TV History

Follow The Yellow Brick Road… In this rare photo from ‘The Wizard Of Oz’ we see one of the huge Techincolor cameras in action. Production on the bulk of the Technicolor sequences was a long and cumbersome process that ran for over six months, from October 1938 to March 1939. Most of the actors…

Letterman Tribute To Johnny Carson, Part 1 of 6 A week or so after Carson’s death, Dave did a great tribute show to his mentor. In this part, all the jokes in the monologue were written by Carson and faxed to Dave in the month prior. Dave speaks of this in some later segments…

His Master’s Voice… Here’s a rare moment…Johnny Carson as a guest on David Letterman’s show in 1985. Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gehruIvKoXs Johnny making an appearance on Letterman Show in Burbank CA @ NBC Studios Source

Q Card Hell! Can you imagine? Here’s an associate producer working on Q cards for a show at CBS Television City. Can you imagine what chaos there would be on a live show if these were out of order? Source

Episode 1, ‘Studio One’…’The Storm, November 7, 1948 Also known as Westinghouse Studio One, Studio One From Hollywood, Summer Theater and Westinghouse Summer Theater, this series of dramas ran on CBS from ’48 to ’58. ‘Twelve Angry Men’ was one of the many blockbuster presentations in this series that was always among the top…

Good For A Laugh… Oldies, but goodies… Source

Quite Interesting This gives us a look at a lot of the different cameras the BBC used up till 1956, including the new Marconi color camera the BD 848 which is very similar to the RCA TK41 for a reason…Marconi was licensed by RCA to use their technology. Most of the cameras seem to…

BBC’s Early Video Tape Experiments… This is very much like the RCA test model built in 1950. I think both systems used 1/2 inch tape but they moved at 200 inches per second and could only record 15 minutes of programming, even though the reels were huge. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f1GDQDB0Ss Early video tape machine developed by…

Historically Speaking… This is a very interesting history of the way television shows were broadcast and recorded first to Kinescopes and later to videotape and how they were edited. Did you know ‘Laugh In’ episodes took over 50 hours to edit? This take us all the way up to Avid systems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIVYeyWHajE Trace the…

A Real Breakthrough…at the time Very interesting demo of the first nonlinear editing system from 1971. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bNmsKBqFPQ The CMX 600 was the very first non-linear video editing system. It was introduced in 1971 by CMX Systems, a joint venture between CBS and Memorex. CMX referr… Source

The Way Back Machine… This is a 1961 tape effects sales demo from KTTV in Los Angeles. Quite interesting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZUbtrZUAY8 1961 demonstration of video based effects by Los Angles based KTTV. Called “Television Tape” as Ampex had trademarked “Videotape” http://www.televisiontape.t… Source

Back By Popular Demand #2 Source

Back By Popular Demand… Source

The Original Amateur Hour With Ted Mack: Part 1 Long before ‘American Idol’, ‘Star Search’ and even Arthur Godfrey’s ‘Talent Scout’ came to television, there was this. As you’ll see below in the other 3 parts, this was the granddaddy of them all. Between the radio and television years, the show discovered the likes…

The Original Amateur Hour With Ted Mack: Part 2 Like many other shows that moved from radio to TV, this one was a continuation of ‘Major Bowes Amateur Hour’ which had been a radio staple from 1934 to 1945. Major Edward Bowes, the originator of the program and its master of ceremonies, left the…

The Original Amateur Hour With Ted Mack: Part 3 The series is one of only six shows to appear on all four TV networks during the Golden Age of Television…the others were The Arthur Murray Party; Down You Go; The Ernie Kovacs Show; Pantomime Quiz; and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. The television debut came…

The Original Amateur Hour With Ted Mack: Part 4 ‘The Amature Hour’ originated from The Adelphi Theater in NYC which is most remembered as the place where the classic, 39 episodes of ‘The Honeymooners’ was shot using the Dumont Electronicams. The Adelphi was located at 152 West 54th Street in New York City, with…

Even From The Back, You Know Who This Is… If you grew up in the 50s, you’d know Roy Rogers from any angle! Here’s Roy and Dale doing an interview in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1961. I suspect they were there for an appearance at the state fair. Source

Ellerbee Camera Collection Video Tour For those of you that have never seen this, here it is again. I shot this a couple of years back with a small 35mm photo camera and it shows all of the 16 cameras I have on display here in my home. At the time, I had about…