The FIrst Color Picture I Ever Saw Of An RCA TK41

I was almost 13 when I first saw this photo and for a long time, I thought TK41s were light green. This was the front cover of an NBC magazine called ‘Star Time’ that introduced the 1963-64 fall lineup. If you sent them a postcard, they would send you one of these. Naturally, I sent two.

I can tell that this photo was taken at NBC Burbank by the shape of the viewfinder hood. They made their own custom versions in the shop there. The extra side vent is not unusual and some CBS TK41s had this too. This was and RCA aftermarket kit and came with vents for both doors. In the comment’s section is the full cover of the magazine. Did you have one of these magazines? NBC put these ‘Star Time’ magazines out for several years in the 60s and I think this was the first edition.

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You Mean Godzilla Was Just A Guy In A Rubber Suit?

Yes, but not just any guy! It was Haruo Nakajima who’s now 85. He was considered by most to be the best “suit actor” in Japanese monster movie history. He started in 1954 with ‘Godzilla’ and played the role, and many other monsters for 23 years. Nakajima retired from suit acting upon completion of ‘Godzilla vs. Gigan’ in 1972, Enjoy and share!

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History With A Twist…Dick Clark Debuts A Landmark Song

This video opens with Dick doing the intro in front of an RCA TK10 at ABC New York. This is August 6, 1960 and this is the first time ‘The Twist’ was performed on television, but this is not ‘American Bandstand’. It’s ‘Dick Clark’s Saturday Beechnut Show’.

‘American Bandstand’ was Clark’s hit weekday show, which aired after school from WFIL in Philadelphia, but on February 5, 1958 ABC gave Clark a 7:30 Saturday night slot on the network for the New York based Beechnut Show, which usually came from The Little Theater on West 44th Street in Manhattan, but for some reason, this night it was done from ABC’s studios on West 66th Street as you can tell by the bleacher seating.

‘The Twist’ was Dick Clark’s second venture with Chubby, and one of his first as a producer. The year before, Clark produced Checker on a novelty single called ‘The Class’ in which the singer portrayed a school teacher with an unruly classroom of musical performers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2zXff_8-6w

The song’s premise allowed Checker to imitate such acts as Fats Domino, The Coasters, Elvis Presley, Cozy Cole, and Ricky Nelson, Frankie Avalon, and Fabian Forte as The Chipmunks trio. Clark sent the song out as his Christmas greeting, and it received such good response that Cameo-Parkway signed Checker to a recording contract. That single became Checker’s first release, charting at #38 in the spring of 1959. Clark’s wife gave Ernest Evans his stage name by reworking Fats and Domino into Chubby and Checker.

Hank Ballard wrote The Twist and had recorded it in late 1958. The song became popular on a Baltimore television dance show hosted by local DJ Buddy Dean; Dean recommended the song to Clark. When the song proved popular with his audience, Clark attempted to book Ballard to perform on the show. Ballard was unavailable, and Clark decided to record the song with a local artist and who better than his friend Chubby Checker, whose voice was very similar to Ballard’s. Exposure for the song on ‘American Bandstand’ and on ‘The Dick Clark Saturday Night Show’ helped propel the song to the top of the American charts. Now you know the whole story. Enjoy the clip and share!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbK0C9AYMd8&feature=related

Chubby Checker – The Twist

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Now This Is Interesting….

In all the photos I’ve seen of CBS Studio 50, I’ve never seen these “Stand By” and “Applause” signs on the proscenium as we see in the Western Union ad photo. Nor have I ever seen the audio control booth this close to the stage. There is a wide shot for comparison. Note Ray Bloch’s Orchestra is where this audio booth seems to be.

In the Lucy picture, you can see the booth where it was built in 1936 when CBS used this for a radio studio center. It looks to be at the end of the stage wing on the north wall, a good twenty or so feet from the proscenium. Anyone know when they moved the booth up? Enjoy and share!

