TV History

KTLA: First In The West Originally owned by Paramount Pictures subsidiary Television Productions, Inc., and located on the Paramount Studios lot, the station was licensed by the Federal Communications Commission in 1939 as experimental station W6XYZ, on channel 4, but did not go on the air until September 1942. Klaus Landsberg (below left), already…

Meet The KCOP Crew! Thanks to David Crosthwait at DC Video in LA, we have this great clip of the 1979 Rose Bowl Parade coverage on KCOP. You’ll see David running the tape machines, and meet the whole crew with their Norelco PC 70s and PCP 90s. Thanks to Troy Walters in Australia for…

NBC Studio 8H: Pre Construction Artist Rendering In 1950, NBC converted 8H from the world’s largest radio studio to a state of the art television studio. This is a beautifully detailed drawing of the layout. Thanks to William David French for the image. Source

Thy Rod And Thy Staff… Now for a very ‘inside television’ moment. What’s important about this simple photo? The Zoomar demand rod, that’s what. The Zoomar lenses were remarkably sturdy and dependable, but there was a slight Achilles heel. The zoom and focus demand rod. In a studio environment, every thing was great because…

A Teaching Moment Here in Studio 6B is Ed McMahon with an RCA TK41 behind him. Notice the angled box addition. It’s on top, front of the camera just in front of the viewfinder and above the lens turret. Know what that is? It’s quite an ingenious sound baffle. Most likely a creation of…

The Arrival Of The RCA TK44s In 6B This photo is probably from mid to late 1971. That’s when The Tonight Show gave up it’s TK41s for the TK44s. All the other studios had already converted, but Johnny and Fred De Cordova liked the TK41’s warmth. Most other studios probably had the TK44As, but…

The Best Seat In The House This is about as good as it gets for those of us who wondered what Johnny saw from this desk. This is probably late 1971 or early 72, just before the move to Burbank. Source

Welcome To ‘Beautiful Downtown Burbank’ This is the start of ‘The Tonight Show’ in Studio 1 in Burbank. The move from New York was in May of 1972 and reruns filled the gap. I think this photo is from the week prior to air as the cast and crew began a few days of…

Almost Show Time During warm up, Johnny takes a look at the audience. It doesn’t look like it, but there are 465 seats here in Studio 1. By the mid-1970s Tonight was the most profitable show on television, making NBC $50 to $60 million ($178,163,000 to $213,796,000 today) each year. Carson influenced the scheduling…

Follow The Eyes In Johnny’s monologues, it was always interesting to me to watch his eyes move. This shot is during the warm up, but when the show started, a camera would be shooting him head on and was positioned with the lens in the center of the Q card board. During laughs and…

Fascinating Photo 1939, NBC presents “Mamba’s Daughters” staring Ethel Waters, seen here in the head scarf. The play is running on Broadway and is similar to the movie ‘The Help’, which is pretty interesting television fare for the time. The cameras are Iconoscopes and the cameramen are ‘interesting’. On the left, one is wearing…

Insider’s History of The Hollywood Palace Thanks to ABC Hollywood veteran Don McCroskey, here’s a look behind the curtain of a place many of us remember as The Hollywood Palace. ABC started doing shows from what was then called the El Capitan theater in the fall of 1957 using equipment installed by NBC in…

ABC Television: The Early Years The ABC television network went on the air on April 19, 1948. The network picked up its first primary affiliates, WFIL-TV in Philadelphia (now WPVI-TV) and WMAL-TV in Washington (now WJLA-TV) before its flagship owned and operated station (“O&O”), WJZ-TV in New York (now WABC-TV) signed on in August…

NBC 1949, Television Scene Magazine Seems a lot of people like to give credit to ‘I Love Lucy’ for establishing a three camera production standard, but live television at the network level had been doing that for several years before Lucy. Even ‘The Honeymooners’ that was shot on film with the Dumont Electrocam used…

Remember Nipper? In 1898, three years after Nipper’s death, Francis Barraud, his owner and brother of his first owner, painted a picture of Nipper listening intently to a wind-up Edison-Bell cylinder phonograph. On February 11, 1899, Francis filed an application for copyright of his painting “Dog Looking At and Listening to a Phonograph.” Thinking…

A Teaching Moment This photo was taken between late 1946 and early 1948. How do I know? Because, when the RCA TK30s arrived at NBC New York, they initially put the NBC logo on the viewfinder and the WNBT label on the camera body. When the TK10s arrived a few months later, they decided…

Look At The Floor In the days of live television, floor marks for cameras, booms, actors, props and scenery were everywhere. Even with a few full camera rehearsals, it wasn’t easy to remember what lens and what position you were supposed to be in. The floor marks helped. This shot is from ‘The Armstrong…

George Jetson Would Be Proud! Thanks to Benoit Prégent for sending this photo of the Kuba Komet set at the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montréal. Below is a 30 second video of the set working in Germany. The KUBA Corporation manufactured the Komet from 1957 to 1962 in Wolfenbuttel, West Germany. This set stands 5′…

It Never Was The Same Again, Was It? If you were ever on a kids show, you know that after the visit, you never saw the show the same way again. Got a story to share about your visit? Source