If you’re of a certain age, you remember when a television show had one sponsor, or maybe two; all of an episode’s commercials were for those companies. The show’s open usually incorporated the sponsor, too. When these shows were later syndicated, new “generic” opens had to be prepared that referenced no sponsor, as local stations sold all the commercial time.
One such show I watched in syndication as a boy was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, a 1950s and 1960s family sitcom starring the family of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. A few years ago, someone gave me a big DVD set of episodes as a gift. All of those episodes used the original opens, with the sponsor mentions intact. I learned that for a few years, Kodak was a frequent sponsor.
Some of those episodes included commercials, and it was very cool to see advertisements for some of the Kodaks I have in my camera collection. Here’s Ozzie pitching the Kodak Brownie Starmatic. You can read about my Starmatic here and here.
I used to own a Kodak Automatic 35F, a 35mm viewfinder camera with a coupled light meter and a four-speed shutter. I used that camera on a trip to the Tennessee hills about 15 years ago and really enjoyed it. Here’s Ozzie again, introducing that camera’s forebear, the Automatic 35.
Ozzie and his family didn’t always appear in the Kodak commercials on their show. Here’s a commercial for the Kodak Signet 40, another 35mm rangefinder camera with a coupled light meter. I own a Signet 40; it’s remarkably capable. Read about it here. The spot also briefly shows members of the Pony line (read about my Pony here) and the Retina line (read about my Retinas here, here, and here).
Ozzie and Harriet shilled lesser Kodaks, of course; all the way down to the least-expensive Brownies. But I don’t have any of those in my collection!
