PRODUCING NATIONAL YOUTH CULTURE
When ABC decided to take Bandstand national in 1957, dozens of local markets already had or would soon start their own teen dance shows. Like Bandstand, programs such as The Milt Grant Show in Washington, D.C., The Buddy Deane Show in Baltimore, High Time in Portland, Oregon, The Clay Cole Show in New York, Dewey Phillips’ Pop Show in Memphis, Clark Race’s Dance Party in Pittsburgh, Robin Seymour and Bill Davies’s Dance Party in Detroit, Phil McClean’s Cleveland Bandstand, Jim Gallant’s Connecticut Bandstand, and David Hull’s Chicago Bandstand cost little to produce and provided their stations with opportunities to capitalize on the profitable teenage demographic.5 A sales pitch for The Milt Grant Show highlights the commercial appeal of these locally televised teen dance shows. Speaking directly to the camera, Grant addresses potential sponsors:
Gentleman, I’m about to offer you the best television buy in the world. I’m Milt Grant, the producer and emcee of The Milt Grant Show and record hop here in Washington … we have a winner that can win for you and your client … you see the ingredients are sure fire. First of all, we have the top records of our day. Then we have big named stars … and we have a studio audience of seventy sampling for your clients’ products. Some of our clients are Motorola, Pepsi-Cola, [and] the Music Box store … our commercials are thoroughly integrated with the program content. We have a winner and it’s growing. … Gentleman, here is the combination of sales, showmanship, audience, and price that makes the Milt Grant Show the best television buy in the world.6
While clearly hyperbolic, Grant’s pitch is indicative of how local deejays and television stations sold their dance shows to potential sponsors. To distinguish American Bandstand from these local programs, every aspect—from the show’s title, introduction, and set design, to Dick Clark’s banter before playing records—provided advertisers, record producers, and viewers with evidence of the program’s national reach. For fans of the locally produced Bandstand, the most obvious change when ABC started broadcasting the program nationally was the title, American Bandstand. (The show continued to use both names while it broadcast from Philadelphia, using American Bandstand for the national ninety minutes, and Bandstand for the opening and closing thirty-minute segments that were only broadcast locally). By calling the show American Bandstand, the program’s producers offered both an accurate acknowledgment of the affiliates broadcasting the program and an ambitious evaluation of the national audience they hoped would tune in. For viewers in other parts of the country, many of whom were already familiar with their own locally broadcast dance shows, the title immediately announced American Bandstand as the national offering.
In addition to the name change, through its new introduction and set design American Bandstand encouraged viewers to imagine themselves as part of a national audience of television viewers. Each show opened with the camera focused on teenagers dancing in the studio to “Bandstand Boogie,” a big band swing style instrumental written especially for the show. The camera would pull back to reveal a large cut-out map of the continental United States made out of blue-glittered cardboard. With the teenagers now pictured as dancing inside this national map, the producers superimposed the show’s title at the center.7 Using this technique, within the first minute of each program American Bandstand depicted its studio audience as literally dancing across the nation.
American Bandstand’s studio design also integrated this national perspective. Across from Clark’s podium sat a second map of the United States featuring the call letters of each of the local television stations carrying the show. This map, which was visible periodically during each show as the camera tracked teens dancing around the studio, served as a reminder of the program’s national reach. More important, Clark frequently walked over to the board to make direct references to cities and stations in other parts of the country. “Let’s go over to the Bandstand big board to see which stations we are going to check today,” Clark announced in a typical episode in December 1957.8 With the camera focused in tight close-up on the map, Clark informed viewers that Frankie Avalon’s “De De Dinah” was topping the record charts in Buffalo, New York (home of affiliate WGR); Cleveland, Ohio (WEWS); Akron, Ohio (WAKR); and Youngstown, Ohio (WKST).9 In another show that same week, Clark highlighted stations in San Francisco (KGO); Stockton, California (KOVR); Fresno, California (KJEO); and Decatur, Illinois (WTDP) before introducing Sam Cooke’s “I Love You for Sentimental Reasons.”10 Built into the structure of each show, this affiliate map of the United States offered TV stations, advertisers, and viewers evidence that American Bandstand was a national program. With this national map of television stations, American Bandstand encouraged viewers to imagine a nation of audience members watching along with them.11 Within a broadcast medium that repeatedly sought to generate a sense of a national culture, American Bandstand stood out for its insistent and geographically specific reminders that viewers were part of a national television audience.
