Sightseeing #2…’Today’ Show, Set Tours And Ikegami HK322s

It’s not often that we get to see the Ikegami cameras at NBC, or a complete new set change on a major show, but in this video we get both. We start with the Friday, September 7, 1990 sign off from Studio 8H and the old set. During the SNL summer break, ‘Today’ moved there so that Studio 3B could be updated and the new set built. The second part is the intro of the new set in 3B with a few nice shots of the Ikis there.

I don’t think NBC stayed with the Ikegamis very long…maybe four years? Anyone know? I think they may have left the RCA TK47s around 1989 and by ’93 or ’94 had switched to Sony. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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October 22, 1939…The First Ever Pro Football Telecast

75 years ago today, the relationship between professional football and television began when The National Broadcasting Company earned a spot in history by televising a pro football game. Only 22 days before, NBC had televised the first ever college game on September 30th.

A crowd of 13,050 were on hand at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field on that now-historic day when the Philadelphia Eagles fell to Brooklyn’s Dodgers 23-14. Yes, there was a Brooklyn Dodgers football team, from 1930 to 1943.

The game included play by three future Hall of Famers…quarterback Ace Parker and tackle Bruiser Kinard for the Dodgers and end Bill Hewitt for the Eagles.

Five hundred-or-so fortunate New Yorkers who owned television sets witnessed the game in the comfort of their own homes, over NBC’s experimental station W2XBS. Many others saw the telecast on monitors while visiting the RCA Pavilion at the World’s Fair in New York where it was scheduled as a special event.

According to Allen “Skip” Walz, the NBC play-by-play announcer, only eight people were needed for the telecast. Walz had none of the visual aids…monitors, screens or spotters used today, and there were just two iconoscope cameras. One was located in the box seats on the 40-yard line and the other was in the stadium’s mezzanine section. (The photo of Waltz below was taken a few years later with an RCA Orthicon camera behind him).

“I’d sit with my chin on the rail in the mezzanine, and the camera was over my shoulder,” remembered Walz. “I did my own spotting, and when the play moved up and down the field, on punts or kickoffs, I’d point to tell the cameraman what I’d be talking about.”

The television log records of that day say that the game began at 2:30 p.m. and ran for exactly two hours, thirty-three minutes. By comparison today’s games run almost three full hours. Of course there were no commercial interruptions during the 1939 game. There were, however, interruptions of another sort.

“It was a cloudy day, when the sun crept behind the stadium there wasn’t always enough light for the cameras,” according to Walz. “The picture would get darker and darker, and eventually it would go completely blank, and I would begin to call the game in the style I used for radio broadcasts.”

Enjoy and Share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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Inside CBS Studios 41 And 42…Grand Central Terminal, Then And Now

In November of 1937, CBS was near completion of their first television transmitter on the 72nd and 73rd floors of the Chrysler Building. Across the street in Grand Central Terminal, work was underway on the new CBS television studios.

The studio space was 40 feet high, 230 feet long and 60 feet wide. There, two live production studios were built…41 and 42. Studios 43 and 44 were control rooms, but called studios. All four structures, plus a dressing room and some engineering space was packed into this room.

In the photo with the many fluorescent lights, we see the largest studio, 41. In the next black and white photo, we see Studio 42. I think there was a movable wall between them for huge productions and election night coverage.

Next is a photo of that space stripped and ready to become The Vanderbilt Tennis Club. In the exterior photo, we see circled the area of the building where this space is located. Finally, here’s a shot of the space as it looked a few years ago. I think the tennis courts are gone now and the space is now a lounge for conductors and engineers. Enjoy and Share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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What A Night! September 27, 1954…’Caesar’s Hour’ & ‘Tonight’ Debut

A week or so back, we touched on this but here’s something new. Thanks to Maureen Carney, here is the ad that ran that day introducing not only ‘Caesar’s Hour’, but the rest of the television line up that Monday night, including the debut of ‘Tonight’ with Steve Allen.

Below is what is thought to be the first “Commuters” sketch from the new Caesar show that ran that night. This is called “The White Rug” and features Sid Caesar, Nanette Fabray, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris and Janet Blair.

In ‘Your Show Of Shows’, there was a similar set of neighborly sketches called “The Hickenlooper’s” that Sid and Imogene Coca performed with Morris and Reiner. That was so successful, Caesar carried it over but took it from the city setting to the suburbs. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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Follow Up…NBC’s Studio 3H And 5F, Historic Photos

In the Guided Tour of Studio 3H I just posted, we saw the control room in action, but here is a closeup of the video shading board that was in use in 3H in 1937 and the information on the back of the photo.

A few days back, we also saw NBC’s second ever television installation in another video. That was Studio 5F and here is a shot of the 16 and 35MM projectors in the first ever telecine room. There are two Iconoscope cameras on the other side of the wall these are projecting into. This was built just after work was completed on 3H and probably went into service in early 1936. The photo is accompanied with the information on it’s back. Enjoy and Share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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Seems Like Only Yesterday…And It Was! CBS Sunday Morning…

Thanks to Craig Wilson for these 4 shots from yesterday’s show from Studio 45. Notice the three-camera shot…Studio 45 is so big it hosts two shows…’CBS Sunday Morning’ and ‘Inside Edition’. Behind the three cameras you see one of the green cyclorama curtains and the ‘Inside Edition’ sign.