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This was the space formerly occupied by CBS Studios 41 and 42. I think this photo is from the early 80s and was probably taken when Donald Trump took over this space and re built two tennis courts here as the Vanderbilt Athletic Club. In 1966, a man from Hungary took over this space and installed a tennis court and an astroturf ski jump.

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JUST IN! CBS/Colbert To Keep ‘Late Show’ At Sullivan Theater

First Story
http://variety.com/2014/biz/news/stephen-colbert-to-keep-late-show-in-new-york-1201267630/

Second Story
http://www.thewrap.com/colberts-late-show-staying-at-lettermans-ed-sullivan-theater/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=contactology

CBS to Keep Colbert’s ‘The Late Show’ in New York

CBS’ “Late Show” will remain in New York at the Ed Sullivan Theater with Stephen Colbert takes over hosting of the show next year, under an agreement announced on Wednesday by the network’s CEO Les…

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Follow Up…The CBS Mini Camera Strikes Again

Here’s Walter Cronkite in a great 1957 publicity photo related to the upcoming inauguration of President Eisenhower. CBS would be deploying several of it’s new Intercontinental Electronics mini cameras at the event. As we saw yesterday, CBS first used these cameras for floor interviews at the 1956 political conventions.

After some digging, I’ve come to the conclusion that this camera was built in the US by Intercontinental using a 1954 design from France’s CSF Electronics, which was created in the late 1890s as the French subsidiary of General Electric. What we know today as the Thomson brand of electronics sprang from CSF. Enjoy and share!

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Classic! ‘Sammy Davis Jr. Show’ With TK41s

From NBC Brooklyn, here’s a clip from April 26, 1966 that opens with Sammy in front of a crane mounted RCA TK41. Behind the camera is NBC veteran Frank Gaeta.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXjKNl0C-AU

from April 22, 1966. thanks to fromthesidelines and wmbrown6 for the great comments and info on this clip.

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Merv Griffin Gets A Ride On A Marconi Mark IV

This fun clip is from November 8, 1965. This was the first year of Merv’s Group W, syndicated daytime show and was done at The Little Theater at 240 West 44th Street in New York. This is now known as The Helen Hayes Theater.

In ’69, CBS picked up the show and moved it to late night to compete against Johnny Carson. The first season was done from The Cort Theater at 138 West 48th Street.

In the fall of 1970, Griffin relocated his show to Television City in Los Angeles, but without sidekick Arthur Treacher, who told him “at my age, I don’t want to move, especially to someplace that shakes”. From that point on, Griffin would do the announcing himself, and walk on stage with the phrase: “And now…, here I come!”

By early 1972, sensing that his time at CBS was ending, and tired of the restrictions imposed by the network, Griffin secretly signed a contract with rival company Metromedia. The contract with Metromedia would give him a syndication deal as soon as CBS canceled Griffin’s show. Within a few months, Griffin was fired by CBS. His new show began the following Monday and proved to be more successful than its network counterpart, running until 1986. Enjoy and share!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDs8JxxAnlU

Jazz guitar icon Jim Hall sits in with Mort Lindsey and the band but Merv insists on putting him through his paces in a mock audition from 1965. Merv shows o…

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July 23, 1962…First World Wide Television Broadcast Via Telstar

On Monday afternoon on this date, 52 years ago, CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite entered NBC’s studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to co-host this historic broadcast with NBC’s Chet Huntley. ABC’s Howard K. Smith was at the UN Building. The twenty minute broadcast from the US to Europe was slated to start at 3 PM eastern, but the Telstar signal was acquired a few minutes early so they started then.

Aside from the historic transmission event, the sight of Cronkite and Hunley working together is nothing less than extraordinary and you will love the sign off at 40:23 which made everyone laugh!

Just after that, NBC Newsman Merrell Muller takes over and implies that only NBC carried the US to Europe program live here in the US.
A few hours later, all three networks did carry the Europe to US portion live with the hosts at NBC, but after seeing how well this went, I’ll bet CBS and ABC were sorry they opted out of this segment.

