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A Primer On The History Of Chroma Key In Television… Was this Milton Berle chroma key sketch the first? No, but it is one of the most sophisticated early uses of the technology as it employs both chroma key and video tape editing. This was quite a feat in 1959! Motion picture production had…

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10200462127141865 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 25 cameras, now, with…

Of all the bio and tribute shows I have seen, THIS IS THE BEST EVER! Really! There is very rare footage here of Steve’s carrier and even the very first ‘Jose Jimenez’ sketch from Bill Dana who Allen discovered, along with Don Knotts, Tim Conway, Tom Poston, Louis Nye and more… you will see…

Some Television Firsts In Football…Pro and College Here are some interesting firsts in the coverage of the game. The video is from ABC’s first season of what would become a juggernaut in television sports coverage…’Wide World Of Sports’. Here, in a preseason game between the Dallas Texans and the San Diego Chargers, we will…

Rare New Video…Inside NBC Radio Studio 6B, 1945 We’ve seen a similar film in the past, but this seems to be a new addition to the AT&T archives. In the beginning, we meet the people in the studio, but at 6:00, we get a couple of minutes behind the scenes and see how the…

December 17, 1953…FCC Approves RCA Color, A First Hand Account Thursday afternoon on the 17th, the FCC approved the RCA Dot Sequential color system as the national standard. Our friend and former NBC engineer Frank Merklein was actually the one that broke the news to David Sarnoff. Below is part of an email from…

Mega Version! Behind The Scenes At…’The Price Is Right’ 2013 This is a one hour, real time, look at the show in production…it’s VERY interesting and fun to watch. Notice the cameras are all cable free and are now wireless. The yellow and white boxes on the pedestals are batteries that run the RF,…

ULTRA RARE! 1956 ‘Peter Pan’ Promo As we just read in this morning’s first story, the first television production of ‘Peter Pan’ was March 7, 1955. On January 9, 1956, NBC Brooklyn did it again…live and in color. Here is a promo for the second broadcast that fortunately was captured from inside a kinescope…

The First Instant Replay…Thanks to CBS Director Tony Verna The first isolated camera and a “borrowed” Ampex VR 1000 brought life to a new element of broadcasting that would forever change football and sports coverage. The following account of how it came to be is from “ESPN College Football Encyclopedia: The Complete History of…

By Request…A Visit To NBC Brooklyn Studios, 1967 Here, you’ll see the great RCA TK41s in action at NBC Brooklyn. The date was March 13, 1966 and the production was ‘The Bell Telephone Hour’. That episode was “The Music Of The Movies” and in the clip you’ll see (Oz scarecrow) Ray Bolger and a…

It is an honor for this site to have among it’s members, Max A. Schindler. Max not only directed ‘Meet The Press’ for over twenty years, but directed many special events for NBC including parts of the John and Robert Kennedy funerals and Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. In the first…

This is one of only 2 or 3 surviving copies of 3M’s 1976 NAB tribute video called ’20 Years Of Video Tape’ and covers, in amazing detail, the history of video tape starting even before the unveiling of the VRX 1000 at the 1956 NAB convention and goes all the way to 1976. This…

1950s Demo Reel…Local Market Weather Package These twenty second forecast pieces were usually not in lieu of a local weather report inside a regular newscast, but were used during the day as sponsored “public interest” spots with a ten second sponsorship slide and VO at the top of each one. Telecine rooms were always…

October 28, 1950…’The Jack Benny Show’ Debuts On CBS The video here is a kinescope of that first show, with special guest Dinah Shore. Since Television City was still being built, this probably originated at the CBS Studios at 1313 Vine Street or from Studio A at Columbia Square. On this debut show which…

MUST SEE! Prime Time Television…1948 And 49 With My Detailed Notes This is just amazing, so please…Share this! At the start, an NBC VO announces that the Midwest network links will be open and operating by Christmas, 1948. I would love to see the ‘Eye Witness’ series…it was all about television behind the scenes.…

Television In The Army…1953 ‘The Big Picture’ Special This is about as good a look at RCA TK 11/31s in action as you will ever get, but we also see Dumont 5098C cameras here. There are some RCA TK30s scattered in and even a small Dage portable and RCA’s Walky Looky. There’s a lot…

Special Updated Version Of NBC Burbank Stroll! In yesterday’s post of the Jimmy Fallon record release, I mentioned that he was not the first ‘Tonight’ host to have a record charted in Billboard Magazine. Steve Allen was, and here is the song that he wrote and recorded in a very special television version! This…

‘I’ve Got A Secret’…Backstage Video 1962 A Rare Look At CBS Studio 52 This opens in the Control Room and moves to the stage of Studio 52. This is a long and narrow building with the entrance on West 54th Street and the back door on 53rd and is just behind The Ed Sullivan…

‘See It Now’ Debut With First Ever Commercial Coast To Coast Feed Today, when news breaks, we can get live pictures from almost anywhere in the world almost instantly, but this was not always the case and we take that ability for granted. Here’s a reminder of the incredible effort it took just to…

This is the first time America met Ralph and Alice Kramden…it was October 5, 1951 on Dumont’s “Cavalcade Of Stars”. In July of 1950, Jackie Gleason took over as host of Dumont’s ‘Cavalcade Of Stars’. The original hosts were Jack Carter and then Jerry Lester with Morey Amsterdam filling in occasionally. By the middle…