Rare! ‘Hullabaloo’ Color Footage…November 29, 1965

This was done in NBC Burbank’s Studio 1 with ‘Bonanza’ star Michael Landon as host and, sometimes, Go Go dancer. ‘Hullabaloo’ began as a half hour in black and white on January 12, 1965 and the first season ended August 31, 1965.

The second season brought an hour long color show that ran from September 13, 1965 till August 29, 1966. Only a few episodes have survived in color. All the rest of the episodes, including the first season, have survived only as black and white kinescopes. This is because NBC destroyed the tapes in the 1970s once Smith-Hemion Productions turned down the offer to take them into their possession. A sadly familiar story.

This is the show’s close, complete with credits and Johnny Holiday announcing. Paul Revere And The Raiders close out a the show that had featured The Byrds, Jackie DeShannon and David Winters.

#t=196″ target=”_blank”>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lohb-4Gc-I #t=196

Lyrics: http://easylyrics.org/?artist=Paul+Revere+And+The+Raiders&title=Steppin%27+Out Thanks for checking out our videos and site!

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The NBC Tour & Best Seat At CBS…The Desk Of William S. Paley

Yesterday I finally saw ALL of NBC…top to bottom. It was an incredible six hour stroll through history that ended at The Paley Center For Media which is where the photos below were taken.

This is the desk of CBS founder William S. Paley; a leather topped card table with numbers that marked the place of each player. Paley sat at the #1 position (seen below left), Frank Stanton sat at the #2 position. It’s likely that Fred Friendly of CBS News spent a lot of time at the #3 position.

Who else sat at this table? You name them…Jackie Gleason was probably lured from Dumont at this table. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Edward R. Murrow, Don Hewitt, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Douglas Edwards, Mike Wallace, Red Skelton, Ed Sullivan and most of the names that are synonymous with CBS have probably sat here at one time or another. This is the true “catbird seat”.

We were able to end our day here because television history’s true protector and conservator was with us. It was a pleasure and honor to have Ron Simon join us for the NBC tour. Ron is the Curator of The Paley Center and since around 1988, has been archiving and collecting kinescopes and video tape of programs that would have otherwise been lost. Thanks to his efforts, thousands and thousands of hours of rare recordings are alive and well…safe for future generations. We all owe Ron and The Paley Center a debt of gratitude for their efforts.

I spent several hours there Saturday watching some of these rare videos, including the fist ever ‘Honyemooners’ episode in which Art Carney played a policeman. His ‘Norton’ character had yet to be created.

While I am on the sad subject of lost footage, here is a story SNL cameraman John Pinto told me at lunch Friday. John had worked at ABC and was hired for SNL’s debut a few months before it started. To keep him occupied till that October 1975 debut, John was assigned a job he still regrets having had to do.

For three months straight, it was his job to bulk erase tapes, most of which happened to be from ‘The Tonight Show’. To quote the announcer at the Hindenburg crash, “Oh, The Humanity!”

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Network Television’s First Evening News Anchor…Douglas Edwards

This is thought to be the earliest known photo of Douglas Edwards telecasting the news, shortly after the May 3, 1948 debut of ‘CBS Television News’.

Edwards joined CBS Radio in 1942, eventually becoming anchor for the regular evening newscast ‘The World Today’ as well as ‘World News Today’ on Sunday afternoons. He came to CBS after stints as a newscaster and announcer at WSB in Atlanta, Georgia and WXYZ in Detroit, Michigan.

CBS began broadcasting news shows on Saturday nights, expanding to two nights a week in 1947. These reports were delivered by CBS radio news men, who were not interested in this “television stuff” and loathed having to do it. Edwards had a couple of turns at it, and kind of enjoyed it and let his interest be known.

On May 3, 1948, Douglas Edwards began anchoring ‘CBS Television News’, a regular 15-minute nightly newscast. It aired every weeknight at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time, and was the first regularly scheduled, network television news program to use an anchor.

On February 16, 1948, NBC had begun airing ‘NBC Television Newsreel’, and later ‘Camel Newsreel Theatre’ as a 10-minute program that featured Pathe’ newsreels. John Cameron Swayze provided voice-over for the series. ‘The Camel News Caravan’ was an expanded version of the ‘Camel Newsreel Theatre’ feature Swayze on-camera.

