Velvet Light Trap articles from March 1994

Velvet Light Trap archives from March 1994

Introduction.
March 22, 1994... WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO WRITE "HISTORIES OF television"? One might approach this question by asking what it means to write any history at all in 1994. Recent debates in historiography have opened the field of inquiry to previously unheard voices,...

A failed vision: the mutual television network.
March 22, 1994... CONTEMPORARY OBSERVERS OF AMERICAN television programming would likely surmise that a television network that in 1950 held the TV rights to baseball's All Star Game and World Series, major college football, a professional football conference,...

What Ozzie did for a living.
March 22, 1994... DURING ITS LENGTHY RUN ON THE AMERICAN airwaves, "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" (ABC, 1952-1966) inspired jokes about what its adult male protagonist did for a living--jokes that persist to this day. To viewers of this television...

Televising postwar Los Angeles: "remote" possibilities in a "City at Night".
March 22, 1994... THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF TELEVISION AND its impact on society must entail some work at the local level, especially regarding how the relationship of the television apparatus to societal structures of power might be seen to be ascending--enabling...

NBC program clearance policies during the 1950s: nationalizing trends and regional resistance.
March 22, 1994... What I am afraid of is that some critic will begin matching what General Sarnoff has predicted for the cultural future of television against what NBC is currently showing. That would be most embarrassing for all concerned.-- Syd Eiges to Pat...

The face on the lunch box: television's construction of the teen idol.
March 22, 1994... ALL MY MONKEES ALBUMS ARE STILL LINED up next to the old stereo in my room in my mother's house; my friend Claire still has the ticket stubs and souvenir program from a Bobby Sherman concert; my sister keeps her David Cassidy memorabilia in an...

Channels of Discourse, Reassembled.
March 22, 1994... by Robert C. Allen, ed. A SECOND EDITION OF THE POPULAR TELEVISION studies anthology Channels of Discourse (1987) represents considerable expansion of the work begun in its predecessor. Like the original volume, the new Channels of...

Cinema and Spectatorship.
March 22, 1994... by Judith Mayne JUDITH MAYNE OPENS CINEMA AND SPECTATORSHIP with what she proposes as a primary goal: to find some way to recoup 1970s film criticism for the 1990s. By the end of her 172-page book, she has gone beyond that rather narrow...

Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama.
March 22, 1994... by E. Ann Kaplan E. ANN KAPLAN'S MOST RECENT BOOK DRAWS on a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives to formulate a compelling study of maternal representation from 1830 to the present. Its greatest value lies in its attention...