Tag Archives: TV Guide

TV Guide’s 1994 Holiday Viewing Guide

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For this Time Capsule, I’m taking you back to 1994 to check out TV Guide’s Holiday Viewing Guide. TV Guide used to put these extended articles in their magazines during the holiday season to highlight all of the holiday-themed offerings on television. They’s highlight upcoming movies, specials, and show episodes, along with giving their own thoughts on them. I always used to look forward to seeing this in the TV Guide, as I would use it kind of like a Sears catalog, in so much as I would go through it circling things I wanted to watch. So journey back to 1994 and see what all of the networks were offering viewers for Christmas that year.

(The flipbook below is easy to use. You can click on the expand button to blow it up to full-screen size for maximum enjoyment.)

1984 TV Guide Fall Preview

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One of the things I miss most about the past is just how much info used to come packed in an issue of TV Guide. In the ’90s, that thing became quite a thick publication that was filled with the nightly TV grids so you’d know what was on TV when, and cool ads for various shows and movies each night.

But as good as normal issues of TV Guide were, their best issue of the year was always their fall preview issues where they’d run down all of the new series debuting on network television that fall. Every year was sure to bring hits and misses, and going back through those old issues now is a real trip back in time.

With that in mind, I present this Time Capsule and all of the fall preview pages for the fall of 1984. There were some epic shows that debuted in 1984, plus a few not so epic ones too. Give the pages a look and remember what it was like flipping through a TV Guide fall preview back then.

TV Guide’s Coverage of The Day After From 1983

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The Day After was an American television film that first aired on November 20, 1983, on the ABC television network. More than 100 million people, in nearly 39 million households, watched the program during its initial broadcast. With a 46 rating and a 62% share of the viewing audience during its initial broadcast, it was the seventh-highest-rated non-sports show up to that time and set a record as the highest-rated television film in history.

The movie depicted a fictional war between the NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact countries that rapidly escalates into a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. The action itself focuses on the residents of Lawrence, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, and of several family farms near nuclear missile silos.

Below are scans of TV Guide’s coverage of the movie the week it aired on television. Enjoy.

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TBS Christmas Creatures Features From 1992

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TBS was one of my favorite TV channels in the late ’80s and the early ’90s, so I like to go back in time and talk about the things that made me love it so much. I’ve even given this stuff its own category…TBS Time Machine!

Am I the only one who fondly remembers TBS back in the days before it was a self-branded comedy channel? The days before the two-hour binge blocks of semi-modern sitcoms dominated their time slots?

The good old days of TBS were filled with off-beat movies from the expansive Turner library, and the programmers behind the channel used to come up with any and all reasons to group movies together and put them on the air. Like this special day of programming for Christmas in 1992. All it took was a little alliteration combining the words “Christmas” and “Creatures” and they had a theme. Then, they just had to search their library for movies that fit that theme.

The movies featured on Christmas Day 1992 were At the Earth’s Core, The Last Dinosaur, and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Three movies that probably haven’t been shown on television since. But that was the beauty of TBS back then. Where else would something like The Beastmaster get played at least once a month, and get promoted in bumpers as a “can’t miss” event?

If I could go back in time to 1992, my TV would certainly be tuned to TBS at 10:05 eastern, and that’s where the dial would have stayed until the end of the marathon. I actually looked into making this come to life this year for Christmas by purchasing the three movies, but I had two problems with that. One, I would have had to put out a little more money than I wanted to recreate this, and two, I realized that part of the magic would be missing, as my marathon wouldn’t be filled with those glorious old TBS bumpers for other movies coming throughout the week and would have felt flat as a result.

It wasn’t necessarily the movies themselves that made it special, it was the whole package. And that’s why I lament the loss of the old TBS.