[TV orNotTV] TV Phone History [Was: Sitcoms introduced to whole new generation]
PGage
The kids know how to use the Google and Wikipedia. Plus I've been
watching a fair amount of old TV on MeTV and while obsolete things
like pay phones, men wearing hats, and social smoking appear, they
don't keep anyone from figuring out what's going on in the episode.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I have been wondering if there is some summary of when changes in phone technology began showing up in television and movies? I was watching an old show with one of my children (youngest son) and he was amused by (and totally thrown out of the scene) a corded push button phone. I was a little surprised, as we have a corded phone, but it is in my office, and he never uses it (we live in an area where cell service is unreliable, as is the power, so we need a more reliable form of telephone communication). I told him my memories of when those old, first generation push button phones first came out, and what a boon it seemed to be for television shows and films, as they could now depict phone calls without the agony of waiting for the dial to return after each digit. That of course elicited a blank stare, so I went into a discussion of rotary phones, and what those were like (those he has never seen, at least not in real life). That got me to thinking of what I consider old tv shows and films, in which there was no direct dialing available, and people had to make their calls through an operator. My son was able to supply some examples of films and tv shows we had seen at the dawn of the mobile era, when they made a big deal of having a mobile (at first just a "car phone"), and the phone practically required a briefcase it was so huge.
So I am wondering if there is a summary somewhere of something like the following, showing the approximate year that various developments in telephoning appear in popular entertainments:
Direct Dialing
Push Button Phones
Cordless Phones
Mobile Phones
Diner
Hank Fung
Hank
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PGage
You can try to look through Celebrities with Phones: http://www.phonelosers.org/cwp/ - and go through there. Hasn't been updated in a long time but interesting.
I see Courtney Coz on a corded phone in 1994's "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective". I see Drew Barrymore in 1996's "Scream" in two phone-photos, one corded, the other (apparently) cordless. I see Fran Drescher as "The Nanny" with a corded phone, but undated, so could be anywhere from 1993-1999. I see Rene Z. in 1996's Jerry McGuire with a corded phone.
I am going to tentatively concluded that corded phones were used most often in movies/TV through around 1996, which is when I see the first cordless appearance. It may have been a few more years before they were ubiquitous.
I don't see much evidence to inform my question about mobile phones, though I now note that the X-Files premiered in September of 1993. I was recently thinking of re-watching that series (via Netflix), and if I do I will check, but it sure feels like one of the things that stood out about that show from the start was their cell phone fetish - but maybe that didn't start until a season or two in?
If cordless phones were predominant on screen though 1996 (and of course my evidence here is very thin and non-random) and cell phones were featured prominently on shows like the X-Files in the early 1990s, then it seems like it is possible that cell phones were represented in pop culture slightly before cordless phones.
Okay, that may be enough procrastination from grading the pile of Final Exams waiting for me - then again, it may not. Let me see...
Melissa P
A few thoughts at the end of the day. And – combining two threads.
Let’s take one series: Beverly Hills 90210
First, it’s interesting to note that in the first series, no one had a cell phone. What a contrast with the current version.
Secondly, I’m really only half paying attention to the talk of characters showing up in different versions of the same show, which means I probably haven’t read some posts – and that I don’t find the subject particularly interesting. But although I haven’t watched the current version of 90210, that series is a good example, I think, of a character or two showing up in both series.
BTW I just read a review in the NYT of a new book about Bell Labs. Interesting stuff. I’m reminded of a lecture I attended in the early 1980s by a scientist with Bellcore, the Baby Bells answer to Bell Labs. He “warned” us of the coming paradigm shift in telephone usage, how we would be calling individuals, not specific locations. I remember my colleagues and I laughing afterwards. Because at that time we couldn’t grasp the significance of what he was talking about.
Melissa
Curious about the email address? Listen to the most beautiful song ever sung.
David Bruggeman
From: PGage <pga...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [TV orNotTV] TV Phone History [Was: Sitcoms introduced to whole new generation]
Wesley McGee
That helped a little.On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Hank Fung <calw...@gmail.com> wrote:You can try to look through Celebrities with Phones: http://www.phonelosers.org/cwp/ - and go through there. Hasn't been updated in a long time but interesting.
