UHF (film): Difference between revisions

 

Like Weird Al's music, the film focuses its comedy on oddball humor and [[Satire, Parody, Pastiche|satire, parody, and pastiche]] of pop culture. Released in 1989, at the height of Weird Al's popularity, the film was expected to be a summer blockbuster, but barely broke even at the box office (opening against the 1989 ''[[Batman (film)|Batman]]'' movie, after all) and instead became a [[Cult Classic]].

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* [[Technology Marches On]]: The UHF band in general. There's a long history which (at least in the US) goes back to [[The Fifties]] - although the history in other countries (like the UK) will differ:

** After years of experimentation, TV was publicly demonstrated by NBC (then WNBT channel 1, on the Empire State building) as a curiosity at the 1939 World's Fair in [[New York City]]. With no stations in most markets (and [[World War 2]] as a distraction which pushed TV tinkering aside in favour of radar tinkering) it languished until after the war. Channel 1 was lost to land-mobile radio in 1948 and a few channels above VHF 13 were lost to the military; with only twelve possible channels, the hundred or so original stations on-air in 1948 were routinely interfering with each other. The Federal Communications Commission stopped issuing any new TV licences for three years while they decided how to fix the mess; ultimately they opened seventy new channels (UHF 14-83, 470-890MHz) in the then-unproven UHF spectrum. NBC launched "Operation Bridgeport" as a short-lived UHF 24 test station, rebroadcasting their NYC station's signal into a community in Connecticut. By 1954, a hundred underpowered UHF stations went on the air... and eighty of them went out of business within the first year. Apparently the feds didn't think to require set makers include UHF tuners until the 1964 model year, and the early tuners were of such poor quality that UHF TV licences in any given city were routinely spaced at least six channels apart due to receiver limitations. The end result was seventy channels of not much except static. With only 12 VHF channels, each major city could usually be given three (adequate for [[NBC]] and [[CBS]] as the two main networks of the era, although perennially third-ranked [[ABC]] often ended up struggling on outlying stations in places like Muskogee, Oklahoma) and fourth-ranked [[DuMont]] was basically doomed (out of business by 1956). A few UHF stations did survive and thrive in places like South Bend, Indiana or Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania where these were the only channels available - but these were the exception, not the rule.

** More than a few home antenna installations began with a huge, professionally-installed VHF antenna on the roof, to which a bent metal coathanger of a folded dipole dangling from the back of the set was added later to get the lone educational UHF station in the early days. UHF was merely an afterthought; the new-for-1964 TVs had the tuners in the US (but not necessarily in Canada) but they were often deployed to replace an old 12-channel TV and re-use the existing VHF antenna. Oh look, it's [[Sesame Street|Big Bird]] on channel "U", why does he look all fuzzy? Even if an antenna were designed for proper "82 channel" coverage the best that could be done was "up to 100 miles VHF, 60 miles UHF" as the longer-wavelength VHF signal was more capable of bending a bit to get around obstacles. (This is likely still true today, but digital low-VHF stations have their own technical issues.)

** Over-the-air TV began to lose viewers to cable TV in the 1970s; the cable companies could install one antenna per station on the tallest point in the city, shift the received signals to other channels, boost them and distribute them. This moved signals which were UHF over the air to VHF on some arbitrary channel on the cable. No more need for a converter box to get channel 14. The TV sets were also slowly improving; by the mid to late 1980s, separate tuners were no longer necessary for UHF and VHF, nor was it necessary to endlessly 'clunk' through seventy empty channels to find the few UHF stations available in glorious fuzzy analogue.