Earl William Muntz

Earl William "Madman" Muntz (1914–1987), born in Elgin, Illinois, was a merchandiser of cars and consumer electronics from the 1940s until his death in 1987. Although he dropped out of high school, Muntz ultimately made fortunes in three separate areas: automobiles, TV sets, and car stereos and tapes. (A 1968 Los Angeles Times article noted that one year he sold $72 million worth of cars, five years later he sold $55 million worth of TV receivers, and in 1967 he sold $30 million worth of car stereos and tapes.) He was a pioneer in television commercials with his oddball "Madman" persona in which he dressed in unusual costumes, engaged in stunts, and made outrageous claims to generate publicity. He also pioneered car stereos with the development of the Muntz Stereo-Pak (better known as the 4-track cartridge, a predecessor to the 8-track cartridge developed by Lear Industries), invented the practice of Muntzing, produced and marketed the first black-and-white television sets to sell in the USA for less than $100, and created one of the earliest functional widescreen projection TVs. He also coined the term "TV".

After his success as a used car salesman, and then with Kaiser-Frazer dealerships in Los Angeles and New York City, Muntz founded the Muntz Car Company, which made the "Muntz Jet", a sports car with jet-like contours. The car was manufactured between 1951 and 1953, with fewer than 400 cars being made. Muntz married seven times and divorced six. Among his wives were actress Joan Barton (who appeared in films with John Wayne), and Patricia Stevens of the Patricia Stevens Finishing Schools. Phyllis Diller was among his many girlfriends. He was friends with singer Rudy Vallee, comedian Jerry Colonna, actor Bert Lahr, television presenter Dick Clark and actor Gene Autry.

Early life

Muntz was fascinated by electronics from an early age. He built his first radio at age 8 and had built one for his parents car by the age of 14. During the Great Depression, he dropped out of Elgin High School (at age 15) to work in his parents hardware store in Elgin, Illinois.

At the age of 20, Muntz opened his first used car lot in Elgin with just a $500 line of credit. However he was not old enough to legally close his own deals, so his mother had to sign all of the paperwork for him.

Marketing innovations

During a vacation in California, Muntz noted that used cars sold for much higher prices than in Elgin. So, at age 26, he decided to move and open a used car lot in Glendale. On a hunch, he purchased (with the intent to resell) 13 brand new right-hand-drive vehicles that had originally been built for customers in the Orient, but were stranded due to World War II. One vehicle was a custom-made Lincoln that had been built for Chiang Kai-shek. Local newspapers ran stories about the unusual cars—as a result Muntz sold all of them in two weeks without even removing them from their original shipping crates. Muntz soon opened a second lot in Los Angeles and closed his lot in Elgin.

Common opinion at the time dictated that used car salesmen should project a staid image, however Muntz completely rejected this thinking. He realized the possibilities of generating publicity with weird stunts and he developed his "Madman" persona as a result. His flamboyant billboards and oddball television and radio commercials for his various businesses soon made him famous. In one TV commercial (which normally aired just after the Ed Sullivan Show), Muntz dressed in red long johns and a Napoleon hat and promoted his new 14in-screen TV sets by saying "I wanna give 'em away, but Mrs. Muntz won't let me. She's CRAAAAZY!" In his used auto commercials, he marketed one model as the "daily special" which he stated MUST sell that day. Muntz claimed that if the car did not sell, he would smash it to pieces on camera with a sledgehammer. Another infamous Muntz used car TV pitch was "I buy 'em retail and sell 'em wholesale... it's more fun that way!" His commercials generated so much publicity that comedians such as Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and Steve Allen would continually try to outdo each other during television appearances by telling "Madman" Muntz jokes. University of Southern California fans would often spell out Muntz' name during halftime as a prank.

His radio commercials generally followed a classical music theme, structuring melodies around the spelling out Muntz' name. Muntz also used skywriting as a marketing tactic. However, after watching one of his ads being created, he noted that the letters often began to blur and dissipate before the pilot could finish spelling out "Muntz Televisions." As a result, Muntz came up with the abbreviation "TV".