I see Courtney Coz on a corded phone in 1994's "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective". I see Drew Barrymore in 1996's "Scream" in two phone-photos, one corded, the other (apparently) cordless. I see Fran Drescher as "The Nanny" with a corded phone, but undated, so could be anywhere from 1993-1999. I see Rene Z. in 1996's Jerry McGuire with a corded phone.
I am going to tentatively concluded that corded phones were used most often in movies/TV through around 1996, which is when I see the first cordless appearance. It may have been a few more years before they were ubiquitous.
This doesn't necessarily answer the question, but I did remember Jaime Weinman of MacLeans musing about this.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/11/01/delayed-by-storm-stop-signed-fearless-freep/
Seinfeld is given as the example of a show where a lot of their plots wouldn't work today because of them. Looking it up on Wikipedia, they say "The Bottle Deposit" from 1996 was the first episode where one of the main characters uses a cell phone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottle_Deposit
Wesley McGee
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JW
> 1971-76 series "Cannon") had a phone in his car. That startled me as a kid,
> because I had never seen such a thing. And even though I was only ten years
> old when that show went off the air, I remember thinking that it was
> ridiculous - that even if such a thing as a car phone actually existed, it
> must be so expensive that a private eye like Cannon wouldn't be able to
> afford it.
Let's see. Mannix' original run is the first place I remember seeing a
mobile phone. It's also popped up in Paul Drake's (Perry's
investigator) car on Perry Mason, which I've seen in reruns. Those
phones involved calling the mobile operator and having her make the
connection. I'm inclined to agree with Tim about the likely costs, but
it was something interesting and exotic for the time.
Jim Ellwanger
> Let's see. Mannix' original run is the first place I remember seeing a
> mobile phone. It's also popped up in Paul Drake's (Perry's
> investigator) car on Perry Mason, which I've seen in reruns. Those
> phones involved calling the mobile operator and having her make the
> connection. I'm inclined to agree with Tim about the likely costs, but
> it was something interesting and exotic for the time.
Not a TV show, but Denise Crosby's character in the 1988 movie "Miracle Mile" has a brick-style cell phone -- that's the earliest "Hollywood" example I can think of.
And I happen to know, because I just watched it, that there's a cordless landline phone used in 1992's "Love Potion No. 9." They do seem to be relatively rare in movies and TV; I wonder if it was felt that they don't "read" as being telephones as well as the old reliable corded type, and if there's no reason to have a character walking around their home with a phone, then they might as well just use a corded model.
--
Jim Ellwanger <trai...@ellwanger.tv>
<http://www.ellwanger.tv>
PGage
PGage
I found one source that said that while rotary phones were introduced in the US in 1919, they did not become widely used until the mid 1950s. I guess that would make the majority of television shows at least rotary, though of course Andy Griffith's house went to an operator (did Lucy and Ricky have direct dial?, Rob and Laura? I am pretty sure the latter did, but I am getting vague and confusing memories of plot lines involving party lines, which is probably a different issue). See: http://www.oldphones.com/nytimes.html
Pushbutton, or touch tone, phones were introduced in the 1970s, but apparently most residential users made the switch after deregulation in 1984 (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-rotary-phone.htm, not sure how reliable this source is). I have a pretty clear memory of having the standard push button phone in my parent's house in the late 1970s, and we were not early adopters of technology to be sure - maybe these got rolled out sooner in Los Angeles. I remember getting those books with the recipes for creating various simple songs and melodies by pushing different telephone buttons, and thinking that was just about as cool as things could get until the flying cars arrived. I also remember having a pushbutton phone at home, and seeing most people on television dialing it up old school for a few years more. I am going to use 1984 as a place holder for when pushbutton phones might have begun to appear routinely in television shows.
That gives me, as a first estimation, the following dates for when various forms of telephony began to appear routinely in popular entertainments:
1955: Rotary Phones (mid 1950s)
1984: Push Button Phones (after degregulation)
1994: Cell Phones (X-Files premiers in 1993, I add a year to get to it being "routine", though this may be a year or two early; see note above that first use by a major character in Seinfeld was 1996 - I believe that was Kramer, talking with Jerry while chasing down his kidnapped car)
1996: Cordless Phones (based on a non-representative sample of films using corded films around 1994, but not in 1996 and after. I probably don't have enough real evidence to give different dates for the routine use of cell phones and cordless phones).
