14 9 / 2008
So, yesterday I was over the house of some friends who are, besides being very good looking, are also great company and hosts of the highest order. Over fresh carnitas and some of the Corpse Reviver No. 2, a few of us got to reminiscing about childhood without cable TV. And those of us who’d grown up in the S.F. Bay Area recalled fondly the old TV channels you shuttled between if you didn’t have cable and weren’t supposed to be watching TV at all but had stolen an hour or two unattended on a weekend day to gorge on the admittedly slim pickings of our local unaffiliated channels. These were, you may recall, KBHK TV 44 and KOFY TV 20.
Both were (in retrospect) adorably useless, showing things like monster movies, Mama’s Family, reruns of the Brady Bunch and the original Star Trek, and (as seen here) Mary Tyler Moore marathons. But they were also adorably local, boosters of the pre-boom Bay Area (which had a little more of a cohesive identity if a less cosmopolitan energy, I feel like) and when Channel 20 returned from commercial break, they took twenty seconds every time to showcase a dog or cat from somewhere around the Bay (“Midgy / Castro Valley” say, or this Trixie from the SF ACC) and play a little jingle, reminding you that we’re all together here in this nine county area, and life is… whatever it is. That song, “WELCOME TO YOUR PLACE! K-O-F-Y, TEEEVEE 20!!! STEREO!!!” is burned into a part of my brain rarely accessed, which is why it was so fun to (a) find someone else remembered it, and (b) find clips abound on YouTube. Thank you, internet, for curating my memories so I don’t have to.
I really urge you to watch this whole clip, from the ending titles of Mary Tyler Moore through the kitty showcase and local boosterism jingle to the amazing early-90’s feminista at the end. Ah, childhood. This makes me want to eat a peanut butter and honey sandwich and do cartwheels down my hallway.
Epilogue: KOFY 20 and KBHK 44 were both eaten by network affilitation some time in the mid to late 90’s and became the WB and UPN networks. It was a step down. But since then, there’s been some more restructuring (KBHK 44/Cable 12 became the fusion CW Network, and I guess KOFY is back to being an independent channel? I’ll have to check it out) and according to Wikipedia, “March 2008 saw the return of the dog station IDs that TV20 became so well-known for during the James Gabbert era of the station. The IDs have been updated to having the dogs sitting on a couch in front of several San Francisco backdrops.” Nice.