His commercials generated a significant amount of publicity and his car lots even became tourist attractions. A 1946 survey by Panner Motor Tours revealed that Muntz ranked seventh among things in Southern California that attracted tourists.

Muntz was willing to take large risks in his attempts to generate publicity. During the era of McCarthyism, he asked one of his advisers "Do you think I'd make the front pages if I joined the Communist Party?" He even named one of his daughters "Tee Vee" (although she was normally referred to as "Teena").

This same "Madman" method would later be copied by other, including New York area electronics chain Crazy Eddie. In TV commercials for Crazy Eddie (named for owner, Eddie Antar), radio personality Jerry Carroll would leap at the camera and jump around while jabbering at high speed, and always end his spiel with the line "Crazy Eddie: Our prices are insaaaaaane!" Carroll was a significant 80s icon, even appearing in a commercial in the film Splash.

Muntz Jet

In 1948, race car designer Frank Kurtis (founder of Kurtis-Kraft), attempted to market a new sports car under his own marque. This car was named the Kurtis Kraft Sport, a 2-seater which only sold 36 units by 1950. In 1951, Kurtis sold the license to manufacture the cars to Muntz, who quickly rebadged them as the "Muntz Jet", extended the body to make it a 4-seater, and exchanged the Ford engine with a larger Cadillac V8. Later, this engine would be replaced with a less expensive Lincoln sidevalve V8.

The car was manufactured in Evanston, Illinois and featured its own unique design, with aluminum body panels and a removable fiberglass top. It was capable of 112 mph, a significant achievement for a road car at the time (the fastest production car in 1953 was the Pegaso Z-102 Supercharged sportscar at 155 mph/244.62 km/h). However, the labor and materials demands related to producing it resulted in a high price and after selling about 400 cars (and losing money on each), Muntz closed the company in 1954.

"Muntzing"

Although Muntz pretended to be a madman in his unorthodox television commercials, he was a shrewd businessman and a self-taught electrical engineer: through trial-and-error, he developed a practice of reducing electrical components inside devices to the minimum number needed to function. This practice became known as "Muntzing".

In the early 1950s, most brands of television receivers were complex pieces of equipment. TVs commonly contained approximately 30 vacuum tubes as well as large rheostats, transformers, and other heavy electronics. As a result they were usually very expensive (for example, the cheapest U.S.-manufactured set made before World War II, which had a 3-inch (8 cm) screen, cost US$125, the equivalent of US$1,863 in 2007. The cheapest model with a 12-inch (30 cm) screen cost $445, equal to $6,633 in 2007. By 1954, although television had existed in various forms for more than 40 years, only 55% of US households owned a receiver. By contrast, just 8 years later, 90% of US households owned a set.)

Muntz developed a television chassis that produced an acceptable monochrome picture with just 17 tubes. He carried a pair of wire clippers around and when he thought one of his employees was "overengineering" a circuit, he would begin snipping components out until the picture or sound stopped working. At that point, he would tell the engineer "Well, I guess you have to put that last part back in" and walk away.

Marketed under the name "Muntz" by his company "Muntz TV Inc.", the simplified receivers were the first black-and-white TV sets to retail in the USA for less than $100. They sold well and exhibited good reliability as the reduced number of tubes created much less heat. They worked well in metropolitan areas, close to television transmission towers where signals were strong. Due to the reduced component count, his sets worked poorly with weak signals, as most of the components left out of his design were those intended to boost performance in fringe areas. This was a calculated decision: Muntz preferred to leave the low-volume, high-performance television receiver market to firms such as RCA and Zenith Electronics, as his intended customers were primarily urban dwellers with limited funds to spend on a television receiver. In 1952, Muntz TV Inc. grossed $49.9 million.

