THE 1980s / MONDAY NIGHT ON ABC

That's Incredible! in the 80s: When Weird Reality TV Was Family Viewing

A kid played the piano, somebody beat a video game, and sooner or later somebody in the room said, “There’s no way.”

By Gizmo

SMELLS LIKE GEN X / 1980s TVDON’T CHANGE THE CHANNEL YETThey’re about to show the part you came back from the kitchen for.

That's Incredible! editorial cover using original-series imagery.

The show would tell you what somebody was about to try, and the room would start arguing about whether it could be done. Then you’d see the equipment, get a look at the person who’d agreed to use it, and find out the commercial was coming first. I remember wanting everybody to hold their questions until we’d seen the landing. That was going to tell us more than whatever we could work out from the couch. That’s Incredible! arrived on ABC on March 3, 1980, with John Davidson, Cathy Lee Crosby and Fran Tarkenton. It had room for stunt performers, kids who were remarkably good at something, a demonstration you wanted to see twice, and stories about things that might or might not have happened the way they were told. You could spend an evening being impressed, skeptical and slightly worried, all without having to change the channel. It feels like a very early-eighties way to spend a Monday. One person in the room would be there for the motorcycle. Another might remember a little girl at a piano. If you were the kid who’d been told to stop putting quarters into a machine at the arcade, you might have been the only person in the room who understood why grown people were taking a video game so seriously.

Inside This Article

Three people to help you believe what you were seeing
The commercials never helped my nerves
The little girl at the piano deserved the room
The night the arcade belonged on the family set
Everybody brought a different amount of skepticism
Monday night was busy right out of the gate
What I’d look for now
A few things worth checking before the next stunt

Three people to help you believe what you were seeing

The hosts gave the whole thing a friendly place to start. John Davidson had the ease of a guy who could introduce a person with a peculiar reason to be on television and make it sound like the next perfectly reasonable thing to see. Cathy Lee Crosby could get you interested in what the people in a piece had to say. Fran Tarkenton brought the recognizable face of somebody plenty of viewers already knew from football. I remember the three of them as a group before I remember much of what any one of them said. They could give a story a little buildup and leave you ready to see what a camera crew had found. Then they’d be back to introduce something with almost nothing in common with the thing we’d just seen. That’s a useful kind of company for a show that might have a very different idea of entertainment fifteen minutes from now.

Fran Tarkenton, Cathy Lee Crosby and John Davidson pose in a black-and-white portrait. — The three hosts in an original ABC publicity portrait.

The 1981 TV Guide cover with the three hosts is a good way to remember how familiar the faces had become. You could see them on a magazine at the store, recognize the name at the bottom, and have a very clear idea which day you’d be able to see them again. That kind of repetition is probably why I can get the title back in my head with a lot less work than it takes to remember one complete episode. I like the fact that the show made a little time to establish the person who was going to do the thing. A feat has a beginning and an end. Somebody has been working on it for considerably longer than the time we get to see it, and a good introduction gets you wondering what the rest of that person’s day looks like.

Cathy Lee Crosby and her co-hosts appear on the cover of TV Guide. — The three hosts had the cover of TV Guide for the week of May 2, 1981.

The three hosts stand together by the large screen on the studio set. — A glimpse of the room from the original opening.

The three hosts and a few of the things that turned up on their stage. View full size.

The commercials never helped my nerves

A stunt is one of the easiest things to follow when a roomful of people is doing three other things. A person is here. They intend to get over there. There’s something in between that makes this a pretty poor idea. You can get that much from one look at the picture and have plenty of time to call the person in the kitchen over. TV Guide describes a motorcycle stunt involving three helicopters and their spinning rotors. That’s the sort of premise that could hang around in conversation after a show had ended. You could put two people who’d seen the same piece in a room and get an entirely different explanation of what had made it impressive. A kid might want to know how fast the bike went. A grown-up might be asking why a television show was paying anybody to find out.