I agree with David that another important telephone milestone in popular entertainment is the depiction of phone booths (something my 14 year old son has almost no direct experience with, while one of my clearest memories as an early adolescent was my mother's passionate commands to never leave the house without, and never spend, my last dime, so that I could always call her and tell her where I was).
Brad Beam
From: PGage
>This is a bit of a tangent, but I have been wondering if there is some
>summary of when changes in phone technology began showing up in television
>and movies?
To continue the technological march, I flipped by "General Hospital" last
night, and noticed that characters were reading not a paper, but their
tablet with the home page of the paper prominently displayed.
_ _
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stannc
-Stan
Wesley McGee
In the Seinfeld episode "Thr Alternate Side", Jerry talks to the person who stole his car via the installed cell phone. This episode aired in 1991.
-Stan
Anyway, by the time Bowfinger came out in 1999, car phones had been reduced to a punchline of a joke (Bobby Bowfinger tries to use this to fool people into thinking he has a cell phone, too.)
David Lynch
> BTW I just read a review in the NYT of a new book about Bell Labs.
> Interesting stuff. I’m reminded of a lecture I attended in the early 1980s
> by a scientist with Bellcore, the Baby Bells answer to Bell Labs. He
> “warned” us of the coming paradigm shift in telephone usage, how we would be
> calling individuals, not specific locations. I remember my colleagues and I
> laughing afterwards. Because at that time we couldn’t grasp the
> significance of what he was talking about.
A lot of what I remember about that concept, up to the days when cell
phones were beginning to really take off (some time circa the mid 90s)
was not a prediction that you would take your primary phone with you,
but that the telephone network would route calls to your physical
location, and we've never really gone there beyond things like Google
Voice and the occasional tech firm that uses it as a whiz-bang feature
to show off how cool they are.
--
David J. Lynch
djl...@gmail.com
Tom Wolper
>
> That gives me, as a first estimation, the following dates for when various
> forms of telephony began to appear routinely in popular entertainments:
> 1955: Rotary Phones (mid 1950s)
> 1984: Push Button Phones (after degregulation)
> 1994: Cell Phones (X-Files premiers in 1993, I add a year to get to it
> being "routine", though this may be a year or two early; see note above that
> first use by a major character in Seinfeld was 1996 - I believe that was
> Kramer, talking with Jerry while chasing down his kidnapped car)
> 1996: Cordless Phones (based on a non-representative sample of films
> using corded films around 1994, but not in 1996 and after. I probably don't
> have enough real evidence to give different dates for the routine use of
> cell phones and cordless phones).
>
> I agree with David that another important telephone milestone in popular
> entertainment is the depiction of phone booths (something my 14 year old son
> has almost no direct experience with, while one of my clearest memories as
> an early adolescent was my mother's passionate commands to never leave the
> house without, and never spend, my last dime, so that I could always call
> her and tell her where I was).
There is a lag between the introduction of a technology and its
mainstream adoption. When a new technology is used for the first time
in a movie or TV show, it has to be done at a time when the viewer can
recognize the object and know what it's used for, and if the writer
waits to long to adopt the object, the viewer will think, "Why's (the
character) doing that? Doesn't he have a cell phone?"
Years ago I saw a documentary about telecommunications where they
showed old footage of a rotary phone switching station and described
how it worked. There were long rows of vertical rods and when you
picked up your receiver and got a dial tone, you enabled a rod. There
were seven wheels encircling the rod and as you dialed a wheel would
turn according to the number of pulses. When you finished dialing the
number the wheels would be aligned for the number you were calling and
the connection would be made. When the rotary telephone was first
introduced, most telephone exchanges did not have this infrastructure
and Bell Telephone (who had a phone monopoly and rented phones to
households, for you young'uns) would not make rotary telephones
available in an area until they installed the new exchange. So if New
York had rotary phones, it would not be in movies if people in
Cleveland could not recognize the technology.
Touch tone, or push button, phones used electronic switches instead of
mechanical ones which were much less expensive, much faster, and more
reliable.
