ZENITH COLOR TELEVISION W/ REMOTE CONTROL 1960s PROMOTIONAL FILM 55924
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 มี.ค. 2018
- In this short promotional film by Zenith, the consumer electronics company touts the many advantages of its new color television sets. The film opens with a father taking his daughter to a Chicago Cubs baseball game (00:30), who are hosting the San Francisco Giants. His daughter’s reaction to seeing her first live baseball game, “in color,” causes him to make the decision to buy a color television set. Interviews with people on the street (02:29), who own Zenith products-including a B&E TV Repair employee (02:56), reinforce the quality associated with Zenith. Zenith is the first company to put color signals on the air in Chicago, paving the way for the expansion of color television. The film shows the Zenith assembly plant for its color TVs (04:15), an R&D facility (04:23), and a color tube plant. Zenith provides the best in appearance, performance, and dependability, and the film goes on to reveal how it hits each of those consumer demands. Zenith’s Plant 2 (06:19) manufactures many components used in color televisions, including the super-gold video guard tuner. At Plant 6 (07:40), Zenith hand-crafts chasses, which are critical to a television set’s performance. The film also discusses Zenith’s color demodular circuitry (10:48), the use and production of phosphor and shadow masks, and other aspects of the TV screen’s production. The final test area (17:00) is where Zenith employees ensure the high quality of Zenith’s color television sets. In the sets themselves, the controls are concealed to protect from children but are easy to use (18:56). Zenith also features the state-of-the-art “space command” remote control (19:50). With Zenith, you get ease of operation, top performance, brighter pictures, dependability, and fine appearance. The film ends with a look at the various cabinet styles of the television sets (20:53), including the Italian and French Provisional styles.
Zenith Electronics LLC is an American brand of consumer electronics owned by South Korean company LG Electronics. It was previously an American company, a manufacturer of radio and television receivers and other consumer electronics, and was headquartered in Glenview, Illinois. After a series of layoffs, the consolidated headquarters moved to Lincolnshire, Illinois. For many years, their famous slogan was "The quality goes in before the name goes on." LG Electronics acquired a controlling share of Zenith in 1995; Zenith became a wholly owned subsidiary in 1999. Zenith was the inventor of subscription television and the modern remote control, and the first to develop High-definition television (HDTV) in North America.
The company was co-founded by Ralph Matthews and Karl Hassel in Chicago, Illinois, as Chicago Radio Labs in 1918 as a small producer of amateur radio equipment. The name "Zenith" came from ZN'th, a contraction of its founders' ham radio call sign, 9ZN. They were joined in 1921 by Eugene F. McDonald, and Zenith Radio Company was formally incorporated in 1923. Zenith introduced the first portable radio in 1924, the first mass-produced AC radio in 1926, and push-button tuning in 1927. It added automobile radios in the 1930s with its Model 460, promoting the fact that it needed no separate generator or battery, selling at US$59.95 The first Zenith television set appeared in 1939, with its first commercial sets sold to the public in 1948. The company is credited with having invented such things as the wireless remote control and FM multiplex stereo. Zenith also pioneered in the development of high-contrast and flat-face picture tubes, and the multichannel television sound (MTS) stereo system used on analog television broadcasts in the United States and Canada (as opposed to the BBC-developed NICAM digital stereo sound system for analog television broadcasts, used in many places around the world.) Zenith was also one of the first companies to introduce a digital HDTV system implementation, parts of which were included in the ATSC standard starting with the 1993 model Grand Alliance. They were also one of the first American manufacturers to market a home VCR, selling a Sony-built Betamax video recorder starting in 1977.
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit www.PeriscopeFilm.com
I am 65 yrs old now, back in my twenties I worked for a local TV shop here in MD, and it was well established that Zenith products were the top of the line. They were more expensive than RCA. Motorola, and the others, but we had very few service calls for Zenith TV sets, and from a service standpoint, we found they were built like tanks and were true workhorses.
To see color TV on the old Zenith for the first time was a remarkable experience.
