WNBT (NBC), December 1941 – Part B

Just 2 weeks before this, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and we were at war with Germany, Italy and Japan. Even this meager schedule of programming would basically go to nothing in the next few years as production of home receivers was replaced by radar and radio equipment manufacturing.

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Who Knew Atlanta, GA and Mayberry, NC were so close?

Below in pink, you see Tara from ‘Gone With The Wind’ and under it, the Mayberry set for the ‘Andy Griffith Show’ on the ‘Back Forty’.

Forty Acres was a film studio backlot that belonged to RKO Pictures and later Desilu Productions, located in Culver City, and is best known as Forty Acres, or “the back forty”. It had other names such as “Desilu Culver”, the “RKO backlot” and “Pathé 40 Acre Ranch” depending on which studio owned the property at the time.

For nearly fifty years it was famous for its outdoor full-scale sets such as Western Street and Atlanta Street or Main Street and was used in films like King Kong (1933) and Gone with the Wind (1939), and television shows like Bonanza and Star Trek. In 1976 it was razed for re-development.

Forty Acres is best remembered for providing the backdrop for the town of Mayberry on the television series The Andy Griffith Show. Many of the street scenes and buildings on the backlot were seen regularly on television screens across America and became quite familiar with viewers. The original Town of Atlanta set, comprising a New York style street, a town square and a residential area to the east, was situated in the center of the property and was used on shows like Adventures of Superman, Ozzie and Harriet, Batman, The Green Hornet, and Mission: Impossible. It was also used on Star Trek in three episodes entitled “Miri”, “The Return of the Archons” and “The City on the Edge of Forever”.

The Tara set, which sat on a sloping rise at the north western corner of the property, was torn down in 1959 to eventually become the Stalag 13 set for Hogan’s Heroes. Most of the sets, which included Camp Henderson on Gomer Pyle, were situated primarily in the center, south and west end of the property.

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State Of The Art: Video Tape Delay

Until sometime in the mid to late 60s, this is the way you got a 6 second delay for live television events. In this photo, you would have recorded on the left machine, thread the tape over a few homemade spendels and play it back on the machine on the right for air. In case of bloopers, cut to live action before the image gets to the playback head and pray there are no more till you can get to a station break and re sync.

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1913: State Of The Art Sports Reporting

Check out these two long rows of telegraph operators and reporters. That’s how the 1913 World Series was covered from The Polo Grounds in NYC. The series pitted the New York Giants against the Philadelphia Athletics.

(NY Giants became the SF Giants in 1957)

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New York Worlds Fair: Summer 1964

I remember visiting the RCA Exhibit and the how much I hated leaving it. I was 13 and my parents had to threaten me to get me out of there. This singing duo was there along with a guy playing an electronic accordion. Sprite had a brand new commercial running that had the same kind of new, electronic keyboard sounds that were coming our of his instrument. I think there were only 2 TK41s there, but I looked at every inch of both of them. I was fascinated by all of it.

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Color Comes To Japan: 1957

On Sunday, I had a story about Expo ’58 and the RCA color exhibit at the Brussels’ World’s Fair. In it, I also mentioned that RCA had sent a mobile color unit to Japan in 1957 to give them a first look at color television and here is the other part of that story. The Japanese were impressed and within a year of the visit, these 5 RCA TK41s arrived at Nippon Broadcasting.

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Reagan, Carter, Anderson

This is election night, 1980 at ABC New York. The big camera is an Ikegami HK 312E with the big Triax box on it’s right side. The ENG camera may be an Ikegami 77, but I’m not sure. Do you know?

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August 27, 1968…44 Years Ago Today

Dan Rather was manhandled at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Classic footage of a well remembered event.

For more presidential election videos go to electionwall.org

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RCA TK30 ‘Gun site’

This is a screen capture from an introductory article on the RCA TK30 from RCA Broadcast News in 1946. Here we have an explanation of the mysterious gun sight that attached to the top of the viewfinder hood. I think there were two types…this one with a polarized lens and a very simple, slotted metal version that looked like Mickey Mouse ears set very close together.

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New Year’s Eve At Times Square: A History Lesson

Here’s a brand spanking new RCA TK30 above the entrance to the Hotel Astor in Times Square in 1946 shooting the merry makers below. Since the mid 1800s, Trinity Church was the gathering point, but the celebration moved to Times Square in 1904 as part of a promotion of the New York Times to celebrate their new building and headquarters.

New York in 1904 was a city on the verge of tremendous changes – and, not surprisingly, many of those changes had their genesis in the bustling energy and thronged streets of Times Square. Two innovations that would completely transform the Crossroads of the World debuted in 1904: the opening of the city’s first subway line, and the first-ever celebration of New Year’s Eve in Times Square.

The NY Times building was the focus of an unprecedented New Year’s Eve celebration. Alfred Ochs, owner of The Times, spared no expense to ensure a party for the ages. An all-day street festival culminated in a fireworks display set off from the base of the tower, and at midnight the joyful sound of cheering, rattles and noisemakers from the over 200,000 attendees could be heard, it was said, from as far away as Croton-on-Hudson, thirty miles north along the Hudson River.

The New York Times’ description of the occasion paints a rapturous picture: “From base to dome the giant structure was alight – a torch to usher in the newborn year…”

The night was such a rousing success that Times Square instantly replaced Lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church as “the” place in New York City to ring in the New Year. Before long, this party of parties would capture the imagination of the nation, and the world.
Two years later, the city banned the fireworks display – but Ochs was undaunted. He arranged to have a large, illuminated seven-hundred-pound iron and wood ball lowered from the tower flagpole precisely at midnight to signal the end of 1907 and the beginning of 1908. The rest as they say, is history.

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But you knew that Green Acres wasn’t really shot outside, right?

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London Olympics Coverage…From Studio 8H

This is where most of the commentary marries the video…on the floor of Studio 8H at 30 Rock. With SNL on summer break, the studio is transformed to the Announce Center. Each of these eight or so sound proof booths has 2 sides…a small producer’s side and a larger talent side that can accommodate up to three announcers.

The commentators watch the live feed and with the help of producers on each end, give us the ‘play by play’ on each event. This is really an ingenious system and the photo below is actually from the 08 Summer games in China when NBC used the same set up. I don’t know how far back this off site system goes, but would like to hear from those that have ‘been there and done that’.

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Jim McKay on NBC? CBS Too?

Actually, yes! With the Olympics upon us, I thought you may like to know that NBC was classy enough to include Jim McKay three times in it’s Olympics coverage over the years. In 2002, ABC “loaned” McKay to NBC to serve as a special correspondent during the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. The NBC broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony was dedicated to McKay, per a message at the closing of the broadcast. NBC also dedicated the 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremony to him.

Although Jim was with ABC for 37 years, he has covered the Olympics 12 times for all three networks starting with the 1960 Summer games from Rome, which he anchored for CBS from the Grand Central Terminal studios. Gone, but not forgotten. Thanks Jim!

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