Because Sunday Morning is Only the Beginning

Before our move into our new house we threw away tons of crap that we had been holding onto for one reason or another. Old papers, computers that don’t work, things that we had no idea why we held onto them. We had two VHS tape storage units that were collecting dust in our huge walk-in closet. In the age of DVDs and DVRs, I couldn’t remember that last time I actually used a VHS. We threw away those tapes we knew we would never watch again. I came across a tape that had a label that read simply, “Do Not Erase”. Not remembering what was on the tape, I popped it in my VHS player (which amazingly enough still worked). What was on the tape brought back many memories of sleepless Saturday nights with a good friend of mine.
The show was called, “Discovery Television” or “DTV”. The original creator of the show was another friend of mine, Darrell Lindsay, who named the show after our church’s youth Sunday School, which if I remember right was called “Discovery Sunday School” or something like that.
Barry Brake took over the production of DTV after about a year or so. DTV had an amazing audience of about 100 or less Junior and Senior High School students who attended Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio. It was basically a way for us to make announcements for upcoming events, and also find ways to bring a smile to the student’s faces.
I helped Barry produce the DTV for about two years, and I think his music gig schedule got busy the last year and I produced on my own with the help of some other interns who worked in the Student Ministry.
DTV was basically creative stupidity at its best. We used no video editor, had no computer to do special effects. Pause and record on the 8MM videotape machine which had a cool feature to add a sound track over the video we were recording. Barry is the type of perfectionist who spent over an hour figuring out how long it takes the machines to actually start after you press the record button. All you had to do was count “1, 2 and…” and then what ever was on the screen was getting recorded (this was so ingrained in my head that I still think that in my mind while making family movies).
Here’s an idea of some of the things were in the show…
1. Behind the Bedroom Door. With the permission of the Student’s parent, we would go in and videotape the person’s room while they were away. Embarrassing pictures, love letters (remember e-mail wasn’t used by many), stuffed animals hidden in a closet of a 16 year old baseball star. You could walk in the classrooms and see everyone’s face turn white when the Behind the Bedroom Door intro came on. Each person fearing it was their turn. All good fun.
2. Beer Pressure. One of the topics during our weekly outreach meetings was “Beer Pressure”. To advertise we went to one of the local bars and grabbed an empty 12-pack of beer bottles. It took a great deal of coaxing for me to lie down in the empty bottles and say “Come on, you know you want some. Everybody’s doing it. What are you a Wimp? A Chicken? You’re a really wimpy chicken! “ The whole time I was sloshing a bottle full of water all around. The lesson for the week was to talk about the pressures of underage drinking.
3. The Pulse. Barry would go around and hang out just outside the local high school campus’s and interview students on a variety of topics and issues that were happening at the time. Now-a-days someone who did that would probably be arrested. Picture it, a man in his late 20’s, a video camera, and talking to young boys and girls.
There were so many classic episodes in my mind that’s it would be impossible to put them all down. I was disappointed that in my rush to join the Navy, I didn’t get all of my favorites recorded. One in specific I was looking for was an advertisement for PowerSource. It was a clip from a Barney show (yes the purple dinosaur) where the kids were singing around giant bowels of cereal and fruits. We wrote a song and Barry quickly came up with the soundtrack of really cheesy children music with a terrible synthetic trombone. I can still remember the song even though I don’t have the video to go along with it. “Power Source is a nutritious part of your Wednesday. Power Source is so much fun to do. You can have, lots of apples, bananas, and cereal too. Basically you’ve got nothing better to do”. And then Barney came on and said “Come out to Power Source, where this week we’ve got Purple Pepperonies.
I’m almost sure I have the only remaining copies of DTV. I quickly digitized what I had, and now it sits on my computer, and a compact disc as a 700mb file of sheer silliness.
And for those out there asking the question, yes, I still think that while I was in college, I had more fun on Saturday nights than my friends who were out being the typical college students.