This is the only version of the entire US portion of the broadcast I can find and is queued to the start of the network coverage. As you will see, there are shots fed into NBC from all across the country including Cubs baseball from Chicago, President Kennedy in Washington, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Mt. Rushmore, the Statue Of Liberty, buffalos on the planes, The Mormon Tabernacle Choir from Utah and much more.

In Europe and Canada, 100 million viewers tuned in and it seems that the baseball game was their favorite part. A few hours later, the tables would turn and Europe would broadcast live to the US with Howard K. Smith joining Cronkite and Huntley at NBC and all three networks would air this live, simultaneously.

There is more on this event in the very good story at the link below. Enjoy and Share!

http://www.history.com/news/the-birth-of-satellite-tv-50-years-ago

http://youtu.be/0IX7vC4Ts_A?t=9m58sWith behind the scenes stories from Bill Turner

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45 Years Ago Today…Apollo 11 On The Way Home: Day 8

Here is the eighth of nine daily articles written for Eyes Of A Generation by Jodie Peeler on this historic event, complete with videos. Enjoy and share!
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Apollo 11’s Television Cameras:

As discussed in yesterday’s post, television cameras were carried by the Apollo spacecraft starting with the first manned mission in October 1968. Here’s the story of the television cameras that made it possible for viewers at home to watch what was going on in space.

Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 carried a small black-and-white slow-scan camera developed by RCA. Designed to operate within the limited bandwidth available for television downlink at the time, the RCA camera had a 320-line progressive scan format at 10 frames per second, and had a one-inch vidicon tube. As described yesterday, the television pictures sent back by the spacecraft were converted on Earth before being sent to NASA and then to the networks. Although more advanced capabilities were available by October 1968, NASA flew the RCA camera because it was already flight-qualified.

On Apollo 9, the first manned flight of the lunar module took place in Earth orbit. The LM would require its own camera, and a Westinghouse team led by Stan Lebar developed a slow-scan black-and-white video camera for the LM. It used a very sensitive secondary electron conduction tube unlike any other tube readily available, meant to provide detail from what was likely to be a dark and shadowy lunar surface. Although on landing missions it would ride in a compartment on the LM’s descent stage, it was carried in the cabin on Apollo 9 so the astronauts could test it out.

For television historians, the most intriguing camera made its debut on Apollo 10, the first flight to send color television from space.
Westinghouse realized that a mechanical color system similar to that championed by CBS during the “color war” of the late ’40s, was not much more complicated than black-and-white and could be kept far more compact than a full-blown color system. The problem of conversion to NTSC was taken care of with conversion equipment installed in Houston. So, in a way, CBS had the last laugh as field-sequential color pictures sent back the first color television pictures of Earth in May 1969.

One problem with earlier Apollo television transmissions was that the astronauts had no viewfinder or monitor, so Westinghouse developed a small black-and-white monitor that could be secured atop the camera to let them see what they were shooting.

The two camera systems developed by Westinghouse – the color unit in the Command Module, and the black-and-white unit attached to the LM – flew with Apollo 11 two months later. Color television came from inside the spacecraft at several points during the mission. When Neil Armstrong emerged from Eagle on July 20 to begin his climb down to the Moon, a compartment on Eagle’s descent stage opened, allowing the black-and-white lunar camera to capture his first steps. Once he was on the Moon, he removed the camera from its platform and placed it on a tripod a few yards from the LM. It captured all of Armstrong and Aldrin’s historic Moon walk, and still stands where they left it in July 1969.

Later cameras improved on these innovations – the color camera was adapted for lunar use by the Apollo 12 flight in November 1969, and in time for Apollo 15 RCA designed a sophisticated color camera mounted on the Lunar Rover that could be controlled from Houston, a system that sent back some of the most vivid moving pictures of the entire Apollo program. However, it’s those two Westinghouse cameras from Apollo 11 that captured the eight days when mankind made its most dramatic step into the future.

For more information on the Apollo cameras, try these links.

