TV History

July 14, 1933…Popeye Comes To The Silver Screen This is the first of 109 cartoons Popeye starred in from 1933 until 1942. Newspaper cartoonist E. C. Segar is the man who created Popeye, but before he came along, Olive Oyl had been the star of his “Thimble Theater” comic strip, and had been since…

Forgotten Gem! Steve Martin’s “The Great Flydini” Sketch…CLASSIC! That “wild and crazy guy”, Steve Martin, has done so much great work, for so long, it’s easy to have missed some of his sketches. Even though I am a big fan, I had not seen this till recently. This is one of the best pieces…

July 1970…The RCA TCR 100 Video Cart System Debuted Some loved it, some hated it, but this was a real innovation, and came a full 2 years before the Ampex ACR 25. Thanks to Barry Mitchell for the reminder. -Bobby Ellerbee Source

My Show…”Squidbillies” Season 10 Debuts Tonight! For those of you that don’t know, I am the voice of The Sheriff on the “Squidbillies” which has been the top rated show on Adult Swim since we started in 2006. (FYI: at night, Cartoon Network becomes Adult Swim). It is rare for my character to not…

July 10, 1950…The Original, TV Music Countdown Show Debuts “Your Hit Parade” was television’s first ever Top Ten type music show, and radio’s too. It started on the NBC Red Network on April 20, 1935 and ran there till 1955. The television version started on NBC on this day in 1950 and ran there…

TeleTales: “Film At 11″… WPIX Coined The Phrase In 1948 “First on the scene. First on the screen”. That was the motto for NYC’s newest television station, WPIX, which went on the air June 15, 1948. It was owned by the New York Daily News, which was famous for their pictures, thus the name…

Mystery Photo Reveals…THE FIRST WNBC TV Was NOT In New York!?! Believe it or not, there was another WNBC TV, before there was WNBC New York! Yesterday, our friend Barry Mitchell sent this to me and I was as bewildered as he was, so I started digging. How could these famous call letters be…

July 5, 1982…”NBC News Overnight” Debuts EDITOR NOTE: The video at the bottom of the page is cued up to start at Linda’s final sign off and a full roll of credits for the show, with video of all 60 staff members and some familiar faces. BUT…the whole show is there should you wish to…

Remembering Noel Neill…Superman’s Lois Lane Is Gone Actress Noel Neill, the First Lois Lane of the Screen, Dies at 95 She starred as the intrepid Daily Planet newspaper reporter in 1948 and ’50 movie serials and in TV’s ‘Adventures of Superman.’ Source

“Legend Has It”…The Fence Between Networks At Super Bowl 1 Many of us have heard about the fence that had to be built between the CBS and NBC crews covering this event, but finally, here is the only photo proof that it happened. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-01-26/sports/8601070170_1_nbc-sports-pat-summerall-super-bowl From the Chicago Tribune, here is the story as it…

On page 10, is as good a description of what happened on this day in 1941, as you will find. As told in “Broadcasting” magazine’s July 7th issue, NBC’s W2XBS became WNBT at 1:30 PM, and by chance, became the nation’s first commercial TV station. To keep either from being “the first”, the FCC…

Tomorrow, television marks the 80th anniversary of its move from the “experimental” phase to the “commercial” phase. Today, we’ll look at the creation of a new piece of production equipment that was necessary to make it all flow on screen…the Shadow Box. Pictured here is the CBS shadow box prototype being tested in one…

A Rare Two Headed Monster…MGM’s Over/Under Studio Crane With motion picture studios all cranking at full tilt in the late 1930s, innovation at every level was part of the game. With so many Berkley and Ziegfeld type production numbers in vogue, this is actually a pretty clever approach to getting twin perspectives on a…

The First Robotic Overhead Camera…NBC’s “Home” Show Now, this is BIG! So, big you can hardly see the RCA TK11 mounted in this massive contraption. By comparison, this dwarfs a studio crane boom arm, that may have served the same purpose. The video here is shot from overhead camera and WOW…wait till you see…

RCA Camera Mystery Finally Solved!!! You Won’t Believe This… Just what is that gear/wheel mechanism on the side of these first generation RCA Iconoscope remote cameras? I’ve wondered this for years, but till today…I never knew for sure. This morning, I was reading a page from Richard Hubbell’s 1945 book “Television Programming And Production”,…

Commercial Television’s 75th Anniversary…Friday, July 1, 2016 To set the stage for this week’s anniversary, I’ll lay out some pictures and share some little known stories about how broadcasters got ready for the move from experimental to commercial television. At the time, it was a big commitment to the new media, and involved a…

“Today”…60 Years Ago Martin & Lewis, With Jerry Running Camera The video at the link above is cued to start just before Dean and Jerry Come out to close the live “Today” show from Atlantic City, July 26, 1956. Soon after, Jerry takes over the RCA TK30 equipped with a new RCA Electrazoom lens.…

June 25, 1951…America’s First Color Broadcasts Begin On CBS Let me start with some things you probably never knew about this historic event. To me, the first day and circumstances seem to foreshadow the overall outcome of this four month experiment. In April of ’51, CBS had just taken over the Peace Theater, at…

June 24, 1963…NBC Studio 8H Goes Color NBC Studio 8H become “The Peacock Studio” on this day in ’63 when it began broadcasting in color. There is a lot of interesting detail in the NBC Press Release, but one thing they left out was…the four RCA TK41s installed in 8H actually came from The…