Television In The Army…1953 ‘The Big Picture’ Special
Television In The Army…1953 ‘The Big Picture’ Special
This is about as good a look at RCA TK 11/31s in action as you will ever get, but we also see Dumont 5098C cameras here. There are some RCA TK30s scattered in and even a small Dage portable and RCA’s Walky Looky. There’s a lot of camera footage here, but you’ll have to skip around some.
The first 10 minutes of this is done at the Army’s New York facility and is RCA heavy. Some of the TK30 footage of the war games was shot at West Point.
The second segment takes us to Augusta, Georgia and the Southeast Signal Corps School at Ft. Gordon (where I trained), and this installation was equipped with Dumont equipment, including a kinescope machine which we’ll see.
At around 14 minutes in, we see a small Dage portable and at 21, more of the mobile unit with TK30s. At 22:25 we see the RCA Walky Looky in action. Many of us that grew up in the 50s and 60s remember watching these ‘Big Picture’ presentations on our local stations. Do you remember? Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee
The Army Signal Corp Pictorial Center is now the Kaufman-Astoria Studios, current home of ‘Sesame Street’. The facility was originally built by ‘Famous Players-Lasky’, later known as Paramount Pictures, in 1920. It was at one time the largest film studio in the world until eclipsed by many larger sound stages in Los Angeles. Among the early features shot at the studio were the first two Marx Brothers films, ‘The Cocoanuts’ and ‘Animal Crackers’.
The complex is in heavy use today as the shooting stage for ‘Orange is the New Black’ and ‘Nurse Jackie’, in addition to its continuing use by ‘Sesame Street’.
http://www.kaufmanastoria.com/