It is 1939, and RCA has just introduced television at the World’s Far in New York City. The Fair was held at what is now Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, in Queens, under the banner of the “World of Tomorrow,” and demonstrated many new products in development by your favorite corporations.
This film demonstrated to the masses the workings of television technology and programming. As you can probably tell, RCA is really patting itself on the back for basically single-handedly inventing the necessary parts of television, such as the iconoscope and the kinescope, and single-handed producing live television programming.
The film entices the audience of the possibilities that television can have, showcasing two forms available only on live television.The programming is notable because it is of a horse race, an extraordinarily popular sport in midcentury America, and of a symphony orchestra performing a Strauss waltz. Television can bring a popular entertainment, such as horse racing, and a refined cultural form, such as the symphony, via RCA technology.
The truth is that RCA did not single-handedly develop all of these technologies. They did however market them aggressively and position themselves as a leader of television. Moreover, their first-mover advantage in live network television made NBC the dominant television network for television’s first generation.
This video is available on the DVD compilation Television & TV Broadcasting Industry History Films: w/ RCA & NBC Films from Quality Information Publishers, Inc.
This film is an update of The Story of Television from 1939, and apart from a few scenes, there's no similarity to the 1939 version. In this version, we see RCA taking even more credit for inventing television, including interviews with Vladimir Zworkin and David Sarnoff.
Produced after the 1954 adoption of NTSC color based on the RCA standard, this film is something like RCA taking a victory lap.
This video is from the Prelinger Archives, available at the Internet Archive.
Every television historian has a soft spot in his/her heart for live anthology dramas. What's not to like? These “teleplays” were well-written, well-acted, and focused on deep character psychology. They were also performed live and almost never repeated again. Thank goodness for the kinescope recordings.
In this installment of Playhouse 90 from 1958, Days of Wine and Roses concerns a married couple who are alcoholics. The portrayal of this disease is extraordinary. This clip starts after Joe, a public relations man, has reached his moment of clarity and begins attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. AA was a fairly new organization, founded in 1935, and was gaining prominence by this point. During his testimonial, there's a flashback to a particularly dark part of his and his wife's lives.
The representation of Joe's and Kristen's addiction is absolutely breathtaking. When I first saw this, the representation of rye whiskey, a socially acceptable and even upscale spirit today, compares to how we think of crack cocaine or meth. Beyond the addiction, the performance is very naturalistic. These actors seem like real people, not delivering a stylized performance. It's gritty but not exaggerated. Also, consider the medium of television. There are a lot of closeups and very few cuts (or “switches” in the parlance of live television). Televisions were much smaller than the sixty-inch sets of today.
The entire program of Days of Wine and Roses is available on The Golden Age of Television from the Criterion Collection.
News programs were only fifteen minutes long until about the 1960s, after the assassination of President Kennedy, when they expanded to thirty minutes and included more original reporting.
In this installment of Plymouth News Caravan, the newsmaker is Albert Eisnstein who just passed away and is eulogized in this program.
There are few television programs in the 1950s more celebrated than See It Now. In the early installment, Edward R. Murrow demonstrates the reach and capacity for live television and the connections made possible by this new medium. You'll have to forgive them for being a little excited but they were switching video feeds from all over the country.
My favorite part of this excerpt is the conversations between the many soldiers in Korea. They were reminiscing about Christmas, and their various traditions throughout
While all the other studios were fighting television, Disney was one of the few studios to embrace it. They had the least to lose, as they were a relatively small studio in the 1950s and the studio that distributed their movies, RKO, had gone out of business. Moreover, they needed exposure for the new theme park they were opening in California, in 1955.
Credit Disney with making the early jump to television. ABC was also struggling in the television network race and were looking for new content. It was a win-win-win. Disney found a use for their old films, which were doing little sitting in vaults away from movie screens. ABC received content from Disney to air on its stations. Disney was able to promote Disneyland on weekly basis on its own TV show.
The other studios would soon begin selling their old movies to television and would eventually even begin producing programming expressly for television.
Finally, you might be familiar with quiz shows and how they were rigged to accomodate the sponsor's wishes. This is because television programming, much like radio program had been since the 1930s, was controlled by the sponsor. The network served as a primarily technical role, as a producer, and a distributor, using the CBS's and NBC's connections and network of affiliated television stations.
Herb Stempel was a working man's hero. He attended CUNY for free, because that's what it used to cost to go to college in New York City (nothing), and lived in a blue-collar suburb of Queens. On the other hand, there was Charles Van Doren, a teacher at Columbia University whose family consisted of a poet father, a novelist mother, and biographer uncle. Stempel had amassed a long winning streak due in part to his likability on the program and the sponsor feeding him questions. However, once the sponsors wanted a change, they had Stempel “throw” the program and gave Van Doren the answers to the questions.
The lasting legacy of the Quiz Show Scandals is hard to gauge. Some point to the scandal as being the moment when US audiences lost their affinity for television. This would make the Quiz Show Scandals as an original sin, something like the moment when Adam reached for an apple in Biblical lore. But people had already been suspicious of television anyway. The scandal was a public relations setback, but the networks capitalized on this moment to take control of television programming from the sponsors. The system was known as magazine sponsorship. A program would have many sponsors but the network would control the programming. Not only would this make for greater autonomy from the sponsors, it would also be a lot more profitable.