4-track cartridge development

→ Hauptartikel: Stereo-Pak

In his attempts to combine two of his main product lines, cars and stereos, Muntz invented the Muntz Stereo-Pak 4-track tape cartridge, a direct predecessor of the Stereo 8 cartridge (aka the "8-Track Tape") developed by Bill Lear. Muntz also founded a spinoff company which manufactured prerecorded 4-track tape cartridges. Most record labels did not manufacture 4-track tape cartridges themselves, however, the Muntz Electronics Corporation licensed music from all the major record labels and issued hundreds of different 4-track tapes in the 1960s, from approximately 1965–1970. Muntz exhibited his Autostereo players and Stereo-Pak cartridges at the 1967 Consumer Electronics Show.

The Autostereo player (which retailed for $129 and up in 1963) was a popular aftermarket addition among the Beverly Hills rich and famous. Frank Sinatra had one installed in his Buick Riviera, Dean Martin had one in his Corvette, and Peter Lawford had one in his Ghia. James Garner, Red Skelton, and Lawrence Welk all had them installed as well. Barry Goldwater bought one for his son and Jerry Lewis went so far as to have his scripts recorded onto Stereo-Pak]] cartridges so he could learn his lines while driving.

The market for Muntz' 4-track system had faded by 1970 due to competition from Stereo 8, which saved money by using less magnetic tape and used a less-complex cartridge mechanism. Although the 4-track system had higher fidelity, since the tape speed was double the speed of the Stereo 8 system, and the 4-track had wider heads for better bandwidth, the Stereo 8 quickly became the dominant format for car stereo systems during the late 1960s. The Ford Motor Company began featuring Stereo 8 players in their 1965 automobiles and it became a standard option by 1966.

In a 1979 interview in The Videophile newsletter, Muntz revealed that the biggest problem for the Stereo-Pak business was returned merchandise. He explained that when licensing major artists like The Beatles, the Stereo-Pak plant had to churn out hundreds of thousands of cartridges. But once the album left the charts and sales dropped, retailers would return the unsold cartridges, expecting credit towards new titles. Muntz was unprepared for the returns and said the huge cost of unsold merchandise eventually made his Stereo-Pak business unprofitable.

Muntz and Home Video

After his Stereo-Pak audio business closed its doors in late 1970 (when a fire gutted the building it was in), Muntz quickly involved himself in the growing home video market. During the mid-1970s, Muntz had the idea of taking a 15" Sony color CRT television set, fitting it with a special lens and reflecting mirror, then projecting the magnified image onto a larger screen. He housed these primitive units in a large wooden console, making it one of the first successful widescreen projection TV sets marketed for home use.

The sets were built in Muntz' headquarters in Van Nuys, California. Sony's U.S. sales division was unaware that Muntz managed to deal directly with Sony's Tokyo OEM department, who shipped the TV chassis directly to his Van Nuys factory. Because of Muntz' talent for mass-market advertising and self-promotion, the projection sets became a multi-million-dollar business by 1977. Muntz was quick to feature Sony's Betamax as well as JVC's and RCA's VHS home video recorders in his store, and he set up a showroom to demonstrate the potential for creating a "theater experience in the home."

In 1979, Muntz decided to sell blank tapes and VCRs at cost to bring customers into his showroom—where he would then relentlessly trumpet his profitable Muntz projection TV systems. His success continued through the early 1980s. Unfortunately, Muntz invested heavily in the Technicolor CVC, which was a 1/4" system designed to compete with Betamax, VHS, and the 8mm video system introduced in 1985. The CVC format was ultimately unsuccessful in establishing itself on the market, sales quickly eroded, and Muntz' store closed soon after.

Later years

By the time Muntz died in 1987 (of lung cancer), he had begun to focus his retail business on cellular phones, satellite dishes, and prefabricated aluminum houses. At the time of his death, he was the number one retailer of cellular phones in Los Angeles.

In 2001, he was posthumously inducted into the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame.

External links

• Earl Muntz Biography, a short biography from the Consumer Electronics Association website
• The Man: Earl Muntz, a biography from the website of a biopic about him
• Earl Muntz, the 4-Track Madman, from a website maintained by fans of 8-track tapes