online community focused on sharing and reminiscing about video, audio, and images that stir our memories of the past – old television, theme songs, commercials, print advertisements, the sights and sounds you remember
Tiny Tim took “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and turned it into one of the most unforgettable TV moments of the late 1960s.
With his ukulele, long hair, nervous smile, and high falsetto voice, he came across like someone from another planet. His big break came on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and before long he was showing up on shows like The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
The public didn’t quite know what to do with him. Some people laughed, some were fascinated, and some thought he was just plain strange. But Tiny Tim was completely sincere. He loved old songs and performed them in a way nobody else could.
And whether you loved him or thought he was weird, once you heard “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” you never forgot it.
The Patty Duke Show is another one of those shows that reminds us not to believe everything we see on TV. I remember not believing my mom when she told me Patty Duke played both roles, Patty Lane and her “identical cousin” Cathy Lane. Maybe I couldn’t read the credits yet, but to a kid, it sure looked like two different girls.
The show ran on ABC from 1963 to 1966 and starred Patty Duke as both cousins. Patty Lane was the fun, typical American teenager from Brooklyn Heights, while Cathy Lane was the more refined, well-traveled cousin from Scotland. The whole joke of the show was that they looked exactly alike but acted completely different.
What made it even more fun was how they pulled off those split-screen and double-exposure tricks back then. Years later, when I became a video producer, I had a whole new appreciation for it. Anytime I could recreate one of those effects myself, I was pretty proud of it. Back then, it looked like TV magic, and in a lot of ways, it really was.
Baby Secret was another one of those innocent-looking dolls until it talked, or worse, whispered. Back then, our breakfast cereal was promoted by clowns, our chaaawwwwclit milk was sold to us by a scary dummy, and somehow, nobody thought any of this was strange.
Mattel’s Baby Secret came out in the mid-1960s and looked sweet enough at first. She had a baby face, rooted hair, a soft body, and moving lips, but the big gimmick was the pull-string voice box. Unlike other talking dolls that spoke out loud, Baby Secret whispered her little phrases, like she was sharing something just with you. Cute idea in the daytime, maybe. At night in a dark bedroom? That’s a whole different story.
I know she was supposed to make kids feel like she was telling them a private little secret, but a whispering doll beside the bed sounds like the kind of thing today’s kids would need therapy for. We just called it Christmas morning.
Creepy puppets, talking dolls, ventriloquist dummies, clowns selling cereal, and commercials that got stuck in our heads for the next 50 years. Maybe we weren’t tougher back then, maybe we were just too busy watching cartoons to realize half our toys and commercials were nightmare fuel.
I’ll never forget when my mom pointed out during an episode of Hollywood Squares that Wally Cox was the voice of Underdog. Oh, the world was so complicated back then, so many thanks to our moms who had the patience and love to guide us through the important stuff, like cartoon trivia.
Underdog debuted in 1964 and gave us Shoeshine Boy, the mild-mannered little dog who became a rhyming superhero whenever trouble showed up. With Sweet Polly Purebred usually in danger and villains like Simon Bar Sinister causing trouble, Underdog would come flying in with that famous line that still sticks in our heads all these years later.
Oh, the magical opening for The Wonderful World of Disney and the wonderful world of color! This was the time when we got our first color TV, and we would sing this whenever a TV show was in color. Growing up, we didn’t have much money on Dad’s salary as a Marine, but we had one of the first color TVs on the market. What a hero he was bringing this big 21-inch console into our home! Between our toys and TV, we were all set.
We always looked forward to Sundays with The Wonderful World Of Disney to wrap up our weekend. Then came that sad little realization: the show was ending, bedtime was coming, and school was waiting for us the next morning.
The Disney anthology show first began on ABC in 1954 as Walt Disney’s Disneyland. It later became Walt Disney Presents, then moved to NBC in 1961 as Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, which was a perfect title for the era when color TV still felt like magic. By 1969, it became The Wonderful World of Disney, the name so many of us remember. Over the years it moved between ABC, NBC, and CBS, with different titles including The Disney Sunday Movie and The Magical World of Disney. The series has continued in different forms and special presentations for decades, making it one of the longest-running prime-time programs in American television history.
For a lot of us, it wasn’t just a TV show. It was part of the Sunday night routine, that last bit of weekend magic before Monday morning came knocking.
