TV History

Take Me Out To The Ballgame…With 13 Cameras! If you’ve ever wanted a really in depth look at how major league baseball is done, here you go! This three part, behind the scenes, tour in Cleveland shows us how this days game with Atlanta is done from start to finish on June 15, 2007.…

Surprise After Surprise…’What’s My Line’ 12th Anniversary Show Two mystery guest make this fascinating! The first are Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, the show’s creators with some very interesting historical comments on the shows 12 years at CBS. They start at 3:57 and the second mystery guest signs in at 18:56…it’s Bob Newhart. By…

The TV News Story On My Camera Collection…2009 By early 2009, the rush was on for broadcasters to finish the conversion from analog to digital. To help promote their soon to come transition, Atlanta’s NBC affiliate WXIA did a piece on my camera collection. I was surprised to learn that the piece also ran…

Digital Restoration Of Classic Films… This 9 minute documentary on how old films are digitally restored is just fantastic. The before and after shots are frequent and show just how far artists can reach back into the past to bring out long lost luster and detail of old films. Enjoy and share! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSlGYGYJCX8 Universal…

Behind The Scenes…Craig Ferguson’s Show, CBS Studio 56 When we first see the studio around 1:20, be ready for a surprise. It’s a lot smaller than it looks on television. It’s only 5,963 square feet and you can see the layout at this link. http://www.cbstelevisioncity.com/stages# https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_m19xqpl4I This is a short promo piece from June…

Welcome To The Ed Norton Apartment… This great color photo was taken in April of 1955 at CBS Studio 50. At the end of May of this year, they would wrap up the hour long live show here and do a season on film (the Classic 39) at Dumont’s Adelphi Theater, but would return…

Inside Breaking News…Live At CNN For The Challenger Disaster About a half hour before the Challenger space shuttle was launched on January 28, 1986, a CNN tape crew had come into the main news studio to shoot a feature on how the news is covered. What their camera recorded in Atlanta was the same…

Letterman School Of Broadcasting…Camera Operation 101 By request, here’s the clip of Dave picking an audience member and putting her to work behind of the their RCA TK44s. Enjoy and share! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wli9BOL6FQ8 David Letterman selects an audience member and she operates a TK-44 on-air. Source

The Latest And Greatest In Tape…RCA’s TCR 100, 1970 I think this was one of the first times RCA beat Ampex to the punch in videotape innovations. Here’s a look at the RCA sales demo of their new quad videotape cassette unit, the TCR 100. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM_2upiGUO0 RCA TCR-100 Videotape Cartridge System, Sales Reel From…

360 Degree Panorama Shot…NBC Burbank, Studio 1 This is where Johnny Carson’s ‘Tonight’ show came from. Now, it is the ‘Access Hollywood’ stage, but this is not that set which has four sides. This has only three and you can see the audience seating on the open wall. By the way, you can use…

360 Degree Panorama Shot…NBC Burbank, Studio 3 Yesterday, the last live NBC feed came from Burbank, but here is a great shot of Studio 3…the whole thing! There’s a lot of history here as this was home to ‘The Dean Martin Show’, ‘The Jerry Lewis Show’ and countless others, including much of ‘Tonight’ with…

‘The Mickey Mouse Club’…The Whole Inside Story Since it’s Sunday, and you have some time, here’s piece I have been wanting to repost for a while. I hope you’ll take a look. This is the best retrospective I’ve seen and much of it is told by the Mousketeers themselves. Enjoy and share! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1r-ufjAIfE 56…

70 Years Ago Today…Dominick George Pardo Joined NBC Radio David Schwartz, one of television’s top historians, has put together an exceptional – one of a kind timeline of Dan Pardo’s career at NBC. He was kind enough to share it with us. With thanks to David, here is one of the most impressive collection…

June 15, 1969…;Hee Haw’ Debuts On CBS This 6 minute news story from Cincinnati’s WKRC from 1979 gives us a very indepth look at how the show was done. It was taped at CBS owned WLAC in Nashville twice a year in six week blocks. ‘Hee Haw’, began as a summer replacement show for…

Backtracking…With The Help Of Tom Kennedy! Earlier in the week, I posted this photo with video of ‘The Bob Crosby Show’. Since then, I have heard from one of the people in this photo…legendary game show host, Tom Kennedy, and he had three surprise comments on this picture that I’ll share. The first surprise…

Introducing ‘I Love Lucy’… Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz will carry their real life domestic partnership into professional life when they team up as a husband and wife on a new CBS-TV domestic comedy series, “I Love Lucy,” making its debut Monday, October 15 (CBS-TV, 9:00-9:30PM, EST). When the CBS promo staff wrote this…

Today…NBC’s Last Live Show Airs From Burbank I got this note last night from our friend Bob Meza, who’s worked for at NBC Burbank for nearly 40 years. “Bobby: Just so you know, tomorrow, June 14, NBC Burbank will broadcast it’s last live show. Telemundo will move over to Universal starting Sunday. Days Of…

Found IT! Jerry Lewis And The Laughing Cameraman, Original! Thanks to our friend in Brazil, João Antonio Franz, here is the original version of this sketch I mentioned in today’s earlier post. This is from 1960 and shows the same professional laugher behind at TK41, that we see in the 1967 version, BUT instead…

‘All In The Family’…Some Interesting History Well, these pictures of the cast arriving at Television City settles one thing…it was definitely after September of 1973 when the set moved to Metro Media Studios. I can’t find a firm date, but I think the show moved at the end of the 1975 season. I understand…