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TV shows that were a no-no for some children to watch...

The short 1966 Universal TV theme scared the beejeebers out of me, as did the mid-60s to late-80s 20th TELEVISION Fox jingle-though by 1975 I was no longer covering my ears when that tune came on.
 
Cincinnati Kid said:
I have heard of - and then later saw on YouTube - a short animated film about the danger of nuclear bombs and their fallout. I read this was first shown on the Ed Sullivan Show about 1953 or so and it scared a number of people not just children. Sounds funny that Sullivan would have aired it with all of the many many live acts he presented, but I'm told he did. Perhaps someone will remember the name of this short film.

Would it have been the Bert the Turtle cartoons informing people to "duck and cover?" I've seen clips of those films on Cold War-related documentaries and movies I've seen in the past (e.g., the 1982 film "Atomic Cafe" that we had to watch in college, the CNN "Cold War" series in 1999).
 
No. It wasn't "Burt the Turtle". I thought "Burt" was not only something young kids liked but understood the message of as well.

What I saw was much more dire.....a dark object in the sky dropping something, etc. I may have used skelton-like figures. Can't totally recall. I first heard of it a couple of years back in the "Ask Inman" TV column that appears in the Louisville Courier-Journal.

If someone comes up with the information, it is probably still available for viewing on-line.
 
I've also heard many stories of the 1970s WGBH music causing nightmares for kids...

-crainbebo
 
I wonder if some kids of the '50s and '60s got nightmares in the daytime (when they were home from school) from the openings and theme music to the soap operas of that era. Especially the themes of that time to the likes of "Guiding Light," "Search for Tomorrow" and "As the World Turns." I can sometimes still get goosebumps whenever I see YouTube clips of the original ATWT organ theme and its opening in glorious black and white (especially the Lydian ATWT lettering coming onto the screen).
 
I used to get the beejeebers scared out of me as a very young child (until I was about 5) whenever Richard Dawson yelled "SURVEY SAYS!!!" on Family Feud. Also some of the sound effects used on game shows like Joker's Wild and Tic Tac Dough used to scare me as a young boy, as well as that of the "Penny Ante" game on TPIR.

I also recall one instance of hiding under a blanket during "Magic Mirror" time on the local Romper Room broadcast in the area I grew up it (the WQAD-8 Moline, IL version with "Miss Peggy" as the teacher).
 
I can't say I was afraid of the original, but I preferred the changes
in "ATWT"'s opening in the early '80s: the new theme, the
new graphics, and the new announcer--Dan Region, one of
the nicest people I've ever encountered. "Guiding Light" had some
beautiful pieces of music: the late-'70s with the strings and the
morning sunlight, the uptempo late '80s/early '90s one, just to name
two.

The logo I hated most was Don Fedderson's, which appeared at the
end of such shows as "The Millionaire," "My Three Sons," and "Family
Affair," with the words "A" and "production" in some sort of Victorian
script, and "Don Fedderson" in enlarged block letters that always reminded
me of the opening title on the George Reeves "Superman" episodes. (The
odd thing is that, logo notwithstanding, my whole family loved these shows,
particularly "The Millionaire" and "My Three Sons," and I was as fond of them
as my parents.)

Going back to soaps for a minute, I wonder how many kids were scared
by "One Life To Live"'s original opening of a flame under the title. That
came from the proposed title that, for obvious reasons, ABC wanted
changed: "Between Heaven And Hell."

And did it ever seem to any of you that most shows in the '50s opened with
a big fanfare? I can remember "Ozzie And Harriet" opening with one before the
announcer would say, "The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet. Here's Ozzie...
here's Harriet...here's David...here's Ricky (and later. "here's June" and "here's
Kris") (more fanfare) "Here they are, America's favorite family...the Nelsons."

Or the big fanfare for "The Lawrence Welk Show" before Bob Warren would
say, "(In color) from Hollywood, it's 'The Lawrence Welk Show.'"
 
Paramount Television's late 1970s/early 1980s jingle (the Blue Mountain) has also been know to scare the heck out of many young kids who watched Happy Days and Family Ties.

-crainbebo
 
Has anyone mentioned at the end of Dragnet when the big hands with the hammer pound out "Mark VII Production"? That show usually ended about 9:00 P.M. or so (close to bedtime for some kids) and I'd think it might have seemed scary to some.
 
I've read at least 2 threads in the Classic TV board now about how themes and logos scared kids. I'm always astonished. I was as wimpy as any kid, and I recall being scared by a couple episodes of Twilight Zone, and things of that sort, but never by spinning logos or soap opera themes.