My great uncle bought a Zenith radio, phonograph console new in 1954. I always loved it. When he passed at 100!, I asked for the old radio and was given it, that was 1994. 26 years later, its still working great. Never been rebuilt, only 1 tube inside is not Zenith. Record player, COBRA MATIC, still works fine also. At 66 years old, it sometimes runs all day, not a hitch. Its true, THE QUALITY GOES IN, BEFORE THE NAME GOES ON.
That's the REALLY good era. By 63 or so, the sound quality went way down. BTW, the Cobra tone-arm was used in the finest juke boxes, that had to be near bulletproof. Enjoyed your story!
Color sets were such a huge investment back then, extremely expensive! We had a 19” Motorola portable black and white set all through the 60’s and the first half of the 70’s lol! Dad didn’t believe in throwing money away on a color set, he just didn’t think it was that important. It was quite surprising to see all those shows from the 60’s that were in color for the first time.
Sad to see all the stuff that made America great is gone☹
Sad indeed. Zenith, Polaroid, Ampex, Singer, Remington-Rand, multi-lifetime Schwinn bicycles & even GM, just to name a few. Lets not forget Good-Humor, Breyer's, Ebinger's and Dugan's desert products, that were to die for. What a great country we had. Brings tears to my eyes. Younger generations that weren't there, could never understand. Finally, at least from personal experience, living in Brooklyn, no one cared about race or color. Most all would routinely joke about their own breed. Politicians & the media changed all that.
I always enjoy watching old promotional films such as this. Thank you for posting.
My parents got our first color TV a Zenith, no less, in 1971. It was incredibly heavy with a handle on the top. They had the audacity to refer to it as “portable” 😂
The Good Old Days . I miss them 😊🇺🇸
Wow educational I can only imagine how expensive that was.
The heart warming story of a father who takes his little girl to the ballpark and has a psychotic break
😂😂😂
Too bad Rifftrax didn't get a hold of this promotional film sooner. 😆
While he, and everyone around him, subjects her to second hand smoke.
Ha!!!! And he realized real life is in color!
Our Zenith only caught fire and burned down our first home.
Gotta admit, if I didn't have a color set yet, back then, and watched this promo, I would of bought a Zenith.
I was thinking the same thing. This was a very well done advertisement and definitely works
What a great film promotion for Zenith. That was a great company. Too bad they are gone . We don't have many great firms like that here anymore, that produced a great line of products that supported the USA. Sad, we have to rely on other countries for stuff today.
We buy for the price nowadays not was made in the US
You had to have Money to get Color TV then, We didn't get one till 75. We had a Big B&W TV that was made about 1957.. FM Radio was expensive too! Our first Color TV was Zenith, the old one was a Magnavox.
Live color TV from the 1950s and 60s is amazing.
I wish I could afford a old zenith set from the period.
A 20 inch roundie. The old phosphorus coatings have such a nice vibe.
The quality goes in before the name goes on.
"We surround each dot with a jet-black matrix." I believe it was Zenith that gave us the black matrix picture tubes with improved contrast- the "Chromacolor" picture tubes.
The black shadow mask was Chroma Color and they had Chroma Color 2 as well I think. It made the picture brighter and possibly 2 was the higher brightness rare earth phosphors the newer tubes had like the ad is saying. My first color TV was a used 69 Zenith 23" tube set I paid 115 bucks for in 73. Saved my berry picking money all summer to buy it.
My family's first color TV was a Zenith- in January 1972.
Our family's first color was a Quasar Magnavox with the works in the drawer.
It was a long time before we got color tv, too.
Today we take color television sets for granted. Back then it must have been like how buying a gaming PC is today.
The epitome of the phrase 'They don't make 'em like they used to!'
Color television is amazing.
At first. 😕
The idea of Zenith is to serve people who know quality when they see it.
0:30 Smart decision! But wow, look how many were smoking!
All those jobs lost, never to return. No wonder we are a dying country.
I love that I'm able to view this, even if it is hokey as hell lol. Posterity is sooooo important.
I am a fan of, and provider of, a "wheel alignment for your TV" of sorts: Calibration.
Using industry-reference standardized patterns, I can set the Contrast, Brightness, Color, etc. to where they belong, for transparent display of the original signal or content.