Stan Lebar’s memories of developing the Westinghouse lunar camera:
http://www.tvtechnology.com/feature-box/0124/tvs-longest-remote/202657

Bill Wood’s epic “Apollo Television” essay features information about all the cameras of Apollo:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ApolloTV-Acrobat5.pdf

Tomorrow: Our look at Apollo 11 ends as Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins take a fiery ride home, and television brings the story’s conclusion to a watching world.

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Ultra Rare And HILARIOUS! This Is A LOL RIOT!

Thanks to our friend David Crosthwait at DC Video in Los Angeles, here is a clip from a recently discovered reel of tape in Nevada. Jerry Lewis is guest hosting for Johnny Carson and…well…you’ll just have to watch this to see one of the funniest, impromptu bit’s I’ve ever seen. Enjoy and SHARE!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQYzkgsb2h0

This clip is courtesy of Carson-Entertainment-Group and Jerry Lewis Films. The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson: The Lost Clips. Guest host Jerry Lewis. T…

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Must See! ‘Let’s Make A Deal’ Pilot…Many Points Of Interest

This was shot May 25, 1963 in Studio 1 at NBC Burbank and the first minute is quite interesting! It opens with a long shot of Monty Hall introducing the show’s concept as a pitch to advertisers with an RCA TK41 in the foreground. As the camera zooms in, we notice the TK41 still has three cables, as do all the cameras in the studio…this is a big surprise!

By now, all the New York TK41s were using the single cable. I think the single cable came into use on the TK41B around 1958, but RCA made a conversion kit and NBC NY applied it to all their TK40s and TK41A models. I wonder why Burbank kept the triple cables? They were much heavier than the single cables and took extra utility men to handle them.

Next is the audience seating apron that Hall is sitting in. In the ’50s, the only access to the audience area was on the far left and right via the main staircases, but with no way to get to them center stage, access doors were added to the center aisles. Studio 3 had a similar apron that we have seen on ‘Laugh In’ pictures and that’s because ‘Let’s Make A Deal’ moved to Studio 3 during the first season and stayed there till December 27,1968 when the show moved to ABC.

You can only see about half way up into the 400+ seats in this video and as we saw in pictures from Studio 1 a few days ago, this was a very steep incline.

Finally at the very end is a pristine NBC Productions video logo with the TK41 turret flip. Speaking of lenses, notice how tiny the Zoomar studio size lens looks on the TK41.

The announcer and Mony’s side kick is Wendell Niles. The show was directed by Joe Behar who’d just won an Emmy the year before for ‘The Ernie Kovacs Show’. Behar would go on to many more years of directing ‘Days of our Lives’, ‘General Hospital’, and ‘The Young and the Restless’. If you spot something I missed, please let us know. Enjoy and share!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvNXm_5kLmo

This 37 minute pilot, produced on May 25, 1963 with Monty Hall as host and Wendell Niles as announcer/sidekick, led to the premiere of Let’s Make a Deal on N…

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45 Years Ago Today…Apollo 11 Begins The Trip Home: Day 7

Here is the seventh of eight daily articles written for Eyes Of A Generation by Jodie Peeler on this historic event, complete with videos. Enjoy and share!
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While television from Earth orbit had been demonstrated as early as Gordon Cooper’s May 1963 Mercury flight, television from beyond Earth orbit posed several challenges.

Television cameras (about which we’ll learn more tomorrow) were carried on every Apollo flight starting with Apollo 7. The television signals, along with all other communications signals to and from the spacecraft, were routed simultaneously through a Unified S-Band system developed for the Apollo program. It had to compress seven components (voice, telemetry, television, biomedical data, ranging, emergency voice and emergency key) into a 3 MHz allotment. Priority was given to voice and telemetry, leaving only about 700 KHz for everything else.

Early Apollo missions used a monochrome 320-line system with a 10 fps scan rate, which only demanded about 500 KHz for transmission. On Earth, ground stations split the raw signal into two branches. One branch recorded the unprocessed signal, while the other sent it to a scan converter developed by RCA (which incorporated a TK-22 camera) that produced the extra 20 frames per second needed for a satisfactory, flicker-free television picture. The converted picture was sent from the receiving stations via satellite to Houston, and from Houston it was relayed to the networks.

