October 13, 1957…A Red Letter Day For Videotape & TV History
October 13, 1957…A Red Letter Day For Videotape & TV History
The first 4.5 minutes of the attached video tells the story and includes comparison shots of the videotape and kinescope version of the oldest surviving, intact videotape program, “The Edsel Show”.
Thanks to our friend Kris Trexler’s love of cars, his interest in classic television and his professional abilities as a film and videotape editor, we are able to see this…the oldest surviving video tape. He is the one who tracked down this tape that everyone said did not exist.
“The Edsel Show” was chosen to be the very first CBS entertainment program to be broadcast live to the nation from Hollywood, then “tape-delayed” for re-broadcast in the Pacific Time Zone. The show was performed at CBS Television City in Hollywood from 4pm-5pm Pacific Time for live viewing from 7pm-8pm Eastern Time. The show was simultaneously recorded on videotape at Television City, then played back 3 hours later for West Coast viewers at 7pm Pacific Time.
After the live broadcast, The Ford Motor Company hosted a lavish party at a Hollywood restaurant, where the cast and CBS and Ford execs wined and dined and watched the videotape playback of the show to the West Coast. The evolution from kinescopes to videotape recording was underway!
Not wanting to risk a high profile failure of the new technology, CBS also created a kinescope backup of the show which the engineers at Television City played simultaneously with the videotape, so in case the tape failed, CBS engineers could quickly switch to the kinescope “protection copy” of the show. Videotape was a new technology and there was much to risk if it failed during such an important broadcast, but it didn’t.
Now, back to the fascinating detective work Kris did… http://www.kingoftheroad.net/edsel/edselshow3.html
You can read the details at the link above from Kris’s website, but in a nutshell…the tape was not in the CBS Video Archives. The kinescope was, but the tape copy was on a TVC engineer’s desk who had personally saved the tape. Remember, part of the miracle of videotape was that it could be reused…the engineer knew it would be if he didn’t rescue it and after the playback, he took care of if for the rest of us to see! Thanks to him and Kris Trexler, here is the “The Edsel Show” that was done October 13, 1957 from CBS Television City. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze0Az9tdkHg
This is the oldest videotape recording in existence. The Edsel Show stars Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, and Rosemary Clooney. Produced at CBS …
In 1975 there was a TV special with Charles Kuralt “When TV Was Young” which he introduced from the film archive and VT room. The kine shown of the Edsel Show had no audio and he made note of that. That was of interest to me since I had the audio of the program on a tape a friend had made in Birmingham, Ala.
One point on the time zone delay for this show…while it was done LIVE from 4-5 PM PT for airing in the ET/CT zones (we won’t even talk about MT here!), it was played back to the west coast from 8-9 PM PT (not 7-8); this was in the ED SULLIVAN timeslot. And that’s PT as in PST since Cali ended DST at the end of September, so for about a month until the end of October, there was a four-hour time difference between NYC and L.A (this oddity was true between ’55 and ’61).
From the stanpoint of someone who may have watched this show in 1957, let me say, nothing looks familiar. I was a sophomore in high school and 15 years old. I had no interest in Crosby or Sinatra and my friends and I all were of the same opinion that the Edsel looked like a Buick sucking a lemon. We were car fanatics and rode our bikes to all the car dealer lots to see if we could spot the new cars in there storage area. Anyway, I caught pneumonia around this time and probably was sick in bed when this show aired. A few years later, when we started driving, a friend in the crowd got a bit too drunk at Jones Beach and crashed his Edsel into the toll booths on the Southern State Pkwy! No one wanted to ride with him so one guy volunteered to keep an eye on him. Before the State Police showed up he yanked the driver over to his passenger seat and then told the cops he had been driving and fell asleep. That’s the kind of friends I still have. That’s my Edsel story and I’m sticking to it!
I love seeing videotape from the 1950s. It lets me know how wonderful LIVE TV looked every day. It’s easy, at least for me, to think everything looked like a bad kine when, in fact, it looked as sharp as The Edsel Show.
Fascinating and historic. Thanks, Bobby!
Actually the kinescope was better that I would have expected.
A 20 second countdown. It took a while to get a VR-1000 up to speed and stable.
There was a showing of this at the Paley Center in Los Angeles a few years back. It was dazzling.
Kinescopes often are pooh-poohed as “inferior quality,” which is not universally true. Especially on something that was well done at the network level.
I say that having seen a 1964 Danny Kaye Show that was recorded at CBS Television City and later transferred by CBS to a 16mm kinescope.
When I saw it on UCLA Film and Television Archive’s MWA Vario scanner at 2336 x 1752 resolution, it looked live!
Unless you saw tiny specks of dirt occasionally, or an occasional videotape drop out, you would think it was live!
There was no moire, an interference pattern that happens when one tries to transfer a 525 line film image using a 525 line video system.
My point is that when kinescopes were properly made on good equipment, that was properly maintained, on film that was properly processed, you did obtain good results.
Keep in mind that kinescopes were use not just for time zone delay on the West Coast, but we’re also used to extend network coverage where no electronic means existed.
In the early days that included a good portion of the United States.
Network affiliates got their shows as film copies maybe a week after they were originally broadcast to the East Coast.
And even into the 1970s, kinescopes were being used to record US networks at a San Francisco film lab for processing and shipment to Australia.
Before home video recorders became ubiquitous, kinescopes were also how networks provided copies of appearances to folks who were guests on programs.
One of the problems we see with kinescopes that are used in the infomercials selling music collections is that the kinescopes have not been well handled as they were copied from the film to film or film to videotape.
And those copies may be the only surviving moving images of that particular event. But there are certainly examples of well done Kinescopes that have yet to see the light of day.
Yeah, you can definitely see the difference. Let’s hear it for technology!
There are two videotapes of the Edsel show, according to a CBS Television City Hollywood engineer that I spoke with in July 2006.
He created a 1 inch type C master in 1981 using the best sections of both tapes.
In July, 2006 a small group of members of the Telecine Internet Group — The TIG— had been invited to visit what was then known as “Jurassic Park” in the lower level of CBS Television City. This is now called the “media exchange” room where a variety of video tape recorders ranging from Ampex AVR-1 and 2 quad recorders, One inch type C, and a variety of video cassette formats are located. It enables Television City to transfer pretty much any kind of broadcast video tape to any other format and transmit to the world via satellite or fiber… Or tape!
John Ramstead transfered the Edsel Show to Type C using the two tapes of the program… the one that that’s (now) in the TVC archive, and what he said was one from the CBS NY archive.
At the time—summer of 2006—he said he’d done the transfer 25 years prior… which would make it 1981.
John was telling me about what he did during the process… not much to the video except adjust levels before hand, and then working on the audio to improve what he said was “thin” sounding audio.
IIRC, he said there was one splice in the TVC tape.
John played the 1 inch tape for us, and I can tell you that the sound and picture were remarkable.
Our host at TVC had arranged for the TVC Edsel show video tape and the Quad head that accompanied it to pulled from the TVC archive and shown to us.
I wanted to talk with John more and clarify some things, get accurate notes or comments on camera or tape… and regret that I didn’t do so before he passed away.
I’m glad Kris Trexler was also able to make a copy of the original tape, and share it with us.
It really shows the quality that originated from network studios, And the lasting entertainment that performers from that era today.
This is is great! I love classic cars and TV history. If I remember correctly, this was around the time that Sputnik was launched. What a wonderful time that was.
My mom had an Edsel. I told her not to sell it, but she didn’t listen.
Would this also qualify as the first videotaped infomercial? Great show, thanks.