Unfortunately, today's flat screen HD panels are factory configured with the equivalent of having all the controls on these old Zeniths turned up to the max! And that is influencing the set buying public's concept of what is a 'good' picture.
My goal is to undo such falsehoods, and help people achieve the most accurate image they can from their TVs. Plus, extend the life of the TVs
Amusing to see a company touting point-to-point hand wiring over printed circuits. It makes sense for tubes, but once transistors became standard, point-to-point was basically ancient history, and an absolute rat's-nest nightmare to troubleshoot.
Good hi fi units are still hand soldered.
The Space Command added around $100 to the price.
C nut. Zenith. See not. 😋
A friend of mine who lived in Connecticut for 4 years, his family when return to Chile in 1980 (where I write) I remember they had a Zenirh Color TV set, and a remote control throw ultrasound system as footage shows. When a key was press it a metallic sound can be heard, as a _cling_ . for basic adjustments. And I also noticed screen shadow had rounded dots, not rectangular bricks blue, red, green as several Color TV set used to use.
My father in 1979 bought a Sharp 19", we had a General Electric for two weeks before, but it had some problems when night due low voltage in the city, so it had not auto-voltage system, wich cause of a reduced frame of image after 8 of night. Fortunatelly Chile choosed NTSC system in 1978, some other countries here in Southanerica prefiered PAL European color system. I say this because my friend arrived from USA and his family could not have watched their Zenith TV set.
©2021, Cristian. Thanks for reading me. ,😘
20:07 Second girl from the left looks exactly like Tina Louise (Ginger from “Gilligan’s Island).
This video made me to throw out my new flat screne smart TV and buy good old Zenith... And also pack of smokes :P
Good Luck getting a signal...📺
@@luisreyes1963 The snow is better than what is on TV anyway.
@@luisreyes1963 yeah instead of smokes he have to get a digital box you get better channels than on satellite .
Today that little girl is a woman telling her therapist of the day her father finally took her to the ball park, only to begin talking to nonexistent people in front of the crowd. She hasn’t gotten over the stigma yet! 🙄
If I had to buy a color TV 1967 it would have been zenith
this reminds me of an old zenith tv company joke about a person asking for a raise. as we all know there slogan is - the quality goes in b 4 the name goes on...
A person asked for a promotion and a new name plate on her door and she seemed to not be getting it so it seemed to them to her.
When asking why to her male boss he said the quality goes in b 4 the name goes on.
After I have watched baseball on tv, it was a letdown when I actually went to a live game. The ballpark was much smaller than I visualized from tv or radio.
Wow... Color television! What an age we live in! What's next, portable telephones?
"wow its in color!"
Interessante io sono in Italia mi ricordo quando fabbricavano qui i tvc Grundig / Minerva a catodo duravano una vita si parlò di 45/55 anni fa' ero un bambino ora i tvc led o OLED chinesi /o sud corani o giapponesi durano 3 anni una volta la tecnologia durava ora obsolescenza programmata
My first television was a Zenith chromecast and that Tv lasted me 20 yrs and played well . I gave it to the Salvation army.
Did you remember to apologize for the way you have treated the poor? The Army wants us to do that now.m
I doubt anyone remembers what it was like when an actual TV repairman came to your house and replaced a tube or replacing one yourself, taking the used tube to the store and plugging it in to a tester on a display to see if the tube was really bad then picking a new tube from the many types available. It wasn’t very long from 1960 that the Japanese revolutionized TV manufacture and the modern electronic components changed the way TV’s were manufactured in a mere 20 years American made TV’s vanished overnight and the last American made TV was Curtis Mathis, very good brand it was gone by 1982, however the company still exists as it diversified into other things.
Powder River you got me on that one. You mean people would take out their TV tube to have tested?
Lior Holtslag yes because sometimes the tube still functioned, however it wasn’t at peak performance they either blew out or kind of half worked.
i remember being with dad doing that stuff. Peeps did not like paying 5 bucks for an expensive one so you hoped those were ok.
Peeps used to check all of them while at itm if anything was wrong rather than pay a repairman... remember western auto and
@@scootin123 Not the picture tube, that was usually checked in set by the service tech. The other tubes were easily removed and some recommended that you pull every (other) tube and take them in to test every few months to find them as they were going bad. I don't think HV rectifier tubes were commonly pulled (DIY TV repair articles of the 60s kept you out of the HV cage if I recall correctly).