During the week, that whole side of Studio 45 is all green, floor and all as Deborah Norville’s show is done with a virtual set. I’ve included a shot I took of that set in May. They use a mannequin to help adjust the chroma for camera tests. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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The First Two RCA Orthicon Cameras…Early Indoor Test, 1940

These photos are opaque slides from a homestyle stereoscopic viewer. I think what we are seeing here are the first two RCA Orthicon cameras being tested. Notice there is (1) no focus control anywhere. In earlier posts today, we saw both a panhandle focus and the side mounted focus apparatus, neither of which seem to be here. (2) There is only a single, fixed focus lens and not the double fixed focal length lenses we see on the Iconoscope camera and later versions of this camera. (3) Notice also that there is no viewfinder on any of these cameras, but if you look closely, you can see there is a removable door over that viewing port.

To reinforce my belief that these cameras did not have electronic viewfinders, notice the open door shot. This shows a single row of electronics in the VF area, but behind it is the light proof black box which encloses the ground glass – optical viewer. I think that row of tubes is associated with functions in the camera body below the VF.

As you view that open door shot, look at that huge exhaust port behind it (left bottom) and the single lens on the front (right bottom). In an earlier post, I had identified this first version of the Orthicon camera as the Type 1840…that name is due to the tube number inside which is the 1840, also seen here in the bottom photo. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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The RCA Orthicon Camera On Location…1945

While we are on the Orthicon Camera, here are a few interesting pictures of it in use in outside broadcasts. There are two photo here from the 1945 Macy’s Parade…one of the camera shooting down and one taken from the street showing the camera on the balcony of The Astor Hotel.

The photo of the camera with a banner was taken on VE Day in 1945 with the camera again at The Astor. Finally, a rare hand bill handed out on VE day to passers by announcing the televised coverage on WNBT. In the next post, we’ll see a real rarity…these cameras inside. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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Ultra Rare!  Full 20 Minute BBC Training Film on Video Tape Editing & Smith Block Editing

Movie 720×576

At the link above is a wonderful 21-minute video from the BBC on the finer points of video tape editing. If you have the time and interest in how it was done “back in the day”, well, step right up!

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At this link, is a 2 1/2 minute look at editing 2″ tape with the Smith Block. There has been a lot of interest in the two prior posts and this is the perfect piece to top off this subject.

This is from this link http://www.vtoldboys.com/edit.htm# and there is other interesting early video tape editing information here, including how early electronic editing was done. Thanks thanks to Pat Phos Martin for sharing this with us. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee
http://www.vtoldboys.com/editm01.htm

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This Was Indeed, The Start Of Something BIG! The Roone Arlidge Era

This video is from the last episode of ABC’s ‘Wide World Of Sports’ debut season which started April 29, 1961. This clip highlights some firsts in football coverage.

This is the first use of a crane camera over the field, microphones on the quarterbacks and possibly, handheld sideline coverage in a professional football game. (NBC used RCA’s Walky Looky on some college games in the late 50s). The video is quite historic.

In January of ’62, WWOS was given a permanent time slot where it remained for over forty years. The show was the creation of Edgar Scherick through his company, Sports Programs, Inc. After selling his company to the American Broadcasting Company, and joining them to run ABC Sports, he hired a young Roone Arledge to produce the show.

Around 1956, after graduating with a masters degree from Columbia College, Arlidge got a stage manager’s job at NBC’s New York City station, which was then WRCA. One of his assignments there was to help produce a children’s puppet show hosted by Shari Lewis.

Sometime in late 1960, Arledge convinced his superiors at WRCA to let him film a pilot of a show he called ‘For Men Only’. While his superiors liked the pilot, they told him they couldn’t find a place in the programming schedule for it. But the WRCA weatherman, Pat Hernon, who hosted the pilot, began showing it and Edgar Scherick was one of the people who saw it.

While Scherick wasn’t interested in ‘For Men Only’, he recognized the talent Arledge had. Arledge realized ABC was the organization he was looking to join. The lack of a formal organization would offer him the opportunity to claim real power when the network matured, so, he signed on with Scherick as an assistant producer for WWOS.

Several months before ABC began broadcasting NCAA college football games, Arledge sent Scherick a remarkable memo, filled with television production concepts which sports broadcasts have adhered to since. Previously, network sporting broadcasts had consisted of simple set-ups and focused on the game itself. The genius of Arledge in this memo was not that he offered another way to broadcast the game to the sports fan. The genius was to recognize television had to take the sports fan to the game. You can see that rare memo at this link THE HOUSE THAT ROONE BUILT – Eyes Of A Generation…Television’s Living History

In addition, Arledge realized that the broadcasts needed to attract and hold the attention of women viewers. At age 29 on September 17, 1960 he put his vision into reality with ABC’s first NCAA college football broadcast from Athens, Georgia between Alabama’s Crimson Tide and the Georgia Bulldogs. Sports broadcasting has not been the same since. Thanks to Chaz Bryant for the clip. Enjoy, share and Go Dawgs! -Bobby Ellerbee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvgnv7xJidY

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In Case You Missed This…The Smith Block, Up Close And Personal

Earlier in the week, I posted a photo of a 1965 NBC videotape edit session using the Smith Block. Thanks to David Crosthwait at DC Video, here are some awesome close ups of the Smith Block which was created by NBC Burbank editor Bob Smith.

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