Fran Tarkenton, John Davidson and Cathy Lee Crosby smile in a black-and-white portrait. — The Oklahoma Times ran this portrait of Fran Tarkenton, John Davidson and Cathy Lee Crosby in February 1981.

Some of the danger stayed with the people who had to perform and film it. In 1980, stunt rider Gary Wells crashed while attempting a jump at Caesars Palace for the series. He was seriously injured, and a number of spectators were hurt. Contemporary coverage in Time shows people asking how far this kind of television should go while the show was still new. The Washington Post reported ABC’s decision at the time to withhold the segment. That’s a piece of the memory worth keeping clear. A stunt introduced on a variety show, something planned for the cameras, and something that made it to the broadcast are different things. My favorite parts to revisit now are often the ones where the surprise came from seeing somebody do a thing very well. I still remember the feeling of wanting an answer before the commercial. I’m glad the hour had more ways to get it from us.

The little girl at the piano deserved the room

The preserved KABC broadcast from November 2, 1981, has a piece about Satauna “Taunnie” Howery, a seven-year-old blind pianist. Her parents and music teacher appear. In a show I tend to remember as a series of bets somebody was willing to take, it’s nice to go back to a few minutes where I want to hear what a person can actually play. There’s a particular feeling when a kid is good at something in front of a room full of adults. The adults may be waiting to decide how surprised they’re supposed to be. The kid is probably thinking about the thing that comes next. I enjoy the moments when you can spend enough time with the person doing the work to catch a little of that feeling for yourself.

Cathy Lee Crosby stands on the set in a light-colored outfit. — Cathy Lee Crosby in the surviving November 2, 1981 KABC broadcast.

The archive gives you a sense of how much one edition could get through. The November show has a Hangman game with Vincent Price as well. Price turning up in a story about a game you know from drawing on a piece of paper is a perfectly good reason to stay in the room. I’d forgotten how easy it was for a whole program to have no single mood. You’d get attached to one idea, and then somebody would want to know whether you had another few minutes for a very different one. If you only go back for the spectacular parts, I think you miss some of the reason people found it easy to watch together. There were things to see that made it worthwhile to ask who else in the house might like the next story. You were going to be able to remember different parts of the same evening.

The night the arcade belonged on the family set

I love that a show with a former NFL quarterback on the stage could make room for competitive video games. In January 1983, That’s Incredible! and Twin Galaxies co-sponsored the North American Video Game Olympics in Ottumwa, Iowa. Guinness credits Ben Gold with winning the event, which used five games: Frogger, Millipede, Joust, Super Pac-Man and Donkey Kong Jr. That list is enough to bring back the sound of an arcade. Joust and Frogger ask for two completely different kinds of nerve. Anybody who’d ever used the last quarter of an afternoon could have an opinion about which machine would end the attempt. And there was prime-time television, giving the people who were good at this a chance to demonstrate why anybody would bother getting that good.

The telecast shows an arcade game, its player and the score. — The 1983 arcade segment makes room on screen for both the player and the game.

A surviving clip from the program gives the competition a little more shape than a list of high scores. You can see the difference between what the camera wants to show and what a player needs to concentrate on. The camera has to let somebody at home understand there’s a contest. The person playing needs to keep looking at the same few inches of screen. If you remember somebody leaning in too close to a machine while you were waiting to play, it’s a familiar sight with a very different audience around it. I think that’s why the story still gets passed around. A game can be a thing you do in the corner of a pizza place. Put it on a program your whole family watches and it has a chance to become something you can talk about at home. The person who didn’t play may still know how it feels to watch somebody try to keep their hands steady with other people looking.

A young contestant stands in front of arcade machines. — A contestant from the 1983 video game championship report.

Everybody brought a different amount of skepticism

The series made room for unusual claims, including paranormal stories it could present with a reenactment. I remember that as part of the fun of trying to work out how a segment was supposed to land. A person could be curious about a story and still want to know how the people on the show knew it had happened. A reenactment puts a picture in your head. That’s a large part of why it works on television. The picture can be interesting while the account it’s based on remains unsettled. I find those old pieces easier to enjoy when I remember how much of the response used to happen on the other side of the set. You might have one person willing to give the story a chance and somebody else wanting the lights on so they could explain why a thing had looked that way.

