Fred was telling Lamont he wants Cable TV and I was shocked because I never heard of cable until 1988.

Couldn't have been that many people who had cable in 1973 right?:lol:

Fred was telling Lamont he wants Cable TV and I was shocked because I never heard of cable until 1988.

Couldn't have been that many people who had cable in 1973 right?:lol:

I lived in a small town and cable came around to us in the mid 70's so I'm thinking a big city like like Los Angeles where this show was based,cable in 1973 would have been very probable.Back then cable was a bunch of regional ABC,NBC,CBS channels and maybe a PBS channel.Basically cable back then eliminated the pain in the butt of the Antenna.

I lived in a small town and cable came around to us in the mid 70's so I'm thinking a big city like like Los Angeles where this show was based,cable in 1973 would have been very probable.Back then cable was a bunch of regional ABC,NBC,CBS channels and maybe a PBS channel.Basically cable back then eliminated the pain in the butt of the Antenna.

My grandmom said she always left the TV on CBS back in the 60's and 70's because it came in the best

ABC was so/so and NBC was awful

Actually there were lots of people with cable in 1973; some estimates ran as much as one out of six back then. Since there weren't any cable networks back then, cable either gave you better reception or brought you out-of-area stations to areas with just a channel or two.

There was a cable TV system in the early 70's where I lived called Valley Cable. It had all of the Pittsburgh stations, plus stations from nearby Steubenville, Ohio and Johnstown, Pa. It had one community channel which would broadcast occasional locally produced programming, although most of the time, it provided time and weather info. Very low tech, as it had a camera in the studio pan back and forth over a series of weather dials and a clock.

Wish Fred had stated why he wanted cable in 1973:lol:

Fred was telling Lamont he wants Cable TV and I was shocked because I never heard of cable until 1988.

Couldn't have been that many people who had cable in 1973 right?:lol:


You've never heard of cable until 1988? Boy, were you late! My oldest brother got us cable in 1980-81. We had those zip across boxes to change the channels.

My guess is that cable was regional in 1973 and it was probably available in certain areas.

You've never heard of cable until 1988? Boy, were you late! My oldest brother got us cable in 1980-81. We had those zip across boxes to change the channels.

My guess is that cable was regional in 1973 and it was probably available in certain areas.
I remember in the early 80's our cable company expanded the channels and the reception was awful. We had a box with different tiers of channels. The first tier was pretty good but the higher you went the worse the reception was. That's when we got ESPN and WGN and USA. I think we actually had USA before that though although it was called MSG then. The reception on that channel was awful too. Our local channel was channel 12 but it was on cable 2 but when you put MSG on, you could see channel 2 coming through.

I remember in the early 80's our cable company expanded the channels and the reception was awful. We had a box with different tiers of channels. The first tier was pretty good but the higher you went the worse the reception was. That's when we got ESPN and WGN and USA. I think we actually had USA before that though although it was called MSG then. The reception on that channel was awful too. Our local channel was channel 12 but it was on cable 2 but when you put MSG on, you could see channel 2 coming through.

Interesting. I remember the channels we had had great reception. And since I was like 6 or 7 in 1980 81, only two cable channels that really stood out to me, WPIX channel 11, "11 Alive" and HBO! HBO was the network that defined cable!

You've never heard of cable until 1988? Boy, were you late! My oldest brother got us cable in 1980-81. We had those zip across boxes to change the channels.

My guess is that cable was regional in 1973 and it was probably available in certain areas.

It wasn't available in the hood until 1988:lol: :lol:

I remember in the early 80's our cable company expanded the channels and the reception was awful. We had a box with different tiers of channels. The first tier was pretty good but the higher you went the worse the reception was. That's when we got ESPN and WGN and USA. I think we actually had USA before that though although it was called MSG then. The reception on that channel was awful too. Our local channel was channel 12 but it was on cable 2 but when you put MSG on, you could see channel 2 coming through.