My Mother The Car is another show that kept parents explaining what is fake, even though we were seeing it with our own eyes! We had a talking horse with Mister Ed, a witch with Bewitched, a genie with I Dream of Jeannie, a Martian with My Favorite Martian, and then somehow NBC said, “What about your mother… but as a car?”
The show aired on NBC from 1965 to 1966 and only lasted one season with 30 episodes. It starred Jerry Van Dyke as Dave Crabtree, a man who buys an old 1928 Porter automobile and discovers that his late mother has been reincarnated as the car. She talks to him through the radio, because apparently in the 1960s even the afterlife had AM reception.
The voice of the mother was Ann Sothern, which gave the whole thing a little more class than the idea probably deserved. But that was 1960s television for you. If a show had a wild enough gimmick, somebody was willing to put it on the air and see if families would go along with it.
Of course, My Mother The Car became famous, but not exactly in the way anyone at NBC probably hoped. For years it was used as the punchline for bad TV, often showing up whenever people talked about the worst sitcoms ever made. But looking back now, there is something wonderfully ridiculous about it. It was silly, strange, and very 1965. You almost have to admire a show that went all-in on a talking mother-car and expected America to just ride along.
Did you ever watch My Mother The Car, or was this one of those shows you only heard people joke about later?
It amazes me how we hear a sound, song, or even a phrase like “It’s Shake and Bake and I Helped in an adorable southern accent. No real story comes to mind for me. How about you?
I remember wanting Mouse Trap so bad because it looked so cool in the commercial. What kid wouldn’t want their very own Rube Goldberg machine right there on the kitchen table?
Mouse Trap came out in 1963, and the whole attraction wasn’t just the board game itself. It was that crazy contraption you built while playing. The crank, the gears, the marble, the bathtub, the diving man, the cage, and all those little plastic pieces that had to line up just right. On TV, it looked like the greatest thing ever invented.
The neighbor kid had one, we played it, and I was excited to try it for real. It was fun, but I’ll be honest, it wasn’t quite as exciting as I had built it up to be in my head. Maybe it needed that wacky music from the commercial playing in the background! Without the TV magic, it was still a neat game, but the commercial may have sold it better than the actual game.
Still, you have to give Mouse Trap credit. Every kid who saw that commercial wanted to see that trap go off. Whether it worked perfectly or needed a little help, it was one of those games that made you say, “I want that!”
I still can’t believe my Marine sergeant dad, the same dad who hated hippies and anti-war protesters, the same dad who tuned into Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw, actually enjoyed Laugh-In.
That show was loud, weird, colorful, and full of the exact kind of counterculture humor you would think he’d complain about. But somehow, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In worked its way into living rooms like ours. Maybe it was the fast jokes, maybe it was the pretty girls, maybe it was the one-liners, or maybe it was just goofy enough that even the strict dads could laugh before they realized what they were laughing at.
For all the things my dad would not tolerate, somehow Laugh-In got a pass. And that may be one of the funniest things about the show. It was strange enough for the kids, fast enough for the adults, and somehow ridiculous enough to bring everybody into the same room.
I’d hear that song from upstairs, and I’d sneak halfway down the stairs just to peek at Mom’s show. I remember asking why he was sitting there all alone in that big room, because I didn’t understand what a courtroom was or why everyone looked so serious. Mom still tried to explain it to me, even though I’m sure I was bugging her. All she wanted to do was relax and watch a little TV before her own bedtime.
As a kid, I could not understand why Mom watched such a boring show. There were no monsters, no cartoons, no spaceships, and nobody was falling down a well for Lassie to rescue. Just Raymond Burr sitting there as Perry Mason, calmly figuring out who really did it while everyone else in the courtroom waited for him to prove it.
The show originally ran on CBS from 1957 to 1966, with Raymond Burr as defense attorney Perry Mason, Barbara Hale as his secretary Della Street, William Hopper as private detective Paul Drake, and William Talman as district attorney Hamilton Burger. The famous theme was called “Park Avenue Beat” and was written by Fred Steiner. That opening music had a cool, jazzy, serious sound that basically told every kid in the house, “Fun time is over. The adults have taken over the TV.”
The funny part is, despite the show being around forever and becoming one of the most famous courtroom dramas in television history, I don’t think I’ve ever sat down and watched a single full episode. But I still remember that theme like it was yesterday. That was the sound of Mom’s TV time, the sound of being told to go back upstairs, and the sound of knowing bedtime was coming whether I liked it or not.