A man in a white coat points to a skeleton in a medical room. — A medical scene from original footage preserved in a TVW-7 promo.

A straightforward demonstration could be more satisfying. Somebody who can do a thing under the camera’s gaze has brought you a little more than a story about what happened on a different day. You still have questions, and you’ve got a few seconds of a person doing it to start from. That range is part of what makes the title so memorable. Saying something was incredible could mean you’d enjoyed it, you were impressed by it, or you were going to need a good deal more information before you were prepared to call it anything else. I can hear a whole family saying the same word and meaning three different things.

A woman holds a spotted cat inside a bathroom. — An animal feature glimpsed in the original show footage used in the Australian promo.

Monday night was busy right out of the gate

The 1979–80 TV rankings put That’s Incredible! at number three for the season. A show that arrived in March was already part of the conversation about what people had watched. A contemporary 1983 trade ad still pitched the program around its Monday time slot and all the things it could pack into an hour. The mix had enough life for several seasons of reasons to sit down. The competition is worth remembering, too. Real People had arrived on NBC the year before and could take you to somebody’s house, town or workshop for an unusual story. ABC’s show made its own impression with the expectation that the next few minutes would give you something to see. You could enjoy both and have a pretty good idea which kind of evening each one had promised you.

The show’s title appears across two men on the set. — The title on screen in the November 2, 1981 KABC broadcast.

When I think about that stretch of television, I remember how often a family could agree to give a show a few minutes. Somebody might be headed out of the room when a host explained what was coming. All it took was one person wanting to see the end of the piece and another person asking what was supposed to happen. By then the rest of the room had a reason to wait, too. Now I can get to the arcade story without sitting through anything that came before it. I like being able to find it. Part of the old pleasure was getting a story you would never have thought to look for because it happened to be the next thing on. I can understand why the people who put it on wanted to keep the variety right there in the hour.

What I’d look for now

Start with the 1983 video game piece if you remember the machines. Then give the 1981 broadcast a chance to play for a while. The young pianist and the Hangman segment make a better case for the show’s range than any single clip of a man going over something on a motorcycle. The original run ended in 1984. The Paley Center also has the separately cataloged 1988 reunion. If an old bit of footage feels familiar and has a different date beside it, there’s a fair chance you’re seeing something a station or a special put back in front of you. The show was made of a lot of pieces. Some of those pieces have had a long life of their own.

The three hosts stand onstage in front of an audience. — Back to the studio during the surviving arcade report.

My favorite way to remember it is still that minute when everybody looked up. A strange enough idea could make three people in the same room forget for a second that they were doing three different things. Then somebody got to see what happened and had the rest of the evening to tell the one person who’d missed it.

Fog surrounds a model railway scene. — A visual surprise from the original show footage in the TVW-7 promo.

Three moments worth looking for in the surviving ABC footage. View full size.

A few things worth checking before the next stunt

When did That’s Incredible! originally air?

ABC premiered it on March 3, 1980. The original run continued through 1984. A separate reunion aired in 1988.

Who hosted That’s Incredible!?

John Davidson, Cathy Lee Crosby and Fran Tarkenton hosted the original ABC show.

Did the show really cover a video game championship?

Yes. That’s Incredible! and Twin Galaxies co-sponsored the January 1983 North American Video Game Olympics in Ottumwa, Iowa. Ben Gold won.

How was it related to Real People?

NBC’s Real People began in 1979. It was an earlier success in the same wave of prime-time programs about unusual people and stories. That’s Incredible! followed on ABC in 1980 with a strong emphasis on feats and demonstrations.

Sources & Further Reading

Keep Rewinding

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By Gizmo · Smells Like Gen X

That’s Incredible! in the 80s: When Weird Reality TV Was Family Viewing