Tag: lorimar

Lorimar Productions – the force behind 70s TV

Posted on by The Thatcher Crisis Years

Lorimar is to blame for a big part of your youthful TV viewing if you were growing up in the 1970s.  It was eventually swallowed up in to Time Warner where its logo lived on for a while longer till it eventually disappeared completely.

This production company, born in 1969 and bought by Warner in the mid-80s, brought you The Waltons, Dallas, Knots Landing and the controversial movie Cruising (1980) and Being There (1979).  Lorimar’s logo always popped up at the end of your regular viewing but changed over time till eventually Time Warner made it very slick and charmless.

Here’s the history of a logo:

Saturday morning TV in the 1970s

Posted on by The Thatcher Crisis Years

School was over for another week. In the 1970s, you would have woken up on a Saturday morning, showered with Lifebuoy soap, put on your flared jeans and Harlem Globetrotters T-shirt (yes, I did own such things) and go downstairs to watch the telly.

PlanetAside from the BBC and ITV’s kids’ programmes – like Swap Shop and Tiswas – there was a slew of American TV series. For example, an adaptation of the movie Planet of the Apes, of Little House on the Prairie and if that wasn’t saccharine enough for you, then there was The Waltons.

And do we all remember the mawkish nonsense that was Mork and Mindy.  What I love about the opening credits of M and M and other similar series was that they rushed to tell an establishing story in under a minute.  So you see Mork waving goodbye to his fellow aliens, heading in an egg shaped spacecraft to Earth and then going to live in Boulder – Mork and Mindy put that town firmly on the map.

There’s some terrible US shows that have been completely forgotten.  Makin’ It was a disco based series that cashed in on the Saturday Night Fever craze and starred Ellen Travolta, older sister of the man with the same surname who was the star of SNF.

Pam Dawber and Robin WilliamsEllen also played the mother of Chachi Arcola (Scott Baio) in Happy Days – which turned out to the be the happiest days of Scott Baio’s life – can’t say he made a huge impact afterwards with such turkey spin-offs as Joanie Loves Chachi and Charles in Charge.

Many of these shows were made – churned out – by Lorimar Productions, founded by Irwin Molasky.  It’s interesting to me to see how many Italian American and Jewish characters there were – but hardly a black face and certain no hispanics to be seen.

In all honesty, I didn’t  notice this at the time but a black friend of mine who is the same age as me said he found it pretty dispiriting back in 1979 to have no role models on mainstream TV to look up to.