My First Sony Experience Is With My Sony Television Set

Well, it’s not really mine, but my parents’… but, then again, my brother and I were probably the ones who have spent the most time in front of it.

“Kulit Bulilit”, “Sesame Street”, “Batibot”… “Uncle Bob’s Lucky Seven Club”, “Mga Kwento ni Lola Basyang”, “Okay Ka, Fairy Ko”… “John en Marsha”, “The Sic O’Clock News”, “Goin’ Bananas”… “Looney Toons”, “The Magical World of Disney”, “Heckle and Jeckle”… “The Smurfs”, “He-Man”, “M.A.S.K.”… “G.I. Joe”, “Transformers”, “Ghost Busters”… “Voltron”, “Voltes V”, “Bioman”… “Astroboy”, “Inhumanoids”, “Visionaries”… “Japan Video Topics”, “Tele-Aralan”, “Wok With Yan”…

I could probably fill up several pages just listing down all the programs I remember watching on our old Sony TV set which served our family for close to 20 years.

I searched all over the web trying to find out what model it was, but alas, I couldn’t find any mention of it anywhere. The closest thing (in appearance) I’ve been able to find is the Sony KV1300E (shown below - Photo by Rainer Steinführ) .


It was quite small… perhaps a 13 incher with a wooden casing and it had quite a number of knobs and dials on it.

Like the KV1300E… I believe it had two big dials (one for VHF channels and the other for UHF channels) and at least four small knobs (the power button/volume control knob, the brightness adjustment knob, the hue adjustment knob, and the color adjustment knob).

As far as I can remember, our TV set looked very similar to the KV1300E EXCEPTING THAT our set had a physical/mechanical lock (yup, with a keyhole) situated between the speaker and the UHF channel dial (or somewhere near that area)… something I’ve never seen on any other TV set I’ve come across.

I remember trying (just once) to gently press on the lock (which, in its “unlocked” position, was protruding out of the set) and it felt like it had a spring inside. My brother and I thought (and concluded) that if we were to press on it hard enough it would lock up, rendering the TV unusable. And since we never saw a key for it in anywhere in our house, we never dared trying it out. For that, I never found out how it really functioned.

Anyway, it had undergone numerous repairs during the last five-or-so years it was with us… once for having its channel dial falling off. This reminds me of those occasions when my mother would yell at us every time she would hear rapid clicking sounds coming from the living room. Since we were instructed not to turn the channel dial counter-clockwise (for some reason), my brother and I developed this habit of turning the dial as rapidly as possible to get through all the channels as fast as we could. :P

If parents are our first teachers, and teachers are our second parents, that TV set was my private tutor, such that it taught me many things which I wouldn’t have learned from any of my teachers or my parents.

Like my first Spanish words ( “mi”, “yo”, “ola”, “agua”, “casa”, “cerrado”) and my first Spanish sentences (“Mi casa es su casa”, and “Yo quiero un vaso grande de agua fria”) which I learned from Sesame Street.

With it, I also learned how to count from one to ten in Japanese (“ichi”, “ni”, “san”, “shi”, “go”, “roku”, “shichi”, “hachi”, “kyu”, “jyu”), though I’ve already forgotten the title of the program I learned that from (which, by the way, also taught me that “helicopter” is called “herikoputa” in Japanese).

It made me aware of the latest technological developments in Japan at the time (through “Japan Video Topics”) like the use of cooking oil as car fuel (yep, it’s not new… I first heard of it in the late 80s, I believe… if not, within the first quarter of the 90s).

It was also through that television set that I first witnessed how things were made/done/processed, like samurai swords, cars, bottled milk, cheese, artificial insemination in cows, and cartoons/animation (an industry which I got myself involved in a few years ago).

And, to top it all off, that television set allowed me to feel first hand the sensations of being electrocuted when my fingers accidentally touched the metal terminals of the plug as I was plugging the set to the electric outlet. :P

And they say television is detrimental to a child’s development. :P

Unfortunately, my parents decided to get rid of it when we moved in to our new home some 14 years ago.

That television set definitely had a great significance in my life, just like how Sony’s World’s First Motionflow 240Hz LCD TV (the Sony Bravia Z450) most probably will. Considering what they say it’s capable of doing, it will definitely change my TV viewing experience… especially if I’m going to watch Formula 1 races on it. Imagine… speed without the blur.