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“The Big Picture” Presents….Television In The Army

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Eyes Of A Generation.com


“The Big Picture” Presents….Television In The Army

Remember “The Big Picture” series? Here is their half hour show on how the Army uses TV, from the early ’50s. Given that there are RCA TK11 cameras here (as well as the older TK30s), this has to be sometime after 1952.

At the Production Center, they are making training films, via kinescope and in the field, I noticed the dual remote units still have the same configurations as the early NBC/RCA units with one unit for camera control and the other for transmission.

The small turret camera in the middle of this is, I think, a small Dage model. Near the end, they take us to an airborne camera that looks a lot like the old Iconoscope models used in WW II for guided ordnance and recon. On the ground, RCA’s Walkie Lookie mini cam is use too. -Bobby Ellerbee

13 responses to ““The Big Picture” Presents….Television In The Army”

  1. Tom Williamson

    Very interesting, I remember seeing The Big Picture on TV when. I Was a kid in the 1950’s. TV was so new that we would watch just about anything.

  2. Chuck Pharis

    Great stuff Bobby!

  3. Chuck Conrad

    A lot of the cameras and equipment in this film are DuMont.

  4. Steve Dichter

    I remember this series well. Supplied by the army to TV stations from 1953-59. Generally used as filler to plug holes in the schedule.

  5. Dennis Degan

    The ‘Production Center’ featured in this film is now Kaufman-Astoria Studios in Astoria, Queens New York, home to Sesame Street and countless other film and television productions.

  6. Martin Miller

    That was Great! I remember my days at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. Very much like the video even in 1968. Made many training tapes from brushing your teeth to arming bombs. We used TK11 cameras and Ampex 1000 VTR’s. We were staffed with mostly civil service workers and I was one of the few Army people working there. I learned a lot and Never left television after my time in the service.

  7. Albert J. McGilvray

    In the US Navy, all ships from submarines to aircraft carriers had some sort of on-board TV system. It was called SITE (Shipboard Information, Training and Entertainment). Getting the word out was #1, training the troops #2 and entertaining #3.

  8. Albert J. McGilvray

    Every Saturday morning on WBZ-TV in Boston, MA. Around 6 am before “Rex Trailer and Boomtown.”

  9. Paul Benjamin Mills

    In Augusta Georgia, my uncle had an old TV set with a variable tuner and it could recieve on channel 1. Turns out Fort Gordon had a channel 1. I was a lad so I may be mistaken but I am prettty sure it was ch 1. All I ever saw was a test pattern.

  10. Richard Warner

    Here’s one. True story that he told me. 1953. Jim Nabors, later Gomer Pyle, is a projectionist at WJBF TV6 Augusta. On duty one Sunday morning, he threads up The Big Picture, starts it at the appointed time and goes on to the next thing. Suddenly the phone lights up. An elderly woman on line one says “I’ve NEVER seen anything like that on television before!” It’s an Army film on venereal disease with full frontal male nudity shipped by mistake.

  11. James M Patterson

    I was in the army from 1969 to ’71 at Ft. Bragg, N.C., assigned to a television production unit attached to the Special Forces Training School there. We had a three camera remote unit with on-board generator, and even a VR-1100 quad VTR and a film chain. The cameras were Ampex vidicons and the whole package was built by Ampex, I believe. Our “home base” had a studio and cable distribution system that supplied training programs to various classrooms around the JFK Center for Military Assistance.

  12. Rick Bozeman

    When I worked at WEDU in Tampa in the mid 1960’s there were 2 cameras in a storage room that had been given to them by the Army Pictorial Center or so I was told by an engineer. Don’t know if ‘EDU ever actually used them or not.

  13. Jeff Kreines

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