Camp TV of the 1960s Reassessing the Vast Wasteland

Camp TV of the 1960s offers a comprehensive understanding of all of the many forms camp TV took during that critical decade. In reevaluating the history of camp on television, the authors reconsider the infantilized conceptualization of sixties television, which has generally been characterized as the creative and cultural ebb between the 1950s Golden Age of television and the networks' shift "relevance" in the early 1970s.

Encompassing contributions from a broad range of media and television scholars that (re)consider programs like Batman, The Monkees, The Addams Family, Bewitched, F Troop, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, chapters closely examine beloved 1960s American prime-time programs that drew significantly on aspects of camp, many of which were widely syndicated and left continuing imprints on popular culture. Other chapters consider key TV precursors from the early sixties; British camp television programs such as The Avengers; the use of musical codes to convey camp humor (even on black-and-white sets); the role that the viewing strategies of queer communities played - and continued to play even decades later; and how camp's multivalence allowed for more conservative readings, especially among older audiences, which were critical for the move to "mass camp" throughout American culture by the early seventies.

Camp TV of the 1960s is essential reading for students and scholars in television studies and others interested in the history and theory of camp, the 1960s, or popular culture, as well as fans of these well-known but generally understudied television programs.

Isabel C. Pinedo is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. She is the author of Difficult Women on Television Drama: The Gender Politics of Complex Women in Serial Narratives, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing, and articles on television and the horror film in such journals as Television and New Media, Journal of Popular Television, and Jump Cut, and such books as Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture and A Companion to the Horror Film.

Wyatt D. Phillips is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the English Department at Texas Tech University. His work primarily engages questions of the political economy and industrial practices of media production and circulation. He has published in Film History, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, The Journal of Popular Television, and The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, as well as contributing chapters to half a dozen collections.

Introduction: Camp(ing) in the 1960s

Chapter One: Gilligan and Captain Kirk Have More in Common Than You Think: 1960s Camp TV as an Alternative Genealogy for Cult Television

Section I: Laying the (Camp)Groundwork
Chapter Two: Fractured Flickers (1963-64), Camp, and Cinema's Ab/usable Past
Chapter Three: Wearing French Cuffs to a Gunfight: Camp and Violence in Hanna-Barbera's Snagglepuss (1961)

Section II: Camp TV's Tentpoles
Chapter Four: They're Creepy and They're Campy: Camping the American Family on 1960s Horror Television
Chapter Five: Spellcasting Camp: Bewitched (1964-72)
Chapter Six: How the West Was Fun: F Troop (1965-67) and the American Frontier
Chapter Seven: "Holy Fruit Salad, Batman!": Unmasking Queer Conceits of ABC's Late-1960s Branding
Chapter Eight: "We're Being Passed off as Something We Aren't": Authenticity vs. Camp on The Monkees (1966-68)
Chapter Nine: Straight Male Spies, Queer Camp Vistas: The Evolution of Non-Normative Masculinities in The Avengers (1961-69) and 1960s British Spy-fi TV

Section III: Other Camp(TV)sites
Chapter Ten: Can TV Music Be Camp? Notes from the 1960s
Chapter Eleven: Flipper's (1964-67) Dark Camp
Chapter Twelve: Camp TV, The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-71), and Flip Wilson's (1970-74) Geraldine Jones: Negativity, Trans Gender Queer, and the Comedy of Manners
Chapter Thirteen: "Far Right, Far Left and Far Out": Mainstreaming Camp on American Television

Afterword: Questions of Taste and Pre-cult/Post-cult
Index