Dave Sikula
Deadly," which features Mike Hammer's answering machine, a reel-to-
reel device that seems to take up most of one wall.
--Dave Sikula
Ed Dravecky
> 1996: Cordless Phones (based on a non-representative sample of films
> using corded films around 1994, but not in 1996 and after. I probably don't
> have enough real evidence to give different dates for the routine use of
> cell phones and cordless phones).
This feels wrong. I remember quite a lot of cordless (landline, not
cellular) phones from TV and movies from the mid-to-late 1980s. I know
the technology had spread to my decidedly middle-class neighborhood by
the mid-'80s. Indeed, I found a 1986 article that says the "fad" of
cordless phones was "on the ropes".
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=z1spAAAAIBAJ&sjid=k6UEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6723%2C2642658
This is far from exhaustive, but there are mentions of "cordless
phones" in reviews for 1986's 'Down and Out in Beverly Hills' ("...at
home among hot tubs, cordless phones and animal psychologists."),
1991's 'Julia Has Two Lovers' ('Not even the mobility provided by
cordless phones can prevent tedium from setting in."), 1992's 'Patriot
Games' ("...a smashing kitchen and squadrons of cordless phones and
computer terminals."), and 1993's 'The Beverly Hillbillies' ("Erika
Eleniak is fun as Elly May, especially when she tries to acclimate
herself to Beverly Hills High, where all the girls pack cordless
phones.")
I did find a few fun related articles:
San Jose Mercury News (CA) - March 12, 1986 - 1A Front
PHANTOM CALLS HAUNT POLICE PHONES DIAL 911 ON THEIR OWN
Something is making cordless telephones dial 911, the nationwide
emergency number -- and it's not human fingers. Whatever it is, it's
driving police and emergency personnel crazy here and across the
country. A study done in Santa Clara County suggests that when their
batteries get low, cordless phones pick up frequencies given off by
household appliances such as microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners,
blenders and refrigerators...
The Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA) - September 27, 1996
IN PRAISE OF CORDED PHONES
Perhaps I belong to the last generation that will be able to remember
a time when telephones were strictly stationary objects. Now that
mobile and cordless phones are commonplace, children of today will
grow up in a world where telephones can routinely be found in gardens
or cars, in patios or garages, on porch swings or the side of a tub.
They will need to be reminded that it was not always so...
--
Ed Dravecky III
http://www.fencon.org/
PGage
PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:This feels wrong. I remember quite a lot of cordless (landline, not
> 1996: Cordless Phones (based on a non-representative sample of films
> using corded films around 1994, but not in 1996 and after. I probably don't
> have enough real evidence to give different dates for the routine use of
> cell phones and cordless phones).
cellular) phones from TV and movies from the mid-to-late 1980s. I know
the technology had spread to my decidedly middle-class neighborhood by
the mid-'80s. Indeed, I found a 1986 article that says the "fad" of
cordless phones was "on the ropes".
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=z1spAAAAIBAJ&sjid=k6UEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6723%2C2642658
This is far from exhaustive, but there are mentions of "cordless
phones" in reviews for 1986's 'Down and Out in Beverly Hills' ("...at
home among hot tubs, cordless phones and animal psychologists."),
1991's 'Julia Has Two Lovers' ('Not even the mobility provided by
cordless phones can prevent tedium from setting in."), 1992's 'Patriot
Games' ("...a smashing kitchen and squadrons of cordless phones and
computer terminals."), and 1993's 'The Beverly Hillbillies' ("Erika
Eleniak is fun as Elly May, especially when she tries to acclimate
herself to Beverly Hills High, where all the girls pack cordless
phones.")
Based on Ed's report, and my search today, I am going to revise my timeline, thusly:
1955: Rotary Phones
1984: Push Button Phones
1990: Cordless Phones* (now putting the routine appearance of cordless phones in between push buttons and cells, which seems more intuitively accurate)
1994: Cell Phones
Still not a lot of data points to support this, but at least a working hypothesis.
