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Television Presentation from Defunct Countries and Regimes

Soviet Union, Apartheid South Africa, East Germany, colonial Hong Kong, Yugoslavia, etc. (December 2018)

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JW
JamesWorldNews
Clever how the Czech station has three tv screens on set behind the anchors, yet drops-in virtual images on top of those tv screens! Well before the plasma days.......

The intro music is a bit more Little House on the Prairie than hard news, mind you.

Interesting times.
WW
WW Update
WW Update posted:
And some radio commercials from Apartheid-era South Africa -- the country famously didn't get TV until the mid-1970s:




By the way, here is the American version of that Chevrolet commercial:



And here's the Australian remake:

WW
WW Update
English-language news from TVB in colonial Hong Kong, c. 1981:

47 days later

DV
dvboy
The documentary The Fall of the Berlin Wall with John Simpson has a great section on East German television with some clips.

14 days left on BBC iPlayer
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b1h2

13 days later

WW
WW Update
A special extended edition of East Germany's main evening news -- Aktuelle Kamera -- devoted to the GDR's 40th anniversary in October 1989, just weeks before the Berlin Wall came crashing down:

12 days later

WW
WW Update
In 1971, former Blue Peter (BBC) director Timothy John Byford moved to Yugoslavia and went on to create several internationally acclaimed children's series. Here's one he made for the Belgrade station; as you can see, it has a very British sensibility:

29 days later

WW
WW Update
From 1983, an interesting recording of East German TV, featuring a weather forecast, a look at the day's schedule, the famous rotating cube ident, a news update, and an in-vision continuity announcement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zZ-fOXbhuA
HC
Hatton Cross
There's not much beautiful landscapes of East Germany on the cubes ident, is there?!!

That said, the transition from picture to picture is very smooth and well produced.
WW
WW Update
Hatton Cross posted:
There's not much beautiful landscapes of East Germany on the cubes ident, is there?!!


All of the shots appear to be of the Palace of the Republic, the TV Tower, and Alexanderplatz.
WW
WW Update
Here's another clip with more of the spinning cube and the day's lineup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRphSUe1pL4

40 days later

WW
WW Update
WW Update posted:
Since Timothy Green and Woodpecker mentioned Der Schwarze Kanal , here's a 1970 edition of the long-running East German propaganda broadcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4XtNdoO2oQ

The opening animation, with a scrawny-looking eagle from the West German coat-of-arms landing on TV antennas (note the symbolism!), is a parody of the Tagesschau intro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkzoBItcZ7s

But while Tagesschau got rid of its antennas in the 1970s, they lived on on Der Schwarze Kanal until Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler's farewell broadcast just days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The winds of change were already blowing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQC5r4aJEEs

By the way, the flag sash worn by the West German eagle is that of the militaristic German Empire:

*
Wikipedia.org



Some of those old Schwartze Kanal videos got deleted, so here's a compilation of the program's intros from the 1960s to its 1989 cancellation, just before the Berlin Wall finally fell:

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