FIGURE 21. American Bandstand opening credits, with teens dancing behind a cut-out cardboard map of the United States and the show’s title superimposed at the center. Producers sought to remind viewers and advertisers about the national reach of American Bandstand in order to differentiate it from dozens of similar shows broadcast locally across the country. 1957–1958. Used with permission of dick clark productions inc.
FIGURE 22. Dick Clark talks with teens visiting American Bandstand from Los Angeles. American Bandstand’s studio featured a large map that included the call letters of each local affiliate that carried the show. American Bandstand Yearbook, 1958.
The American Bandstand Yearbook, 1958 reiterated this ideal of a national audience with a station map featuring thirty-four teenage viewers from twenty-one different states. The yearbook showed WFIL–TV’s signal reaching in concentric circles across the United States, and told advertisers and fans that these “friends from around the country” were “at ‘American Bandstand’ too.” This national map motif expanded on the WFIL–adelphia theme that WFIL originally used to sell the station’s four-state regional broadcast area. The photos of these teen viewers resembled headshots in a typical high school yearbook, but rather than representing a single city or town, the yearbook gathered teens from Fort Wayne, Buffalo, Salt Lake City, and New Orleans into a national cohort of teenage consumers. Despite this regional diversity, the fans highlighted in the yearbook reiterated American Bandstand’s white image of national youth culture.12
FIGURE 23. The American Bandstand Yearbook, 1958, picked up the station map theme to feature thirty-four teens from twenty-one different states. The fans highlighted in the yearbook also reiterated the white image of national youth culture constructed by American Bandstand. American Bandstand Yearbook, 1958.
Even when the station map was not pictured on the screen, Clark made frequent references to affiliated stations and markets when he presented records, introduced audience members from out of town, and opened viewer mail. In different programs, Clark told viewers about the popular records in Boston (WHDH) and Detroit (WXYZ), welcomed twin teenage girls from Minneapolis (WTCN) to the audience, and read a fan letter from Green Bay (WFRV).13 By integrating the station call letters in this way, Clark emphasized the national reach of American Bandstand while also providing affiliates with brief advertisements that raised their local profiles. In an era when local NBC and CBS affiliates as well as independent stations could elect to carry individual ABC programs, these affiliate advertisements were critical to the commercial success of American Bandstand and the network. Since Clark and ABC’s network executives worked on a market-by-market basis to increase the number of affiliates carrying the show, these station announcements also offered a warning to stations that considered dropping the show. On the December 17, 1957, show, for example, Clark read a letter from Aida, Oklahoma, that relayed news that the local affiliate (KTEN) threatened to replace American Bandstand with a locally produced dance program. Teenagers in Aida, the letter continued, prote
sted by writing to the station to demand that KTEN keep American Bandstand on the air. The protests proved successful, and Clark thanked the teenagers for their efforts. Using less than a minute of broadcast time, Clark provided viewers across the country with a tutorial on how to compel affiliates to continue broadcasting the program. Moreover, these station announcements identified teenagers in different parts of the country as television consumers linked to both a specific market and the national market.
