TV History

December 15, 1965…WSB Atlanta Goes Color With First RCA TK42 http://insidebobforemansbrainpart2.blogspot.com/2013/10/ruth-kent-colorvised.html At the link above is a story I just got from our friend Bob Foreman. The article he sent is from the Saturday paper, just after the Thursday surprise Atlanta viewers got when ‘Today In Georgia’ debuted in color, making WSB the first…

Congratulations To NBC’s Rick Fox…Retired Friday After 31 Years Several people have asked about the unusually long hold on the opening shot of Friday’s ‘Nightly News’ broadcast and the single technical credit to a cameraman at the end of the show (below in Comments). The cameraman in this screen capture is Rick Fox who’s…

January 11, 1958…’Sea Hunt’ Debuts On 100 Stations In Syndication Filming began September 23, 1958 and ended exactly four years later on September 23, 1961. The series was created and produced by Ivan Tors and ZIV Television. Initially, the under water scenes were shot in Southen California, but soon moved to South Florida and…

Picture Parade #5…’Gone With The Wind’ Technicolor Closeup Having seen one of these huge Technicolor camera blimps in the Oz photo earlier, I wanted to give you a feel for how big they really were. On the set of ‘Gone With The Wind’, here is director Victor Fleming looking into the viewfinder. Behind him…

Picture Parade #4…Heaving and Hoeing, Heavy Metal And Manpower This is a location shot from the 1938 hit musical ‘Girls Of The Golden West’ staring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy and a ton of new comers, like Buddy Ebson who you’ll see in the trailer. You’ll also see a lot crane shots made with…

Picture Parade #2…A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Oz A few weeks back, I watched ‘The Wizard Of Oz’ for the umteenth time on TCM. It’s still a fascinating spectacle…especially for those of us who grew up watching it on black and white sets and never knew till much later that most…

Picture Parade #1…The Universal Court House Square Most recognize this set from ‘Back To The Future’, but it’s been used in more productions than you can shake a stick at. The first time we saw is was with Ma and Pa Kettle in 1949. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee Source

Picture Parade #5…Early Color Testing Days At The Colonial Theater It was late November 1952 when the four RCA TK40 prototype cameras arrived at The Colonial. There was a year of almost around the clock testing of cameras, monitors, switching and transmitting equipment. The first production models of the TK40, twenty five in all,…

Picture Parade #4…The Red Barber Baseball Box Red Barber was the first announcer to broadcast baseball on television. He knew a lot about how to help get the best out of a game and developed this box to “talk” to the director in the truck. When he thought play action was going to be…

Picture Parade #2…’On The Town’, First Musical Shot On Location This 1949 film starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Betty Garrett was the first musical to be shot on location. Not all of it, but all of the outside scenes, were shot over a five day period in Manhattan. It rained three of those…

Picture Parade #1…NBC New York’s Air Cushion Studio Floors Most never knew that under each studio floor at 30 Rock, there are air cushions to prevent vibration from the subway that runs directly under the building. When Rockefeller Plaza was built in 1933, there was an elevated train that ran down 6th Avenue. In…

Picture Parade #4…CBS Studio 42 At Grand Central Terminal, 1950 This is Faye Emerson on her fifteen minute daily show the CBS Network. In 1947, CBS bought the RCA TK10s and 30s for their studios. These are TK30s with the exclusive CBS striped band on the viewfinder. Do you know why they were there?…

Picture Parade #3…CBS Studio 41 At Grand Central Terminal, 1944 These photos are from 1944 and show us WCBW, Studio 41 which was the larger of the two Grand Central studios. Officially there were Studios 41- 44 there, but 43 and 44 were “control” studios and not production studios like 41 and 42. As…

Picture Parade #2…SNL And NBC Studio 8H…February 10, 1979 When Bryan Durr was in high school, he and some buds would occasionally cut class and go on adventures in the city. These great photos are from one of those days. Bryan is now the senior video engineer for Seth Meyers in NBC’s Studio 8G.…

January 5, 1970…’All My Children’ Starts A 41 Year Run On ABC This 1993 video is a fantastic look behind the scenes of the show in ABC’s TV 23, but more on what you can see and where in a moment. From 1970 to 1990, ‘All My Children’ was recorded at ABC’s TV 18…

Picture Parade #6…The Real, Original Bozo The Clown…Pinto Colvig It’s time to set the record straight! Larry Harmon may be a Bozo, but he’s not the original Bozo, even though he’s claimed otherwise. If Bozo has a father, that man is Alan Livingston, former president of Capital Records, who created ‘Bozo At The Circus’…

Picture Parade #5…Who Knew? The ‘Playboy Penthouse’ Show This show, shot at WBKB in Chicago, was a syndicated production that aired late nights in some major markets for a little over a year. Below is a clip from the debut episode, October 24, 1959 with Hugh Hefner as host…his first guest was the great…

Above is a photo of Fred Astaire and dancer Barrie Chase in dress rehearsal for ‘An Evening With Fred Astaire’ at NBC Burbank on October 17, 1958. Further below is a link to the whole show. The show was broadcast live in the east, but was recorded on color video tape for playback to…

Picture Parade #3…Quite Possibly, The First Photo Of ABC Studio TV 1 This is the ‘Look Photo Crime’ show, sponsored by Look Magazine in September of 1949. The crime busting series, based on real stories, aired on ABC Radio five days a week and the TV series once a week. TV 1 and TV…

Picture Parade #2…First CBS Color Special, ‘Ford Star Jubilee’ 1955 Information is hard to come by, but it is thought that for CBS, this was their first full scale color broadcast using the RCA/NTSC Dot Sequential color system. The show came from CBS Television City’s Studio 43. The event on September 24, 1955 was…