Re-creating the Channel 50 of my youth

On a blustery Michigan day like this, with loud winds blowing the snow horizontally, it’s hard not to think back on the cozy wintry afternoons when I was growing up.

You know the ones. With such a biting wind, playing outside isn’t much of an option. And besides, lounging inside with the smell of dinner or cookies baking makes days like these a treat.

But that made me think of something else that was often on in the background on days like this. Since I grew up in the Detroit area, WKBD Channel 50 was often on our TV in the afternoon.

I’m talking about the late ’60s and early ’70s, when the channel was owned by the independent Kaiser Broadcasting and its slogan was “the station that loves kids.”

When we’d come home from school, quite often, we’d flip on Channel 50 to watch reruns of earlier 60s TV shows or movie theater shorts that were older than our parents.

So I decided to complete the picture and play these old shows on my laptop while I’m working.

The point is not to actually watch these goofy old shows. For the most part, I have  no desire to do that. But it’s the comforting sound I’m after, including the background music.

So when I have them running in the background, it’s like when I’d be doing my homework, or reading a book, or whatever, with these shows going on at the same time.

We’d leave it on for a whole string of kids’ shows, like Lost in Space, The Little Rascals, Gilligan’s Island, the Flintstones.

Hulu has a lot of these programs, allowing you to do some one-stop shopping.

I don’t recommend them for all of them, though. Take the Three Stooges. It doesn’t really matter that they’ve colorized it.

But they’ve also digitally cleaned up the audio. The lack of crackling subtracts from the experience. I mean, with the old Channel 50 broadcasts, these were shows that were already pretty ancient, and the analog copies they played on 50 seemed like they’d been backed over by the delivery truck a few times.

Not to mention the fact that the Hulu Stooges collection is a little too Shemp-heavy, and they don’t even include the theme music.

So for those shows, it’s better to go to YouTube – or directly to Crackle since YouTube often links to the shows from there.

Still, there’s one thing missing. You don’t get the commercials for Trix, Armour hot dogs, or Super Elastic Bubble Plastic, that balloon-making goop in a tube with a smell that only a glue-sniffer could love.

You can find many of them, thankfully, at YouTube, but unfortunately, I don’t know a way of stringing them all together to get that c0ntinuous, old-timey Channel 50 feel.

Hopefully, someone will design an app for that.