In 1987 I saw ESN in the TV guide and was like......"what's that? LOL


I was crushed when I found out I could not watch the Sunday Night game between Cleveland and San Francisco

I remember hearing about cable in the early 70s. Was not the plethora of channels, but filled out all of channels 2-13.

It wasn't available in the hood until 1988:lol: :lol:
Yeah they say HBO's been around since 1972 but I don't think most people got it until the 80s.

Yeah they say HBO's been around since 1972 but I don't think most people got it until the 80s.


HBO was available in the hood before 1988 and you had to get an Antenna on your roof. I know only one person in the neighborhood who had it during the 80's

Fred was telling Lamont he wants Cable TV and I was shocked because I never heard of cable until 1988.

Couldn't have been that many people who had cable in 1973 right?:lol:
it was around but on a very limited basis.

We got cable in about 1970. We went from 3 channels (all in Vancouver B.C.) to 12 channels. The added stations were from Victoria B.C., Bellingham Washington, and Seattle Washington.

Oddly enough, I just finished watching that same episode ("Lamont Goes African") on getTV!

Fred was telling Lamont he wants Cable TV and I was shocked because I never heard of cable until 1988.

Couldn't have been that many people who had cable in 1973 right?:lol:I cant remember when we got cable,I think it was in the early 80s.....

I remember LOVING all day cartoons! (And good cartoons,not the crap that soon followed)

Yes I wondered if there was cable in the early 70s after seeing the episodes when Fred mentions cable TV. I was born in 72 and my first experience with it was about 79 or 80 my grandparents got it. Their cable was about 30 channels.

In 1972 it came around (somewhat) and it was refereed to as "Pay TV" in Massachusetts

In 1972 it came around (somewhat) and it was refereed to as "Pay TV" in Massachusetts

The Ghetto didnt have it until 1988:lol:

In the late 1970s, my family used to visit some good friends every New Year’s Day, and they had cable. So when no one had the TV occupied watching college bowl games, my brother usually caught an old episode of The Wild Wild West, which we could never see otherwise.

We were introduced to cable in 1987. I came home from school one day to find guys setting up a giant satellite dish in the yard. We had one of those scrambler boxes to find the channels. It was mesmerizing to see the giant satellite dish rotate as you changed the scrambler. That was cool until our town got with the program in 1989 and got a cable company.

Apparently pizza-delivery was around in the 70s....I didn't think that started until the 80s!

Apparently pizza-delivery was around in the 70s....I didn't think that started until the 80s!

Are you referring to the white housekeeper asking Fred and Lamont do the pizza delivery? lol

Realistically in my opinion, The 1980s was the first full decade of Cable TV’s nationwide existence in America.

Cable TV has been around since the 1950s, and was quite common in pockets of Appalachia, where over-the-air signals were too weak to receive, due to the mountains. HBO launched in 1972, TBS in 1976, and Qube in 1977.

My grandparents were fairly early adopters, and they had cable TV in the mid-1970s. At that time, things still felt very experimental, and there was a lot of "dead air". Qube (later Pinwheel and even later Nickelodeon) aired hour after hour of their show Pinwheel on one channel because they literally had nothing else. There were no commercials. TBS and WTTW were just the feeds from Atlanta and Chicago. Cable TV was required to carry the local broadcast channels (there were only NBC, CBS, and ABC affiliates in our area). Community Access (CA) rounded out the rest of the channels, and it was usually just a test pattern, with all-caps letters doing PSAs in text, printed on the screen. We didn't get HBO. If there were other channels, I don't remember them, or they came much later. Still, 20 channels was revolutionary at the time.

At my home, we only got three channels, and at least one of those was very fuzzy. 20 channels was a shock to the system.

Are you referring to the white housekeeper asking Fred and Lamont do the pizza delivery? lol


Yes! And once on the Carol Burnett Show, in a skit, Carol mentions about sending out for pizza.

I thought it was odd b/c I was born in 1980 and someone was joking with me about me being older than pizza delivery lol I researched it somewhere and found that pizza delivery became a thing around 1984