On CBS, the week’s news stories were recapped on a Sunday night program titled ‘Newsweek in Review’. The name was later shortened to ‘The Week in Review’ and the show was moved to Saturdays. In 1950, the name of the nightly newscast was changed to ‘Douglas Edwards With the News’, and the following year, it became the first news program to be broadcast on both coasts, thanks to a new coaxial cable connection, prompting Edwards to use the greeting “Good evening everyone, coast to coast.”

It is not clear whether both Douglas and Swayze did a live second broadcast for the west coast. By 1947, Kinescopes had begun to be used and there are stories that report the show was done live again with added west coast content, and reports that say it was kine delayed, but one thing is clear…November 30, 1956, Edwards’ program became the first to use the new technology of videotape to time delay the broadcast.

The CBS program competed against NBC’s ‘Camel News Caravan’ that was launched in 1949 with John Cameron Swayze. NBC’s news took the lead, but by the mid 50s, CBS and Edwards were in the lead. In September 1955, ‘Douglas Edwards With The News’ was moved to 6:45 p.m. ET.

On October 29, 1956, Swayze was replaced by Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC’s ‘Huntley-Brinkley Report’ and this helped CBS ratings as it took a while for Chet and David to gain traction.
By the early ’60, NBC’s news ratings were a good bit higher and a decision was make to make a switch at CBS.

Walter Cronkite became anchor on April 16, 1962. On September 2, 1963, ‘The CBS Evening News’ became network television’s first half-hour weeknight news broadcast, lengthened from its original 15 minutes, and telecast at 6:30 p.m. ET. NBC quickly followed suit and ‘The Huntley-Brinkley Report’ expanded to 30 minutes exactly a week later on September 9, 1963.

‘The CBS Evening News’ was broadcast in color for one evening on August 19, 1965, and made the switch permanently on January 31, 1966.

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Video Tape’s Unintended Consequences…Agony & Ecstasy

This is a story you have never heard. It is about the advantages and headaches caused by the introduction of video tape. We’ll start on the hard part…The Agony.

When video tape use began to really take off with network use in 1957, it caused what was then referred to as “time shifting”. This is when a show that had been produced live daily, was suddenly able to tape several episodes the same day…usually a weeks worth.

With the advent of video tape, all three networks reduced their production staffs by up to 40%. Cameramen, lighting men, stagehands and engineers were let go in droves because the “time shift” had eliminated the need to setup and strike every set, every day. Another difficulty was editing the tape, which for many years, was a major production in itself.

The Ecstasy part is obvious…instant high quality replay, but…in 1957, there was another phenomenon to deal with which was why the networks pushed to hard to get video tape in place by then.

It seems that in the mid ’50s, Daylight Savings Time had become a big issue and several states were bucking the national standard for some reason. Some of these problems were brought on by lawsuits from drive-in theater owners and some were “states rights” issues. Among the rebellious states were Tennessee, Wisconsin, Indiana, Arizona and Minnesota.

A lot of this was in court, but the networks wanted to be able to tape delay programs in these five states if need be. A three hour delay for Kinescope playback of New York shows from Los Angeles was OK, because in that period of time you could get a pretty good, fully processed kine. But, with one hour delays, you had to do a hot kine with below average results.

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NBC Studios History…ULTRA RARE OPERATIONS LOGS, 1951

To give you and idea of the kind of information I have been able to use in my research on this project, here are two pages of NBC’s operations logs from March 12 and 13, 1951. Notice on the left are Kine instructions meaning those programs noted would be shown live but also routed to Radio City for kinescope recording.

The -L and -N abbreviations mean Local or Network. On the Monday, March 12 log, at the top, I’ll give you an example of the other abbreviations…’Miss Susan’ is live from Philadelphia
(PHILA)-N and is shown on the network plus being fed to Kine. Next, ‘Edgar Guest’ is live from Uptown studio B and is network. ‘Bert Parks’ is in 6B at Radio City. ‘Kate Smith’ is at the Hudson Theater. ‘NBC Comics’ is a cartoon show on film coming from Uptown’s telecine studio F.

Notice next, ‘Gabby Hayes’ (F & C)-N means the live part of the show with Gabby is in Uptown studio C while the film clip part of the show (excerpts from his days as Roy Rogers original side kick in the old 1930s serials) came from Uptown’s telecine studio F. Surprisingly, ‘Camel News Caravan’ is done the same way and in the same place Gabby comes from.

All the A, B, C and F designations are inside the Uptown studios. On the next day’s log, we see Kate Smith’s show at the Hudson has a cut in from 3B at Radio City. I hope you find this as fascinating as I do. Many thanks to our friend, Game Show Network historian David Schwartz for these and many more rarities you will see along the way. Enjoy and share!

