If Only I Had a Little Humility I Would Be Perfect: Ted Turner, 1938-2026

I mean, we’ve got to talk about him, right? We live in Ted Turner’s world now, for good or ill, and of course we’ve got to get into the colorization thing because what even is this site if we don’t. So we’re not going to give him unadulterated praise; you don’t expect that from Media Magpies. But we’re also going to acknowledge that he did actually do some good and definitely did what he thought was best, even if the consequences of that are still being felt and are still not great.

His early life is frankly kind of bonkers reading. His father was a billboard magnate, per Wikipedia, the origin of his early media empire. He attended Brown University, initially as a Classics major. (Apparently his father wrote that he “almost puked” at the choice, which is a lot.) He switched to econ, but it didn’t end up fully mattering, as he was expelled for having a girl in his dorm room. He joined the Coast Guard Reserve to get out of Vietnam and did his wartime service in places like Fort Lauderdale and Charleston.

Following his father’s suicide, Turner took over the family business. He started buying radio stations. He then sold them to buy a UHF TV station—remember those? He bought another. He received the rights from the FCC to broadcast by satellite. He bought the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Hawks. He paid MIT’s Technology Broadcast System fifty grand for the rights to “WTBS.” In 1979, he sold a station he owned in North Carolina to found the Cable News Network. He tried and failed to buy CBS, and then instead he bought and sold MGM/UA, keeping only the film library, with which he started Turner Classic Movies.

Which means we need to get to the colorization thing. I strongly suspect that he was not alone in liking his movies in colour regardless of how they were filmed; I think Ted Turner was probably an example of the difference between a cinephile and a movie buff. But a lot of us are cinephiles and do dislike having movies colorized. The National Film Registry was established in part to protect certain movies from the process, which honestly is often so bad that my sister once saw a movie where they’d given Frank Sinatra brown eyes.

And, of course, I wouldn’t be a person of my generation if I didn’t mention that he created Captain Planet and the Planeteers in order to spark environmentalism in kids. He created the Goodwill Games both to, you know, have more content for his channels and to help foster goodwill between the US and USSR in the days when they were boycotting one another’s Olympics. He was a passionate environmentalist and also awful at watching what he said. He was apparently on lithium, which does explain a few things, and he signed a pledge to donate most of his fortune to charity in his will. I guess we’ll see.