Call me a nerd- but I liked those end-credit animated logos, and would actually sit and wait for them. My fave was the Four Star logo, with the four stars hurtling forward.

My other favorite (early 60s) was a station ID for cheesy independent KCOP (in LA) which consisted of live action (not animated) footage of little chunks flying together to form a ball (like a billiards 8 ball) that said "13." This amazed me when I was about six years old, but in retrospect, it was probably produced by somehow exploding that 13 ball, then running the film backward.
 
Hearing "And now...the Edge of Night" used to scare me as a kid! It sounded so ominous. I liked the Screen Gems dancing sticks, however.
 
crainbebo said:
Paramount Television's late 1970s/early 1980s jingle (the Blue Mountain) has also been know to scare the heck out of many young kids who watched Happy Days and Family Ties.
I was thinking that Family Ties was UBU, as in "sit, UBU, sit! Good dog! (ruf!)"

None of you were ever scared by the roaring MGM lion? Me, neither, but I remember wanting a cat after seeing the MTM logo! ;D (Also thought that it was cool that the MTM logo after St. Elsewhere featured a cat wearing surgical scrubs! ;D)
 
MTM's Newhart logo had Bob Newhart saying "Meow".

-crainbebo
 
Closing logos didn't scare me as a kid; just the opposite, I liked the late 70s/early 80s Paramount logos(with two different closing musical tags), and the old Rankin-Bass film projector logo.
One that I disliked was for LBS(Lexington Broadcast Services), heard on a number of syndicated cartoons in the '80s.

As for programs I wasn't allowed to watch; at ages 4 to 6, in the late '70s, I was scared by specific episodes of Star Trek('What Are Little Girls Made Of?'), and the 'Bigfoot' appearences on both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. The Trekepisode involved Captain Kirk being captured by a renegade Feederation scientist, who replaced Kirk with an android 'clone'. That process involved Kirk strapped to a spinning platform, accompanied by an ear-splitting engine noise(even louder than the Enterprise engines in overdrive), as the duplicated formed from a white blob in the space next to Kirk. It took me years to get past those early 'scares' with those shows.
My mom wouldn't let me watch the early-80s Match Game because of all the 'sex jokes'.
 
crainbebo said:
MTM's Newhart logo had Bob Newhart saying "Meow".

-crainbebo
That was my first exposure to the MTM logo; I later saw the St Elsewhere'surgical mask', and Remington Steele'Sherlock Holmes' versions(always liked the pipe falling out of the cat's mouth on the 'meow'.) ;D There was also The Duck Factory, the obscure Jim Carrey sitcom about an animation studio, where the cat 'quacked'.
 
I had just started fourth grade in August 1970, and my female classmates talked about the soap opera Dark Shadows, which I had never seen. So I watched it for a week, until my mother came along and told me not to watch it any more because it was scaring my two younger sisters.
I wasn't scared! I was very annoyed! It was decades before I found it what happened to David and Hallie and their bodies being taken over by the dolls in the dollhouse! It wasn't until the late 1990s that the SciFi channel aired all of DS and I got to see the 1970 episodes again!
 
firepoint525 said:
crainbebo said:
Paramount Television's late 1970s/early 1980s jingle (the Blue Mountain) has also been know to scare the heck out of many young kids who watched Happy Days and Family Ties.
I was thinking that Family Ties was UBU, as in "sit, UBU, sit! Good dog! (ruf!)"

Something I'd like to know: if you looked at NBC's short-lived 1985 comedy Sara starring Geena Davis (and I looked at it some then, IIRC), can you confirm that it was UBU IAW NBC? When I saw the end credits one time, IIRC, those were the logos I saw (UBU's famous dog, then "In Association With" on a black screen, and then the NBC Productions Proud N "Turning Peacock" logo).
 
I think the whole idea of MTM using the kitten was to poke fun
at the MGM lion; after all, can you imagine Mary Tyler Moore
roaring? Then I guess somebody got creative and found different
ways to portray the kitten on other MTM shows (including Bob
Newhart and "St. Elsewhere").
 
bpatrick said:
I think the whole idea of MTM using the kitten was to poke fun
at the MGM lion; after all, can you imagine Mary Tyler Moore
roaring? Then I guess somebody got creative and found different
ways to portray the kitten on other MTM shows (including Bob
Newhart and "St. Elsewhere").

And The White Shadow, where the kitten is bouncing a basketball.

ixnay
 
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