The Kraft Television Theater: NBC, May 1947 – October 1958

After the Kraft Television Theater ended, TV Guide did a tribute article about the series. The article stated that the series had aired more than 650 plays that were chosen from 18,845 scripts. The rehearsals for the 6,750 roles took 26,000 hours on 5,236 sets. The first play had cost $3,000 to produce and the last cost $165,000!

The Kraft Television Theater didn’t take summer breaks and aired pretty much twelve months out of the year for its entire run and was done live each week.

Incredibly, the show was so popular and so well funded by Kraft that it aired on both NBC and ABC (but on different nights) during the Fall 1953 and Fall 1954 seasons. Why? Kraft had a new product…Cheese Whiz and they wanted to sell more! It would be interesting to know if the ABC shows were kine copies of the NBC show that aired earlier in the week, or, ‘the best of’ some of the shows from past seasons.

Kraft continued to sponsor TV shows after the Kraft Television Theater ended but they switched from dramatic anthology series to musicals bu bringing the Music Hall from NBC radio to NBC TV in 1958. Milton Berle hosted during the 1958 season. Beginning with the fall 1959 season, Perry Como became the host, and continued until 1967 (as a monthly series from 1963 through ’67)

The photo below was taken during rehearsal for the December 16, 1953 broadcast of ‘To Live In Peace’, staring Anne Bankroft. This was telecast in compatible color the night before the FCC gave the official go ahead for commercial color broadcasts. The studio was the famous RCA/NBC color testing facility, The Colonial Theater. The camera is an RCA TK40.

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