Better television started to come along on the Apollo 10 mission, which finally also brought support for the Command Module’s second 3 MHz USB system. (Apollo 10 also saw the debut of a color television camera developed by Westinghouse; more on it tomorrow.)

Oddly, flying to the Moon allowed more opportunities for television coverage; while NASA’s worldwide tracking network had some areas of sparse or nonexistent coverage for Earth orbit, deep space allowed more continuous coverage. The Manned Space Flight Network (MSFN, pronounced “miss-fin”) had three prime 26-meter stations in Canberra, Australia; Goldstone, California; and Madrid, Spain. All were equipped with slow-scan converters. These stations made it possible for Apollo 8 to send a total of 90 minutes of broadcasts during its six-day mission to lunar orbit in December 1968.

For Apollo 11 NASA had 64-meter antennas, at Goldstone, California and Parkes, Australia, added to the coverage in order to receive weaker signals that couldn’t be picked up by the 26-meter antennas. NASA also had backup arrangements made at Goldstone’s Pioneer Deep Space Network station, and Parkes had additional equipment installed in case of failure at the Honeysuckle Creek Prime station. NASA used Honeysuckle Creek as its Australian hub for spacecraft communications. Both Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek could receive television signals; they would be sent via microwave to Sydney Video, where technicians would decide whether the video from Parkes or Honeysuckle Creek would be sent on to Houston. Sydney Video would also provide the video to the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s network (unfortunately, the only recording of the Australian version that still exists appears to be several minutes of motion picture film taken from a monitor; all the more a loss, given that NASA’s long-sought “raw” tapes of the Moon walk were probably wiped during a tape shortage in the ’70s).

Television transmissions from Apollo 11 were sent both in color (using the Command Module’s color camera) and black and white (using the system in the Lunar Module). Signals from Eagle were being sent through the S-band antenna atop Eagle. As Neil Armstrong climbed down the LM’s ladder for his first steps on the Moon, Houston’s picture was coming from Goldstone. Initially it was inverted, and when that was corrected the contrast was still too high. Houston saw that the video from Honeysuckle Creek was better and switched to that signal. A few moments later, what looked like an improved picture from Goldstone came in, so there was a switch back to Goldstone. Once the stronger Parkes station began tracking, Sydney Video advised Houston that Parkes was providing the best picture. It was so good that Houston stayed with Parkes for the rest of the Moon walk.

Later Apollo missions would bring new innovations and improvements, and by Apollo 17 the television pictures from the Moon would be an entire world removed from the ghostly images of three years before. But while those pictures may be better, the crude monochrome images from Apollo 11 will be the ones most remembered, and most often played and replayed.

This account draws heavily on several sources, notably Bill Wood’s excellent 2005 account “Apollo Television,” available here:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ApolloTV-Acrobat7.pdf

The story of the support lent by Parkes in the Apollo 11 broadcasts is told here:
http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11/

A fictionalized account of Parkes’ role in Apollo 11 formed the basis of the movie “The Dish.”

This isn’t an easy story to boil down, and I’ve drawn heavily on these and other sources. Still, I imagine I’ve gotten some things wrong and oversimplified others, and those errors are my own. Please forgive me; I’m not an engineer, only a historian.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at the television cameras used aboard Apollo 11, then wrap up coverage on Thursday with a safe landing in the Pacific on live television.

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‘NCIS’…Did You Know “Abby’s” Neck Tattoo Is Really A Decal?