Here's the strange thing, just because a tube tests bad, doesn't mean it is bad, if it tests good, it could be bad. The best tester is the device itself. In big cities, it was possible that you could have really bad tubes in the IF section, but since the signals were so strong the weak tubes didn't show up unless tested. Tubes were sometimes bad out of the box (I know a former TV tech that told me a story about how he and another tech ended up sending a set to Zenith depot repair for a bad tube).
Vacuum tubes are still used in a lot of applications. TV transmitters for example are still sometimes using tubes. Your microwave oven has at least one. Anything with a Vacuum Fluorescent Display has that tube in it. CRTs of course are vacuum tubes as well.
I used to do exactly that !! Pull them out, take them to Thrifty drug store , find the bad one, take the new one home, install, boom tv fixed. 😊
Stan Fiedler had at least one of these sets in his Arcade(Janesville, Wisconsin). I have one of them. It's not being used, but last time I plugged it in, it looked like it would work. I wonder how many "Vizeo" sets will still be working after 50/plus years?
quiet a few and if there not working a re cap will get them up and running
"The parts go in, before the name goes on."
A look at when Zenith TVs were the height of American technology.
Unfortunately today, we have let substandard become the norm, buying low quality televisions from a discount retailer such as Walmart. When I was young, the mentality was different, you didn't buy a television for your family room from a discount retailer, you would be ashamed to have people over if you did. You worked hard for your money, so you bought a good television from a reputable quality retailer. I remember the only cheap television that my father ever bought was a 13" Sanyo from Zody's because my mother wanted a small TV in the dining room, and cheap it was, didn't last more than a few years. Our good television was a Zenith sold under the Montgomery Ward house brand name and lasted for more than 30 years.
See the kid on the floor? That was me growing up. I was the “automatic” channel changer. Are you here to rob me? Yes, hand over those gold-plated tuners!
Gold never wears out?, it's a very soft metal so most certainly does wear and that is partially why it is used as due to the fact that it does wear it's self-cleaning.
While gold is soft, they mentioned the tuners were 16k gold, which is relatively hard. And gold isn't "self-cleaning" because it wears. Gold reacts with very few things, so there's nothing to "clean". That inertness is why when people find gold, it's almost always quite pure.
Take a look at my old philco ford tv.
Zenith really used to push their stereo gear back in the day. It was advertized constantly... radio, TV, magazines. In the early 70s I remember my parents fell for all the ads and finally bought a Zenith "Allegro" stereo system and I was so excited. But I ended up so disappointed... it sounded like cheap low end garbage... especially compared to my friend's Marantz Advent system.
By the time the Allegro stuff was introduced, most American products were "compromised". The Marantz / "Original-Advent" system is still highly revered in 2022. STILL sounds more enjoyable than contemporary "high-end" systems, costing more than a Lexus (or even a good home, in some cases). BTW, Zenith made really good console audio, up until they introduced the solid-state stuff. They even had sealed speaker enclosures. Once they began advertising "high-power" 240-watt (EIA peak) amp sections, they weren't the same quality.
I would love to see a video just like this for my Samsung 50" Crystal UHD 8000 Series 4K TV.
Hilarious. 😑
Zenith returne to Brazil 😊😊😊😊
Funny that they tout handwiring over PCBs.
My mother had one Zenith like those that heated and took fire in the curtain.
That's not Zeniths fault.
8:30 I don't know why none of the manufacturers (to my knowledge) used the fiberglass PC boards that were, even then, common in computer and military applications. Sure, they would have cost more than phenolic, but they were nearly indestructible and would have cost less than a point-to-point-wired chassis.
Agreed, except my industry observation when it comes to somewhat newer tube gear. I'm a fan of Audio-Research gear, from 1980 through the mid 90's or so. Though the glass P-C boards never give out, they are too rigid to move with tubes heating and giant high voltage storage capacitor "buzz". Every failure (other than tubes of course) resulted from solder-joint to PC failure. There's no "give" that hand wiring allows. Seen this dozens of times. I heavily solder these joints, and it seems to alleviate the issue. At least I think so. There's no doubt in my mind, that hand wiring has its advantage. Many high-end audiophile (tube) brands still "hand wire".
