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October 4, 1956…’Playhouse 90′ Debuts on CBS Thursday nights at 9:30 eastern, television’s most distinguished dramatic anthology series was anxiously awaited in most American living rooms. Below is a full episode of the show that you will want to see…it’s full of RCA TK11s and many Television City studio shots all the way through.…

September 30, 1960…’The Flintstones’ Debuts On ABC This short clip is what was used to sell the ‘The Flagstones’ to ABC and it’s sponsors. Before it came to air, the name had to be changed for legal reasons as Flagstone was a trademarked name. This pilot was essentially a demo reel of what the…

‘Tonight’…Son Of ‘The Knickerbocker Beer Show’ When ‘Broadway Open House’ left the air in August of ’51, late night television got put on the back burner as NBC’s Pat Weaver was busy putting together ‘The Today Show’, which debuted in January of 1952. After a year or so of intense focus on the early…

UNBELIEVABLY RARE! The SHOW, The SCRIPT & SCHEDULE! On Sunday night at 9PM, October 4, 1959, ‘The Dinah Shore Chevy Show’ aired in color on NBC from The Zeigfeld Theater. Here is the whole show! Below are a few pages of the script and the rehearsal sheets from this same show! Thanks to our…

A Tour Of CBS Television City With Edward R. Murrow This is a November 1953 broadcast of ‘See It Now’. In the first part of this half hour show, we’ll see the extensive and state of the art lighting in Studio 31, Art Linkletter’s show in Studio 41 and Jack Benny rehearsing upstairs in…

Behind The Scenes…The CBS News Studios This is a great clip that takes us inside both the CBS Morning and CBS Evening news studios. The big production studios, 41- 45, are in another part of the building, but the news studios 47 and 57 are close to the front entrance and lobby. I was…

A Rare Look (In Color) At Early Electronic Television… This is quite an interesting look at Philo Farnsworth’s television studio and station in operation. From the technical to the theatrical side, including the wild makeup, we’ve got 10 minutes of great color film to show us how this all came together. Farnsworth and RCA,…

How Television Goes From Coast To Coast…The 1949 Version Before I get too far along, I wanted to mention that at the start of this, and again, scattered throughout, we get a rare look inside at what I think is NBC Studio 8G in action. This would have been shot not long after 8G…

Memories Are Made Of This! 1959 Tour Of KOA TV, Denver This will start as we are lead into the telecine room, complete with a telop machine…something many have never seen before. Soon we are in video control and at next up, we see two brand new Ampex VR 1000 video tape recorders. After…

The Birth Of Video Assisted Movie Making…Jerry’s Noisy Toy This video clip is cued to start at our first look at Jerry Lewis with his custom built video assist equipment…a long rack called Jerry’s Noisy Toy. This is from a 4 minute film featurette for 1966 movie audiences, but Lewis had been using this,…

The First CBS Color Trucks…Circa 1966 I’m not sure if our friend Dave Minott was involved in building this first CBS Labs Color truck, but he was there for all the rest. The cameras (with no cables attached) are newly delivered Norelco PC60s. This is quite interesting and I hope those of you that…

Ultra Rare! Introducing The RCA TKP 45 & TK 76 Prototype… The RCA TKP 45 was the first portable color camera without a backpack and debuted in 1974, two years before the TK 76 color ENG camera. At the 6:19 mark, you’ll see the TK 76 prototype that fortunately didn’t look anything at all…

State Of The Art Television: 1961 & The Ampex Editec System This great 1961 demo tape from KTTV in Los Angeles gives us one of the most thorough run throughs of video switching effects and video capabilities of that era available. Keep in mind though, videotape was still a cut and splice process till…

The Care And Feeding Of The Ampex VR 2000 Quad VTR As your read this, quad video tape is being transferred to digital formats inside CBS Television City at what they like to call “Jurassic Park”. It’s a 24/7/365 operation and the facility is equipped with just about every type VTR format you can…

A Half Hour Behind The Scenes Of Television…January 1952 If you ever wondered how different, or the same, television production was back in the ’50s, here’s your chance to find out. This is a very thorough look at how ‘The John Hopkins Science Review’ program was done at Baltimore’s WAAM. The tour starts in…

Ultra Rare Backstage Footage…’I Love Lucy’ What you will see here is an expertly edited combination of actual production footage and 8mm color home movie footage that was somehow shot by an audience member. This all takes place the evening of October 12, 1951, at Sound Stage 2 of General Services Studios in Hollywood.…

RCA TK60s In Action…WRVA, Richmond Virginia 1965 This kids show with WRVA cameraman “Sailor Bob” Griggs as host, was built around Popeye cartoons and ran locally from 1959 till 1969. Thanks to Bob’s son, Tom Griggs for sharing this. I think this was shot on film by one of the stations news cameramen. Source

Jerry Lewis and The Laughing Cameraman…1967 From NBC Burbank, here’s a great bit with Jerry singing “Witchcraft” and a professional laugher behind a crane mounted TK41. There is another version of this with the TK41 on a pedestal done on another episode of his NBC show. If anyone has a link to that, please…

Above is a rare pilot pitch made for introducing the show to networks and sponsors. There are some interesting new faces in this including Tuesday Weld, Yvonne Craig and a then unknown actor named Bob Denver. There are also some familiar faces as Dwayne Hickman introduces us to not only the characters, but to…