One nuance is distinguishing between when a new technology routinely appears, and when it routinely and completely replaces an old technology. For example it seems that cordless phones appear in movies in the late 80s and early 90s, but during this period there were also a lot of films that only showed corded phones, and this probably reflected an overlap in real life of both technologies in many US homes. Bu the 21st C though, probably most US homes had given up corded phones, and this is probably reflected in the media. Similarly, while cell phones appear in TV shows in the mid 90s, for most of that decade there probably was no depiction of any home relying exclusive on cell phones, or even primarily on them when at home. I remember laughing less than 10 years ago at my sister who had given up her land line to rely exclusively on her cell, only to see that become a standard practice for many (at least many young adults). So I guess I should also be asking "when did specific telephone technologies stop being routinely represented in popular media?" in addition to when they started.
Still, it seems that if all you knew about America was from films and TV shows before 1955 you would think that most people made calls by connecting with an operator; if only from 1955 to 1984 that all Americans did direct dial with a rotary phone; if only between 1984 and 1990 that most Americans used push button corded phones. Starting in the early 1990s you would see a diversity of telephony, with corded phones, cordless phones and cell phones being used; I suspect somewhere by the end of the 1990s you would have not seen many corded phones, and somewhere in the late 00s you might have seen very little cordless phones, with more and more characters using cell phones exclusively.
Jim Ellwanger
On Mar 21, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Ed Dravecky wrote:
> This is far from exhaustive, but there are mentions of "cordless
> phones" in reviews for 1986's 'Down and Out in Beverly Hills' ("...at
> home among hot tubs, cordless phones and animal psychologists."),
> 1991's 'Julia Has Two Lovers' ('Not even the mobility provided by
> cordless phones can prevent tedium from setting in."), 1992's 'Patriot
> Games' ("...a smashing kitchen and squadrons of cordless phones and
> computer terminals."), and 1993's 'The Beverly Hillbillies' ("Erika
> Eleniak is fun as Elly May, especially when she tries to acclimate
> herself to Beverly Hills High, where all the girls pack cordless
> phones.")
Seems like the "Beverly Hillbillies" review is actually talking about mobile phones/cell phones rather than cordless landline phones -- it wouldn't make any sense for students at a high school to be "packing" the latter.
Although the "Down and Out" review probably is talking about cordless landline phones.
I can't tell about the other two -- seems like it could be either one.
So now we need to figure out when movie reviewers finally got their terminology straight!
Brad Beam
From: PGage
>This is a bit of a tangent, but I have been wondering if there is some
>summary of when changes in phone technology began showing up in television
>and movies?
Which "Superman" movie was it that Clark Kent was looking for a phone booth
to change in, but, finding none, used a revolving door instead?
PGage
----- Original Message ----- From: PGage
Which "Superman" movie was it that Clark Kent was looking for a phone booth to change in, but, finding none, used a revolving door instead?This is a bit of a tangent, but I have been wondering if there is some summary of when changes in phone technology began showing up in television and movies?
So, that scene is probably not a comment on cell phones replacing phone booths.
JW
>> booth to change in, but, finding none, used a revolving door instead?
>
> It looks like that is the 1978 "Superman the Movie) (1st Christopher
> Reeve).
Yup.
> ...So, that scene is probably not a comment on cell phones replacing phone
> booths.
It was a comment about how the old booths with the sliding doors had
been (for the most part) replaced by less private pay phones, and how
that would affect the Superman convention of changing in a phone
booth.
djconner
bug/Peter Graves movie "Beginning of the End." The reporter heroine
has a car phone that she uses to call her editor. Interestingly, it's
treated in a completely matter-of-fact way, and not commented on as
being unusual technology. It always made me curious, though, and I
did a little digging. If I understand it right, she was using what
amounted to a radio relay service. The car phone was basically radio
technology, so you were "calling" an operator over the radio, who
would then patch the radio caller into the regular phone network. It
was a service they had in Chicago, where the movie was made, during
the time it was filmed, but it was short-lived.
Another interesting one I saw is that Barbara "Batgirl" Gordon had an
answering machine in an episode of the 1966 Batman series. In this
case it *is* treated like a piece of advanced technology, on a par
with Batman's amazing Bat-devices.
On Mar 20, 1:22 pm, Diner <bwayst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 20, 2012 1:12:12 PM UTC-4, PGage wrote:
>