I have a Zenith Space Command Television works perfect, added a converter box with a built in DVR recorder.
Nice to see some people preserve classic video technology. 📺
POPCORN CARAMEL ,HOT DOG AND ONE COKE YUMMY
Ah yeah, the pre-RoHS era.
Can horse and car races be far behind for the young lady?
Didn't the first color TVs have issues with producing X-rays?
That was GE
@@docgonzo1973 GE was the worst offender, but pretty much all the early sets did so. The cure was to use leaded glass for the CRT and high voltage tube envelopes, and eventually eliminate the high voltage rectifier and regulator tubes altogether.
Bring back these TV's they work better for bringing in Antenna Reception best ever I love my Antenna TV's are better
EI NIS FROM YUGOSLAVIJA 😍
What part?
What is a tube ?
cathode tube.
How many jobs did we export overseas since this was made?
Too, too many. 😢
So printed circuits are bad news waw must remember that...
Zenith made a point at the time. PC boards (favored by RCA and others) did not hold up well with the heat tubes generated. On the other hand, the "hand crafted chassis" were/was (probably) more expensive to build. Zenith DID begin to use PC boards on TV sets as they became solid-state. Zenith made a lot of "hybrid" models that took the tube count down to four (3 in horizontal, 1 in vertical) before they went 100% solid-state in the 1970's.
where was mean joe greene in the tunnel
Why do they call TV a "set" Set of what? it's a single unit, not a set of parts that require assembly.
Indeed it is a set if parts that make up a television
Visited a friend who had the first remote control in our neighborhood. If you hit your hand on the floor it changed the channel. (I want quality color, and lung cancer!)
It's sad the big names are nothing but names on stickers that are slapped on cheap made junk now.
Dose zenith make T.V.s anymore?
Golden Dreams unfortunately no Zenith went out of business in the 1980’s. Curtis Mathis was the last American made TV and it went out in the 80’s as well. You may see names from time to time but none are the real companies that used to exist just maybe a licensed name to whom may own it.
Golden Dreams my parents always insisted on a Zenith Television, but we never owned a color Zenith
My family had an Admiral 27 inch console from the late 70`s that was given to us. The picture tube only produced green so that had to be replaced. It was around $400.00 in 1984 money to get it done.
When Zenith got bought out by Goldstar in the 90s the quality went straight to the crapper. I remember I was an audio technician and having mandatory overtime on an Saturday replacing picture tubes on Zenith only tvs that were under warranty. They were complete JUNK!
@@docgonzo1973 so basically zenith got a gold star and then that was it. Oof!
I swear the narrator of this film sounds like Leonard Nimoy
7:58 No printed circuits. I am a bit surprised that would be an advertising point. I don't really know how those loose wires and semi exposed individual components are better than PCBs. Maybe PCBs made in 1960s are in far worse quality compared to today ?
They were a lot easier to work on than printed circuit boards. It takes a lot more skill and soldering equipment to remove components from a pcb. The pcb is easier to manufacture and harder to work on. There are advantages to each system though. Tv companies did start making tv's with removable pcb's so when the tv repairman made a house call, he could swap out a bad board instead of taking the tv back to the shop. The tv shop then sent the bad boards back to the factory to be refurbished.
PCBs and vacuum tubes were a bad combination for reliability. The heat from the tubes would slowly char and warp the cheap paper based phenolic boards used at the time. PCBs didn't really become reliable until transistors took over, reducing the heat load, and glass/epoxy boards became more common, improving mechanical strength.
Notice how almost everything the father said started with 'My'. "My color TV, my sound, my quality, my my my my my" !!! Why were all American men in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and on and on, always declaring everything as 'My' ? His poor wife was just sitting there obediently as he droned on and on about everything being his. I'll tell you something, I'm in The UK, and if I ever did that my wife would dump the bloody TV on me!
She used to really love baseball, until she realized how boring it is.
half deaf construction worker bragging about the sound what a joke 2:45