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The Start Of Something BIG! Instant Replay…

In 1960, CBS paid $50,000 for the rights to cover the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, but paid $550,000 for the Summer Olympics rights that year which came, via couriered video tape, from Rome. Winter Olympic rights would never again be such a bargain, and sports nor television would ever be the same as this is the first time a video tape playback was used to determine the winner of an event.

During the Games, CBS broadcast 15 and a quarter hours of television focusing on ice hockey, speed skating, figure skating, alpine skiing and ski jumping. During the Games; in the men’s slalom event, officials who were unsure if a skier had missed a gate asked CBS if they could review tape of the event. This request gave CBS the idea for what is now known as instant replay.

While the first near-instant replay system was developed and used in Canada, the first instant replay was developed and deployed in the United States by ABC. During a 1955 ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ broadcast on CBC Television, producer George Retzlaff used a “wet-film”, or ‘hot kine” (kinescope) replay, which aired several minutes later. Slow motion replay was brought across the border to America a few years later by ABC.

CBS Sports Director Tony Verna invented a system to enable a videotape machine to instantly replay on December 7, 1963, for the network’s coverage of the Army–Navy Game. The instant replay machine was a modified quad video tape recorder which weighed 1300 pounds. After a few technical glitches, the only replay broadcast was Rollie Stichweh’s touchdown. It was replayed at the original speed, with commentator Lindsey Nelson advising viewers “Ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again!” The problem with older technology was the difficulty of finding the desired starting point; Verna’s system used audio tones activated as an interesting event unfolded, which technicians could hear during the rewinding process.

Replay in slow motion from analog disk storage was tried out by CBS in 1965, and commercialized in 1967 by the Ampex HS-100, which had a 30-second capacity and freeze frame capability. Unfortunately one of the few remaining HS-100s was trashed last year as NBC continued the clean out at Burbank. Thank to Kevin Vahey for the great photo of and RCA TK11/31 in action on the ski jump.

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NBC Television Network Map…July 1, 1948

In early 1946, NBC’s television network consisted of only NYC and Philadelphia. By early 1947, Schenectady joined in making it a three city linkup. This 1948 map shows that Boston, Baltimore, Washington and Richmond have been added making seven cities linked in the network. Twelve more will be added during 1949. There were more NBC television affiliate stations than are shown here, but their programs arrived in the mail as kinescope films. Only in the linked cities could the same episodes of the same shows be seen at a regularly scheduled time. Shows that aired on a Monday on the network may have aired on Friday at unlinked affiliates. By 1952, pretty much all of the affiliates for all networks nation wide were linked in, but even up into the early 1960s, some stations were affiliated with more than one network and would pick and choose the shows they aired locally, and would take those shows as they were fed down the AT&T network lines.

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America’s New Year’s Eve Broadcast History: The Lombardo Years

Starting in 1927, Guy Lombardo And His Royal Canadians played New Year’s Eve shows on Chicago’s WBBM radio. In ’28, WBBM became one of the original CBS Radio Network stations and the executives in New York became aware of the very popular Chicago celebration and in 1929 brought Lombardo to New York for a New Year’s Eve network show that for some reason was shared with the NBC Radio Network, with CBS broadcasting the before midnight segment and NBC broadcasting the after midnight part of the show. Lombardo’s orchestra played at the “Roosevelt Grill” in the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City from 1929 to 1959, and their New Year’s Eve performances continued until 1978 at the Waldorf Astoria. Below is the earliest (1957) known video of the televised performances which started on CBS in December 31, 1956. The Lombardo special on CBS would include a live segment from Times Square (long the focal point of America’s New Year’s Eve celebrations) showcasing the arrival of the New Year. During the early years on CBS, pioneer broadcast journalist Robert Trout reported from Times Square; in later years, another longtime newsman, Ben Grauer, reported from Times Square, though Grauer worked for NBC. While CBS carried most of the Lombardo New Year’s specials, there were a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the special was syndicated live to individual TV stations instead of being broadcast on a network. By the middle 1970’s, the Lombardo TV show was facing competition, especially for younger viewers, from Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, but Lombardo remained popular among viewers, especially older ones. Even after Lombardo’s death, the band’s New Year’s specials continued for two more years on CBS. The Royal Canadians were noted for playing the traditional song Auld Lang Syne as part of the celebrations. Their recording of the song still plays as the first song of the new year in Times Square.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPfrBxHgLmA

Here is an old kinescope from over 50 years ago!! For 100 years, the slow drop of a lighted glass ball on New Year’s Eve from atop One Times Square in New Yo…

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KTLA Innovation: Television’s First Videotaped Western

‘The Wrangler’ was a six episode summer replacement series for NBC’s ‘Tennessee Ernie Ford Show’ and was produced by KTLA on videotape. This is KTLA veteran cameraman Dick Watson on the Wrangler set with a new Marconi Mark IV and the photo is from his wife, Judy. Much of the back story that follows was written by former KTLA, NBC director Joel Tater.

