Winky Dink and You
Fred's Interactive Screen Time in 1953
A friend and I, having coffee at his place yesterday, reminisced, if you can imagine. Our retro-recollections were wide-ranging.
I revisited some of the science about Earth and the cosmos and terrestrial chemistry and biology that been uncovered to become common knowledge during my education through college that ended in 1973.
I recalled the leaps forward during my undergrad school decades (50s and 60s) in new understandings of continental drift, protein synthesis, cosmology and ecology.
We have come a long way in our knowledge of how this place works, even as we threaten to send Science (that helped to bring us here) packing and Earth gags on the effluents of our affluence. But then…
We turned to lighter fare, and tossed out the prompt, now for you:
What was your first memory of television? (Do add a comment to flesh this out more broadly.)
From three score and ten ago, I remembered Howdy Doody, Kukla Fran and Ollie, and from adult early TV, Your Hit Parade. The innards of the bulky, trunk-shaped appliance glowed orange to show it had come alive. I was fascinated and amazed.
The treat of Saturday morning kids’ shows was the carrot that kept us behaving, more or less, lest we be sent to our rooms during the most important hours of the week.
The very first memory and lasting impression from the earliest television in my life was Winky Dink and You, in 1953. (I was five.) It is unique among early TV in that it was interactive.
The human guide to Winky’s adventures was game show host, Jack Barry, who you may remember, since he persisted into the 80s. The voice of Winky (Mae Questel) was also the voice of Betty Boop and Olive Oyl.
To become a participating member in this early “social media” you ordered (for a half-dollar) your kit that included a set of special crayons and a plastic sheet of cling-wrappy material that stuck to the bulging, roundish screen. The young viewer helped solve mysteries and puzzles by connecting the dots on the overlay.
Or drew on the screen itself if, in your rush to help Winky out of a jam, you forgot to cover the screen with the Magic Window before grabbing your crayons and solving the puzzle.
Yep. I did that.
What do you remember from your very first exposure to the BooBTube? Was your childhood tube-time restricted, like mine, to weekends only and maybe Friday early evening?
Clarence, yes I shared WHERE I'M FROM poem template that came from (Mrs) George Ella Lyon. I was introduced to it at a writer's workshop my first full year of "being a writer in 2003." I later spent a week with a bunch of writers that included George Ella, at the Appalachian Writers Workshop at the HIndman Settlement School in Hindman, KY.
Canned asparagus. there were no cartoon characters going near the stuff. But the real deal, picked seconds before eating raw--I was an instant convert!