September 14, 1981: A truly blockbuster day in TV history spawns two evergreen franchises


SEPTEMBER 14, 1981. A Monday. The kind of day when, out there, beyond the glowing phosphor of the cathode-ray tube, the world spun on in its usual, rather predictable orbit. ZAP! POW! WHAM! The cathode rays hummed, the airwaves crackled. But inside that glorious, glowing box, something else was stirring. Something utterly, irrevocably, quintessentially Eighties was about to erupt! A double-barreled blast of televisual wizardry: two, two! new TV franchises that in their own disparate ways, would carve out a permanent, glittering niche in the cultural firmament!

One was a creature of pure, unadulterated glamour, all shimmer and flash and teeth-gleaming, perfect-o smiles. The other...well, the other was the raw, unvarnished id of the American psyche, served up on a platter of municipal court papers and bad perm jobs. A truly cosmic collision!

First, out of the electronic fog of syndication, came the perfectly groomed, perfectly manicured monster known as ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT! It was a concept so simple, so completely inevitable! An entire show, dedicated to the relentless, unending, hypnotic spectacle of STARDOM! The glamour! The gossip! The BIG MONEY! The whole shebang! And it was presented by two hosts, one male, one female, both with hair that defied gravity and teeth that could blind you at fifty paces. Why wait for next week's National Enquirer in the checkout aisle, when you could get the same news and tawdry scuttlebutt tonight?

From the very first flash of its meticulously coiffed anchors, the very first breathless report from a Hollywood red carpet, ET didn't just report on the fabulous lives of the famous. Oh no. It became the fabulous life itself! It was the velvet rope you never had to stand behind, the backstage pass delivered straight to your living room. A daily, gleaming, perfectly polished spoonful of celebrity gossip, movie trailers, and star-studded interviews, all delivered with an earnest enthusiasm that bordered on religious fervor. It was the birth of the modern celebrity-industrial complex. ET was the meticulously-arranged, ultra-high-calorie dessert cart of popular culture, and we, the ravenous masses, couldn't get enough.

BUT THEN! Simultaneously! A TOTALLY DIFFERENT kind of madness erupted from another corner of the electronic landscape! The unholy, glorious, UN-glamorous spectacle of THE PEOPLE'S COURT!

No celebrities here! Oh no! The stars of this show were the everyday, down-on-their-luck, way-overtaxed citizens of California! Bookended by introductions and epilogues from the suave Doug Llewelyn, conducted under the watchful eye of the formidable bailiff Rusty Burrell, and presided over by the stern gravitas of "an actual California Superior Court judge," Judge Joseph A. Wapner, The People's Court quickly became appointment television for sick kids staying home and housewives across America.

Justice had never been meted out so swiftly. And each 30-minute dose of televised jurisprudence was neatly wrapped up with Llewelyn's daily admonition, "Don't take the law into your own hands - you take them to court."

There would be no TMZ without Entertainment Tonight. And there would be no Judge Judy without Judge Wapner. TV history was being made on September 14, even as viewers watching Wapner in the morning were still eating out of the same potato chip bag when Entertainment Tonight debuted later that evening - and those couch potatoes had no idea they were witnessing it.

So there you have it. September 14, 1981. A day when television, that glowing, mesmerizing god in the living room, simultaneously offered us two utterly compelling, utterly contradictory visions of ourselves. On one hand, the aspirational, the glamorous, the blindingly-fabulous world of Hollywood through Entertainment Tonight. On the other, the stark, often infuriating, and occasionally-unintentionally-humorous reality of our own messy lives, laid bare for judgment, on The People's Court. 

I know you've been sworn. I have read your complaint. But no rabid TV viewer worth their salt was complaining by the time they went to bed on September 14, 1981, late night snack still digesting, dreaming of tomorrow's next double dose of truly revolutionary programming. ZAP! POW! WHAM!

Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA

Popular posts from this blog

Apple Hypercard links to the future on August 11, 1987

Image
Boston, Massachusetts - August 11, 1987   ZAP! POW! WHAMMO! On a muggy August day in 1987, in the heart of Boston’s MacWorld Expo, Apple Computer, those slick Silicon Valley shamans, unleashed a digital thunderbolt that’d make even the most jaded tech heads twitch like a hopped-up Kerouac on a Benzedrine bender. HyperCard ! The name alone was a neon sign flashing in the binary night, a promise of something wild, something free, something so gloriously unhinged it could turn every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a Macintosh into a programmer, a poet, a digital Prospero conjuring worlds from a 9-inch monochrome screen. Picture it: the convention floor, a buzzing bazaar of beige boxes and bespectacled geeks, the air thick with the hum of cooling fans and the fevered dreams of a thousand would-be Zuckerbergs. Apple’s booth is a temple, a shrine to the bitten fruit, and there, amid the faithful, Bill Atkinson—wild-haired, wild-eyed, the high priest of pixel and code—steps up to the altar. Thi...
Read more

Members Only jackets give entrée to the 80s' most-exclusive club

Image
ZOW! POW! WHAMMO! Here comes the 1980s, that electric decade, that glitter-burst epoch, strutting down the boulevard of history with a boombox on its shoulder, blasting synth-pop anthems into the ozone, the air thick with Aqua Net and ambition. And what’s that glinting in the strobe-lit haze? What’s that sleek silhouette slicing through the crowd like a shark fin through the waters of Port Harbor? It’s the Members Only jacket . Ah, the Members Only. A name that crackles with a delicious, almost illicit, exclusivity. Members of what , exactly? That remained wonderfully vague, a shimmering ambiguity that only enhanced its allure. Perhaps it was a club of the effortlessly cool, the possessors of some ineffable sprezzatura that allowed them to navigate the treacherous terrain of high school hallways and mall food courts with an air of insouciant command.  Perhaps it was a more metaphorical membership, a silent pact among those who understood the unspoken language of status, a visual ha...
Read more

Street Fighter establishes a new pugilistic order on August 30, 1987

Image
It was an unassuming Sunday in August. Yes, August 30, 1987. A date that, to the uninitiated, might seem as bland as white bread, but for those with their fingers on the pulsing joystick of popular culture, it marked the dawn of a new pugilistic order! Before this day, the arcade scene, a kaleidoscope of flashing lights and cacophonous bleeps, was already a vibrant, electric beast. You had your Pac-Man gobbling pellets, your Donkey Kong hurling barrels, your Gyruss spinning through the cosmos like a drunken astronaut. But these were games of reflexes, of pattern recognition, of the lone wolf versus the digital horde. Then came Street Fighter . Ka-POW! Wham! Thwack! Street Fighter came out of the shadows like a stranger stepping off a midnight bus, carrying a promise of violence and something deeper—something that hummed in the blood. Capcom, those game design wizards from Osaka, Japan, birthed it. A coin-op machine with a cabinet painted in bold reds and blues, it stood there in the ar...
Read more