Out of these local markets American Bandstand’s map created a vision of a national market of teenage consumers that advertisers and record producers sought to reach. Although the teenage consumer market began developing in the decades before World War II, in the 1950s marketers and the popular press emphasized the discovery of a previously untapped market of teenage consumers.14 In 1956, for example, the Wall Street Journal described the nation’s 16 million teenagers as a “market that’s getting increasing attention from merchants and advertisers.” Estimating that teens spent between $7 and $9 billion annually, the article described how advertisers were turning to teenage-market researchers to help them win the brand loyalty of these customers at an early age.15 Foremost among these researchers, Eugene Gilbert generated many of the statistics that fueled the interest in the teenage market. Starting in the early 1940s, Gilbert, who called himself the “George Gallop of the teenagers,” hired a network of high school students to conduct market research among their peers. By the late 1950s, Gilbert wrote a syndicated newspaper column, “What Young People Think,” and published Advertising and Marketing to Young People (1957), encouraging marketers to develop specific strategies to reach teens.16 Gilbert’s Advertising and Marketing to Young People opens with charts emphasizing that the postwar baby boom had made eight- to eighteen-year-olds the fastest growing age demographic in the country. The size of the youth market, combined with young people’s willingness to try new products, made an “unbeatable selling formula” in Gilbert’s estimation. “Just look at youth!,” Gilbert advised readers:
No established pattern. … No inventory of treasured, and to many an adult’s way of thinking, irreplaceable objects. Youth … is the greatest growing force in the community. His physical needs alone constitute a continuing and growing requirement in food, cloths, entertainment, etc. It has definitely been established that because he is open-minded and desires to learn, he is often the first to accept new and forward-looking products.17
Gilbert’s statements of fact about the youth market were part of the midcentury growth of surveys about “average” Americans. In attempting to “reveal the nation to its members,” historian Sarah Igo contends, these “social scientists were covert nation-builders, conjuring up a collective that could be visualized only because it was radically simplified.”18 Gilbert’s writings on the youth market were influential because he provided pages of data on the consumer preferences of youth, thereby transforming millions of individual teens and pre-teens into a market niche. As evidence of a company eager to reach young consumers, Gilbert could have cited ABC’s attempt to outflank the larger networks by targeting teenage viewers with programs like American Bandstand. For his part, Clark echoed Gilbert’s descriptions of teens as a large, but underserved, consumer market. “It’s been a long, long time since a major network has aimed at the most entertainment-starved group in the country,” Clark told Newsweek in December 1957. “And why not? After all, teenagers have $9 billion a year to spend.”19 While Gilbert generated interest in teenagers as lucrative consumers, American Bandstand provided Clark with a platform to put Gilbert’s ideas into practice.
In this wave of attention focused on teenage consumer culture, American Bandstand stood out for the way that it showed teens using the sponsors’ products. When buying time on American Bandstand, sponsors like 7-Up, Dr. Pepper, Clearasil, and Rice-A-Roni also bought interaction between their products and the show’s teenagers. For example, after the opening shot of teens dancing behind the cut-out map of the United States in one 1957 episode, the camera focused on a 7-Up sign and bottles of the soda placed next to Clark at his podium. Clark read a letter from a viewer in Schenectady, New York, who sent him a bottle opener because he was unable to open a bottle of 7-Up in a previous show. After thanking the viewer for her letter and the gift and commenting on his thirst, Clark took an exaggerated swig of the soda. The camera cut to teenagers in the studio audience who asked for drinks of their own, which Clark promised to deliver after a short commercial. After a one-minute cartoon advertisement for 7-Up, the camera returned to a live shot of Clark handing out bottles of 7-Up from a cooler to an eager group of audience members. As Clark introduced “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes, the camera stayed focused on teens drinking 7-Up and milling about near the cooler through the first fifteen seconds of the song. Throughout the song, the cameras cut away from shots of teens dancing to return to the teenagers drinking 7-Up. All told, this 7-Up promo lasted nearly five minutes and was only the first of several in that episode.20
These interpolated commercials, which were common in radio and television shows in this era, provided American Bandstand’s viewers with daily visual evidence of teenagers’ eagerness to consume products.21 While such a message appealed to marketers looking to expand sales, images of teenagers as consumers also encouraged the home audience to join in by buying the sponsor’s products. The show’s advertisements focused on soft drinks and snacks—Popsicles, Mounds, Almond Joy, Dr. Pepper, and Welch’s grape juice all advertised on the show—all of which were aimed at teenage viewers and their parents in the after-school hours.22 American Bandstand’s afternoon broadcast time was also less expensive for sponsors. In 1958, these advertisers paid $3,400 per half hour compared to $30,000 to $45,000 for a half hour on a live music show in the evening.23 For this bargain rate American Bandstand offered sponsors an unusually deep level of interaction with teenagers in the studio audience and those viewing at home.
