Today's Tidbit... 1963 Ford Football Tele-Viewer - Team Comparisons

We previously covered the Punt, Pass & Kick program and aspects of the 1963 NFL schedule included in the 1963 Ford Football Tele-Viewer brochure. Today, we cover the innovative interior pages that make the Ford Football Tele-Viewers a fun document. The brochure begins and ends with ten 8 x 11-inch pages containing miscellaneous information, while the middle 32 pages are cut to produce 64 half pages, each of which is 8 x 5.5 inches.

The half pages include 1962 season summaries by team, reviews of each week of the 1962 season, NFL records, a few other items, and the 1963 rosters for each team. The team rosters on the half pages had a specific purpose. Today, websites allow us to easily compare one product's specs against another or one team roster against another, but that capability did not exist in 1963. For example, here are the 1962 summary pages for the Bears and Colts. The 1962 Bears roster is on pages A-5, and the Colts roster is on B%, which are physically separate pages due to the cut in the middle.

Meanwhile, pages A7 and B7 show the rosters and selected images of the San Francisco 49ers. Although the order of information for the offense and defense differs across the pages, the content is the same, though the images vary.

While duplicating the 49ers' information may seem odd at first, the duplication and cut page format allows each NFL roster to be viewed side-by-side against any other NFL team. For example, if someone was watching a Bears and Giants game on TV, they could display the Bears roster on page A5 on the left and flip to the Giants roster on page B31 on the right or any of the other 181 team combinations. The differing order of the offense and defense on the left and right half pages also places the teams' offenses and defenses directly across from one another—pretty fancy stuff for a printed giveaway.

So, besides the joy of having your kid participate in the Punt, Pass & Kick competition, the brochure provided parents -and especially dads in 1963- a handy reward for taking their kid to the local Ford dealer to enroll, and that turned out to be a pretty good deal all around.

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