The photo above shows Elvis Presley with his Road Manager Joe Espisito at NBC Burbank in 1968 shooting his “comeback” special. Behind them…another true rarity! Burbank’s modified TK41 viewfinder with Emmy winning cameraman Roy Holm. Would you like to see a close up of that?
I thought so, and here is another view….
You may have glimpsed this oddity for the first time when the show aired in ’68, or in photos since, but either way, I’ll bet you are as curious as I was, so I went to the source to find out what was up with this visual blasphemy of the critically iconic, smooth slope of the viewfinder from the design hand of John Vassos. I’ve heard the original reason for creating a new viewfinder was because one was damaged on a remote and since production stopped in 1966, Burbank engineers make their own VF using a Conrac monitor and building a new housing for it. It may have also been that the components inside were breaking down and needed to be replaced; after all, one of the hottest tubes ever to light up was inside these original RCA TK41 viewfinders and the Conrac was MUCH cooler and a tad lighter and below is a look at the inside.
Burbank not only had a great machine shop to whip up custom items, they also had really good crafts people in the shop. These shop crafted VF covers we done their, to at least give a tip of the hat to the original profile and the work order, approved by tech managers are still around and call for all Studio 4 cameras to be retrofitted and if that worked well, they would convert the Studio 2 cameras too, but soon after these plans were made, the RCA TK44 (not the A or B models) Plumbicon camera was getting talked up so they only ever changed the Studio 4 cameras.