To recruit sponsors, ABC also drew on market research suggesting that many housewives watched the show. The network sent a press release proclaiming “Age No Barrier to Bandstand Beat” to local affiliates and sponsors, and during the broadcast Clark encouraged “You housewives [to] roll up the ironing board and join us when you can.”24 By appealing to both the advertising industry’s traditional view of housewives as archetypal consumers and the new interest in teenage consumers, Clark and ABC positioned American Bandstand to be as attractive as possible to advertisers.25 In turn, these advertisers ensured the show’s sustainability.
American Bandstand’s productions strategies also encouraged viewers to participate in the show by taking an interest in the show’s regulars and by learning dance steps. An October 1957 TV Guide review called attention to the show’s camera techniques: “[T]hanks to some camera work by director Ed Yates that would do credit to any TV spectacular there isn’t one of these amateur and largely anonymous supporting players who isn’t worth watching.”26 While teens danced in the studio, the show’s camera operators made frequent use of two types of shots. First, during slow dances they used extended close-ups on the couples’ faces that provided viewers with an intimate look at which teens were dancing together. In turn, the show’s regulars would jockey to dance in front of the cameras so they could be seen on television. Arlene Sullivan, who along with Kenny Rossi made up one of the show’s most popular couples, remembered that “it got to the point where the regular kids wanted to be on camera all the time, so Dick Clark would turn off the red light so we were supposed to not know which camera was on. But we always knew where the camera was. We were hams.” Asked how she knew which camera was on without the red light, Sullivan recalled, “Oh, you knew. You knew how they were focusing. And then Dick Clark would start to say, if he thought we were in front too long, ‘OK, Arlene and Kenny in the back, Franni in the back, Carole in the back.’ He wanted to give the other kids a shot.”27 Despite Clark’s prodding, the regular dancers were on camera enough to become celebrities to the show’s viewers and t
een magazine readers. Teen magazine, for example, told readers they were “swamped with requests to do a story on the kids from Bandstand” and subsequently featured six cover stories on American Bandstand between 1958 and 1960, with profiles of current and former Bandstand regulars like Pat Molittieri, Kenny Rossi, and Arlene Sullivan. ‘Teen also published two eighty-page special issues for teens to read more about the show’s dancers.28 Daily television exposure and celebrity-style coverage in teen magazines made Bandstand’s regulars into what would later be called reality television stars. These nonprofessional performers became, as ‘Teen put it, the “most famous unknown[s] on TV today.”29 American Bandstand’s use of extended close-ups, coupled with numerous magazine profiles, invited viewers to follow along with the dating and style choices of the show’s regulars and provided viewers with information about another form of consumption.
When the cameras were not holding tight close-ups of the regulars’ faces, they were often focused on dancers’ feet. These close-ups on the dancers’ feet highlighted yet another product viewers could buy, Dick Clark American Bandstand Shoes. Teenagers could purchase shoes in the style popularized by the show’s dancers. In another sign of the Dick Clark’s quest to maximize profits, these shoes were advertised to black teenagers in the Philadelphia Tribune at the same time black teenagers were being turned away from the show’s studio audience.
Nicest Kids in Town Page 21