As most of you know, videotape was introduced in late 1956 and prior to that TV programs were either live, on film or on kinescope. KTLA was the last station in the Los Angeles area to get videotape machines because most of their shows were live and they really didn’t see the immediate need. When a new general manager, Jim Schulke, took over in 1959 he bought lots of Ampex videotape machines, the new black and white Marconi Mark IV cameras and built one of the first videotape mobile units which could shoot shows on location. The new mobile unit would be for not only KTLA shows but anybody else who wanted to shoot their shows on tape on location. Stage 6 on the lot was outfitted with state of the art audio and video equipment to allow for facilities work for outside producers as well. In early 1960 ford motor company was looking to sponsor a summer replacement show for the Ernie Ford show…somehow Schulke convinced NBC and ford to produce a western on videotape, something never before attempted. It was called ‘Wrangler’ and starred Jason Evers. Most of the show would be shot on location at the Janns Ranch in Thousand Oaks with interiors shot on Stage 6.

There were many of the usual problems involved in shooting a period piece on location, such as airplane noise, weather and lighting, but, the biggest problem was that videotape editing had not evolved beyond cutting the tape with a razor, piecing it back with cellophane tape and hoping the splices held. Since there is no visual image on the tape as there is on film, it was a hit and miss proposition that you had made an accurate cut. If the tape pulses were not aligned properly, the picture would roll vertically on the air and you would have to try making the edit again. The first episode of ‘Wrangler’ went on the air August 4th 1960. Because of all the editing problems, that first episode was delivered to NBC to play to the full network just hours before airtime. To try to fix the editing problems, KTLA chief engineer John Silva put together a machine called the TV-Ola, which was to be a frame by frame tape editor. It was about 25 feet long and totally impractical. Meanwhile, the KTLA overtime for shooting and editing the show skyrocketed. Unfortunately the directors chosen for ‘Wrangler’ had never worked with tape before causing endless retakes and the outdoor and indoor scenes rarely matched in continuity. 7 episodes of ‘Wrangler’ were shot, but only 6 aired. The last one ran on September 15th 1960…not a moment too soon for NBC, KTLA, Ford, Silva and Schulke.

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A Dying Breath Brought New Life To Video Assist

In the very last days in operation as a network, Dumont introduced the Electronicam in 1955. By late ’54 the handwriting was on the wall…in February of 1955, Dumont executives realized the company could not continue as a television network. It was decided to shut down network operations and operate WABD and WTTG as independents. On April 1, 1955, most of DuMont’s entertainment programs were dropped.

April 15, 1955, nine years to the day after opening their fist studio at Wanamaker’s Department Store, the company introduced the 35 and 16mm versions of the Dumont Electronicam. The hope was that this new video and film production tool would help save the company, and after all, the end result was much better than the kinescope.

Jerry Lewis saw an Electrocam in New York in 1956 and never forgot that. ’56 was the year he and Dean Martin split, and Lewis did a few solo movies for director Hal Wallis but became involved in the production as well. By ’60, Lewis was on his own and began writing, directing and starring in his own movies with Paramount as a partner. All the while the Electronicam process was on his mind and by the early 60s, he had begun the process of developing a true video assist technology. By ’66, he had “Jerry’s Noisy Toy” which included video and audio tape capacity and RCA vidicon cameras interlinked with Mitchell BNC cameras.

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In The Days Of Not So Instant Replays…

Our friend Richard Wirth has a new article on the history of kinescopes and video tape development. Linking the east and west costs by coaxial cable was a blessing and a curse for networks because of the need to delay broadcasts going west. Here’s a look at how that got done in the 50s. Enjoy!

http://provideocoalition.com/pvcexclusive/story/invention-of-videotape

The Mother of Invention of Videotape

In our file based acquisition world of 2013 where the editing process can begin immediately right there on the set, it can be difficult to relate to a time when just getting the program recorded was a Herculean effort requiring considerable engineering manpower and over a ton of equipment.

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