It still beats today's cable TV programming by leaps and bounds.

Aside from disco dancing the 70's were such a zero era.

Touch-Matic 12 focuses on the brand new technology that will make your dialing a breeze with a rectangular thing that you can easily store your most important numbers on!

Years before one touch dialing ever came to fruition, people relied on phone directories to look up numbers. Now, with a push of a button, all your troubles are over! Yippie-yai-yay!

Narrated blandly by someone who looks she just finished hosting The Romper Room, this spot actually is designed for store managers to introduce them to this newfangled technology. All of this would be somewhat boring except for the fact that we get to see a DYNAMITE display of circa 70s phone products! Yes! Mickey Mouse Phones and wild shape phones! Groovy! Or. in the words of our narrator, It is good.

Pretty long, dull comercial about this innovative "Touch-O-Matic" contraption that seems to be nothing more than a speed dialer the size of a shoebox. For an initial equipment fee and a low monthly fee, you too can lose more desk space to the touch-o-matic 12, available in all the hideous colors of the era. You can hook the Touch-O-matic to any telephone. You just unhook this wire, and that wire, switch this wire, and plug that wire back in. Then all you have to do, is repeat on the other phone. How convenient!

A Dorothy Hamill clone explains this brand-new invention: the speed-dialer. Our hostess is clearly reading from cue cards placed below the camera (you can even notice this in the preview pics), contributing to her overall Stepford Wife creepiness.
A bit boring, but there are worse ways you could spend ten minutes...

This quite curious film (produced by the Audio/Visual Division of Pacific Northwest Bell, nowadays known as Qwest), features the Touch-a-matic 12 (referred to in the film as the TAM-12), which is basically a early speed-dialer, now standard equipment on most phones today. I'd imagine this item was innovative, but quite expensive for it's time (late '70s), considering the technology to make it work (memory ICs, etc.) was expensive in itself, plus the fact that the film instructs to market the dialer to high-income customers as well...

This film definitely has the whole 70's style/aesthetic going on, making it a delight to watch, IMHO :).

One other thing I noticed, it looks like this film was originally shot/edited/produced on videotape, then transferred to film. I can tell this because there are some video scan-line "jaggies" present on diagonal areas in the scenes in the film (i.e. the top of the outside door frame of the store, and especially in the Bell System logo at the end of the film), plus the motion has a certain lag to it, considering it's 30 video frames transferred to 24 film frames a second, plus the image resolution itself is lower, more at par with video than film. It looks exactly like most films transferred from video that I've seen, and I've seen quite a few.

This was quite common practice for videotape-originated programs produced in the 50's-80's, since VTR/VCRs weren't very common, due to their cost, in most industrial/institutional environments of the time (businesses, schools, hospitals, etc.), but projectors always were available, until the mid 80's, when VCRs were affordable enough.

This practice has seen a revivial though among independent filmmakers today (i.e. Rob Nilsson, Lars Von Trier), with them shooting their films on DV and haivng them transferred to 35mm stock for theatrical release...

Before the 1980's, ThePhoneCompany, formerly AT&T, was a nationwide government regulated monopoly with guaranteed profits. Guaranteed profits! Imagine that! But that wasn't enough. Gotta sell gizmos for additional fees. Useful gizmos? Sure, but the customer doesn't own the gizmo and has to pay monthly fees forever. And who to target? Those with high incomes, of course. And if they wanted a simple product like this but didn't want to pay on it forever? ThePhoneCompany would cut off your service and ruin your credit if they found out you put a non-approved product on "their" line.

Now that I have that off my chest, this is a less than ordinary film to train sales staff.

"The Touch-a-matic 12" is an insider film produced for employees of Northwest Pacific Bell, promoting the Touch-a-matic 12, a very early speed dialer. The film has much camp value: the fashions, hair styles, and phones all very much evoke the mid-seventies. The "simple" procedures for setting up the Touch-a-matic 12 turn out to be quite long.