JVC VT-900 melted panel sockets ?

Recently acquired a JVC VT-900 and by golly it works -well ! Had sold a few of these back in the day and they impressed me then -except there was even less to listen to on local FM then than nowadays.So-it's grungy/dusty but it works -doesn't drift and frankly is pretty darn nice for a 40? year old piece of audio gear. Some of the panel lights are obscured and i can see about 1/2" of dust thru the top cover -so i pull that off and run into something I've not seen before.The lights are not burned out - but the mounts have liquified -they look like non-chunky peanut butter ?? Lampholders that burned out -crumbled when ya touched 'em or had sometime previously crumbled - but this is unique ? I've decided to just leave this alone - unless somebody's got a donor front panel/display layin around to replace this one ? Haven't found a service manual so far either ?

If you leave it, the socket just might crumble to the point where the two leads touch together and then you have another problem. I would not replace them with identical parts because the existing parts have shown themselves to be unreliable, perhaps dangerously so. This sounds like a good candidate for a LED upgrade.