of an incoming anvil. But wait!
No, I mean it. The show would pause, giving you, the viewer, the chance to help Winky out by drawing what he needed- the door, the bridge, whatever- on your Magic Screen with your equally magic crayons, and helping him save the day (or at least his). The screen was part of a kit available for a mere 50 cents from the producers. Jack was quoted as saying they sold millions of them, no doubt marked up way more than Twenty-One percent, so for his company, the show was a major moneymaker all the way around.
Around the houses of deprived children everywhere, not so much.
You've already figured out where this is going, right? A television show tells you, all five years of you, to draw a bridge on the magic screen so Winky won't die. You didn't send in your fifty cents. Well that screen putting people in the living room is pretty magic all by itself, izznit?
Ask your parents (or more likely, your grandparents) if the economics of this aren't clear. In the early 1950s, many homes, if not going on most, had a television. "A" television as in one. It was about the size and weight of a 2005 Pontiac Vibe only much uglier, it had rabbit ear antennae which were often the tallest structure in town, it received three channels in the biggest of cities and cost about a year's salary. And your son or daughter just drew a door on it in indelible magic marker.
Somehow the thing lasted until 1957. Sales of Mr. Clean, no doubt, were brisk.
So if life isn't giving you what you deserve out of it, just get out some crayons and draw what you need.
It was called Winky Dink and You, and was the original televised creation of that future game-show fixer, Jack Barry. The premise was simple: the cartoon character stumbled through the usual Saturday morning adventures with his usual Saturday morning sidekick, Woofer the Dog, but things were missing. Doors, for instance. Bridges. Rubber padding to soften the fall of an incoming anvil. But wait!
No, I mean it. The show would pause, giving you, the viewer, the chance to help Winky out by drawing what he needed- the door, the bridge, whatever- on your Magic Screen with your equally magic crayons, and helping him save the day (or at least his). The screen was part of a kit available for a mere 50 cents from the producers. Jack was quoted as saying they sold millions of them, no doubt marked up way more than Twenty-One percent, so for his company, the show was a major moneymaker all the way around.
Around the houses of deprived children everywhere, not so much.
You've already figured out where this is going, right? A television show tells you, all five years of you, to draw a bridge on the magic screen so Winky won't die. You didn't send in your fifty cents. Well that screen putting people in the living room is pretty magic all by itself, izznit?
Ask your parents (or more likely, your grandparents) if the economics of this aren't clear. In the early 1950s, many homes, if not going on most, had a television. "A" television as in one. It was about the size and weight of a 2005 Pontiac Vibe only much uglier, it had rabbit ear antennae which were often the tallest structure in town, it received three channels in the biggest of cities and cost about a year's salary. And your son or daughter just drew a door on it in indelible magic marker.
Somehow the thing lasted until 1957. Sales of Mr. Clean, no doubt, were brisk.
So if life isn't giving you what you deserve out of it, just get out some crayons and draw what you need.
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Date: 2006-10-11 10:06 am (UTC)Man, I would have been KILLED if I'd messed up the TV like that!