KTUL

I have a bit of an obsession with local TV stations in the U.S. from the '60s through the early '80s. I don't mean community access stations, which tend to be populated by boring vanity projects. Instead, I'm talking about the kind of network affiliate stations that also provide programming geared toward local markets, often with gloriously weird results.

My favorite of these growing up was KTUL, an ABC affiliate broadcasting out of Tulsa. While I was born too late to see the station in its '60s and '70s heyday, enough of its personality remained through the early '80s for me to get a sense of what had made it special. Even though we lived in Arkansas, my parents would often watch KTUL's local news broadcasts, largely because of weatherman Don Woods who would illustrate each day's forecast with a cartoon character called Gusty.

I'm also a big fan of sign-off videos, a phenomenon which has disappeared from television now that pretty much every station broadcasts around the clock. KTUL had some great ones, though, including this odd cultural mash-up of Native American Dick West doing the lord's prayer in sign language.



By far the strangest thing I've found while trying to dig up KTUL footage online, though, comes from a show called Maintain, described by its producer Edwin Fincher as a "concert of video realizations." Imagine putting an iTunes visualizer on the air, and you get the idea, except that Maintain was done with a video camera and a monitor, and appears to have been hand-crafted to match the prog-rock soundtrack.



I can't watch that and not be saddened by the lack of crazy experimentation on television now, especially when you realize that this was running on the same station that aired family-friendly sitcoms and cartoons through much of its broadcast day.