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paulfreed — 10 years ago(March 30, 2016 01:25 PM)
An episode aired a few weeks ago and the question was "Von" _______. I forget what the celebrities said, but she rejected all the answers and gave her own "Ryan's express" and that was the $500 dollar answer. The funny part,for the $5000 question she gave a really dumb answer.
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satmfs2 — 9 years ago(June 06, 2016 12:39 AM)
While I was aware of "The Bell Telephone Company", I was surprised that "Bell Telephone System" was a popular enough phrase to be given by the audience.
The Bell Telephone Company, affectionately known as "Ma Bell", was the telephone monopoly that caused the government forced breakup of the company leaving us with all the smaller systems and multiple provides per area we have today. Where I was, they were Northwestern Bell. They were pretty much it if you wanted telephone service in all the state metro and surrounding areas. It would have been a very well known name back in the 70's. -
wordsatplaytoday — 9 years ago(June 06, 2016 07:42 PM)
The Bell Telephone Company, affectionately known as "Ma Bell", was the telephone monopoly that caused the government forced breakup of the company leaving us with all the smaller systems and multiple provides per area we have today. Where I was, they were Northwestern Bell. They were pretty much it if you wanted telephone service in all the state metro and surrounding areas. It would have been a very well known name back in the 70's.
As a result of that, isn't that how AT & T formed?
I think before, making long distance calls was one and the same.
And then after the break up you had to get a separate long distance provider which meant a separate bill.
Now its back to being all on the same bill.
Is that correct?
Damn, I'm good. -
Doofs — 9 years ago(June 29, 2016 11:40 AM)
The Bell Company was acquired by AT&T back in 1899 and was referred to as the Bell System (as mentioned) or Ma Bell. Regulators broke up the monopoly in the early 80's and required the AT&T to divest its regional subsidiaries into the "Baby Bells" listed below - several of which are once again back under AT&T:
Ameritech (Now at&t)
Bell Atlantic (Now Verizon)
BellSouth (Now at&t)
NYNEX (Now Verizon)
Pacific Telesis (Now at&t)
Southwestern Bell (Now at&t)
US West (Now CenturyLink) -
darryl-tahirali — 9 years ago(June 30, 2016 11:26 AM)
[Bell] would have been a very well known name back in the 70's.
Well-put. The contemporary equivalent to Bell would be something such as "Microsoft" or "Amazon"a brand name so well-known that you know the product or service just from that.
Lately, I've found myself watching a few of these episodes on a nostalgia channel, having not seen any of them since I was a kid, and I love the references that are of course obvious to those at the time but could sound challenging or puzzling 40 years later.
For instance, one of the questions I've heard was, "I didn't realize that the economy was so bad until I saw _______________ in the unemployment line." Now, my first instinct was a generic response: bankers. But the contestantand a surprising number of panelistscame up with "Nelson Rockefeller" or just simply "Rockefeller," which I think was acceptable. Nowadays, we would indicate a specific individual with great wealth as being someone such as Bill Gates, but back then everybody knew the Rockefellers.
Another one was something like, "Name someone whose picture you see frequently in the newspaper." Aside from the quaint reference to the newspaper, what
everyone
came up with in the middle of 1973 was "Richard Nixon," who was embroiled in the Watergate scandal at the time.
"Here is the ice you ordered, Mr. Ismay." Titanic Captain E.J. Smith -
seldon913 — 9 years ago(July 01, 2016 07:53 AM)
Going back just a bit farther, Buzzr also plays some episodes of
To Tell The Truth
from the 50's, with the commercials from back then included. It caught me off guard when they played one of the commercials for Aero-Wax and it talked about using new Jet-Age plastics. When I grew up, lots of things got labeled as Space-Age, and while it makes sense for the era, I'd never heard the term Jet-Age before that. -
darryl-tahirali — 9 years ago(July 01, 2016 09:36 AM)
Not surprisingly, the Jet Age came before the Space Age and seemed to be a common reference in the 1950s just as Space Age came to be identified with the 1960s.
The first commercial jetliner was the British de Havilland Comet, which was introduced in 1952 by BOAC (now British Airways), and which had a shaky history including three high-profile crashes before it was redesigned. The Soviets were more successful with their Tupolev Tu-104, which became known primarily to Soviet Bloc passengers, but it was with the introduction of the American Boeing 707 in 1958 that Western passengers were able to travel on a jetliner, and thus the term Jet Age became a common one.
Its heyday was relatively short, though, as aerospace was growing by leaps and boundsthe Soviets launched the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, Sputnik, in 1957, and thus also launched the Space Raceand the term Space Age quickly supplanted it. It still survives, though, in those commercials for
To Tell the Truth
and, I suspect,
What's My Line?
and
I've Got a Secret
, which give us a glimpse of life in decades past.
Back to
Match Game
, Arlene Francis was a panelist who also appeared on those earlier game shows; can't recall whether I saw her on
Line
or
Truth
recently.
"Here is the ice you ordered, Mr. Ismay." Titanic Captain E.J. Smith -
seldon913 — 9 years ago(July 01, 2016 12:07 PM)
Arlene Francis was a regular on
What's My Line
, with only John Daly doing more episodes. I saw her on one of the
Match Game
reruns recently, along with a young Della Reese who I never would have recognized if I didn't see her introduced.