Just for fun, here is actress Pauley Perrette in the makeup trailer having her neck tattoo applied as she transforms into her on screen character, Abby Sciuto. Enjoy and share!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98b7U6M9ecM&feature=youtu.be&t=6m5s

This Special Feature from NCIS Season 5 shows how Pauley Perrette gets her hair and make-up done and how she gets her neck tattoo on. — I do not own anythi…

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45 Years Ago Today…Apollo 11 Lands On The Moon: Day 6

Here is the sixth of eight daily articles written for Eyes Of A Generation by Jodie Peeler on this historic event, complete with videos. Enjoy and share!
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In yesterday’s post, you saw the moment when ABC News covered the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle’s touchdown on the Moon. If you paid close attention, maybe you noticed something funny about that moment. In fact, both ABC and CBS (and perhaps NBC, too) landed on the Moon before Armstrong and Aldrin! Here’s how it happened.

The networks’ production staffs had full access to the Apollo 11 flight plan, and had planned every aspect of the mission coverage down to the second. The networks thus knew when to start animation, when to cut to models, when to start special effects, and just about everything else. Had Apollo 11 gone exactly according to plan, it wouldn’t have been an issue.

But, spaceflight being no different than any other form of flight, sometimes things don’t go as you’d hoped. And live television being live television, audiences got to see the result.

What the networks didn’t know was that on final approach to the landing site, commander Neil Armstrong didn’t like what he saw out Eagle’s windows. He thus flew Eagle toward a more favorable landing site a short distance away, adding about 20 seconds to the flight time.

No one knew this in the New York studios; the steady hum of instrument readings from cool-voiced Buzz Aldrin, interspersed at times with the Southern accent of CAPCOM Charlie Duke in Houston, sounded like the kind of dry astro-talk they’d become used to. There was no indication anything irregular was going on. The animation and countdown clocks ticked on.

At the moment the flight plan called for lunar landing, CBS showed animation of the LM touching down and cut to a mockup of Eagle’s instrument panel. In the center of the screen was a large light marked LUNAR CONTACT. At the time called for in the flight plan, the light illuminated, and CBS cut to a model of Eagle on the Moon. Unfortunately, the instrument readings continued from Eagle. Tentatively, CBS played a camera on the LM mock-up sitting on the Moon, and the production team realized what was going on: CBS had landed on the Moon before Apollo 11.

Stomachs dropped in Studio 41’s control room. The camera held on the LM mock-up, with no caption on the screen, for what seemed like an eternal half-minute before Aldrin called “Contact light – okay, engine stop.”

Almost immediately and with palpable relief, CBS threw the caption LUNAR MODULE HAS LANDED ON MOON at the bottom of the screen.

Here’s the CBS coverage, starting about a minute before the planned moment of landing:
http://youtu.be/E96EPhqT-ds?t=13m50s

ABC, unfortunately, fared little better. Also sticking to the flight plan for its cues, ABC used a model of the LM, complete with a little flame shooting out the bottom to simulate the Descent Propulsion System, to depict Eagle’s descent to the Moon. Its model of Eagle, not as detailed as anything CBS was using, hovered in midair for the final minute, interspersed with shots from inside a mockup of the LM cabin with two “astronauts” aboard, before abruptly completing its descent.

At roughly the same moment CBS put Eagle on the Moon, ABC’s model touched down on its lunar surface and the DPS flame went out, and ABC cut to a mock-up instrument panel with a flashing LUNAR CONTACT light.

Eagle, of course, was still flying. There were a few awkward cuts between the interior mock-up and the model until, just in time for the “engine stop” call, the videotape of the model’s “landing” was racked and the little LM landed as Aldrin made the touchdown call.

Here’s how ABC handled it, starting a minute and a half before the flight plan called for touchdown:
http://youtu.be/l1AzFcsHS_w?t=3m44s

The NBC footage of the moment of lunar landing has, unfortunately, not surfaced. If NBC stuck to the flight plan the way ABC and CBS did, then it’s likely all three scored the ultimate scoop on NASA.

The story of the CBS “landing” was a favorite tale of Walter Cronkite’s, who would say with a chuckle that CBS was on the Moon “twenty seconds before Neil Armstrong.” It’s yet another example of how breaking news and live television can make even the best-laid plans go awry.

Tomorrow: A look at how the television pictures got from space to the living room.

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