Where Are All Those Episodes of DRAGNET?

A lot of us grew up watching the 1967-1970 revival of Dragnet, either first-run or in syndication. It’s known informally as “the color Dragnet,” to differentiate it from the black-and-white original, which aired from 1951 to 1959. Both incarnations were NBC shows. (Radio buffs will scowl and remind you that the true original Dragnet was the radio series, and they’re right, but let’s stick to TV.)

“The color Dragnet” is a pretty good show overall. Episodes from the first one-and-a-half seasons are often terrific. The third season falls into a rut of showcasing tedious police administrative procedurals, but the show recovers somewhat afterward. And of course, even if a particular episode isn’t anything special, you still get to enjoy Jack Webb’s performance as Sgt. Joe Friday, with that voice of his and the way he delivers his lines.

So yes, it’s a pretty good show, but what’s really good is the black-and-white original Dragnet. It’s got a very film-noir feel to it, full of dark nights, heavy shadows, staccato dialogue, fedoras, overcoats, dangerous losers and cynical dames. The Sgt. Friday of these years is lean, terse and somewhat haunted. He can relax a little bit while bantering with sidekick Frank Smith (Ben Alexander), but soon it’s right back to the exhausting grunt work of a police detective: following up on leads, dealing with dullard civilians and surly punks, and piecing together a case, one clue at a time. And the cases are often very grim. There are rapists and violent psychotics on Dragnet, even child molesters. Many episodes in the early years recycled the superb radio scripts of James Moser, which lost none of their impact in the transition. There’s stark, dramatic lighting and unusual overhead camera shots. It’s very compelling television.

Dragnet was one of the few hit radio dramas to become even bigger on TV, placing in the Top Ten throughout most of its first six seasons (not surprisingly, it was especially popular in its home base of Los Angeles). A Warner Bros. movie version was also a hit, arriving pretty much right at the peak of Dragnetmania in late 1954.

Things began unraveling three years later. Maybe audiences felt the show was getting a bit stale. Certainly, Webb himself was getting a little winded by this time. Besides starring in every episode, he was producing and directing them as well, while developing other film and TV projects on the side. In spite of a very strong lead-in (Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life, the most popular Thursday show of that 1957-58 season), Dragnet’s ratings began falling steadily. It was beaten in its timeslot by ABC’s The Real McCoys, prompting a move to Tuesdays the following season. But even more viewers were lost, and Webb turned in his badge. Dragnet was over, at least in prime time, but the show was already a staple of the syndication market, and would remain so well into the 1960s, under the title Badge 714. Oversaturation is as good an explanation for the show’s demise as any, but it should be noted that by the time these later seasons were produced, the well of old James Moser radio scripts had run dry.

Given Dragnet’s popularity and prestige, why hasn’t it been given an official DVD release? Unlike the fabled anthology shows of the era that were aired live, Dragnet was shot on 35mm film. So why doesn’t someone just transfer it to video?

That’s a question I’ve been asking for years, and I’ve been given different answers. I’ve heard that it’s a simple matter of no one having gotten around to it yet, but that’s ridiculous.

Dozens of Dragnet episodes never had their copyrights renewed, and some people believe that’s why no one’s produced an official DVD release— after all, why spend a lot of money restoring public domain shows for DVD when anyone could legally copy your work and sell it themselves? But official releases of the early seasons of One Step Beyond and The Beverly Hillbillies have come out— material that’s largely public domain— so why can’t that be done with Dragnet?

Michael J. Hayde, in his book My Name is Friday (2001), says that “the negatives have been placed in storage,” but if so, nobody seems to be able to find them. I’ve heard that one of the more prominent video labels has tried to do a comprehensive release of the show, but that the project blew up on the launch pad when very little quality material could be obtained.

The bitter truth is that most of Dragnet is missing. Like Lon Chaney’s London After Midnight, it’s simply lost, possibly forever. Many of you will scoff at that notion, since people like to think that every movie and show ever produced is resting patiently on a shelf somewhere. That’s just not the case.

In 1953, Jack Webb and two partners sold the Dragnet franchise to MCA, the company whose Revue subsidiary was a prodigious producer of prime-time TV material. Revue’s stuff was filmed at Universal’s movie studio, and in the course of time MCA gobbled up Universal as well. Today the amalgamation is known as NBCUniversal.

For years, there’s been some confusion about what this means for Dragnet. Universal has a very spotty record when it comes to preserving the camera negatives of its vintage TV material. Timeless has released many of these shows on DVD— everything from M Squad to State Trooper to Medic— which had to be mastered from 16mm collector prints rather than the far-superior original elements, because no one at Universal can seem to find them. In case after case, Universal has retained the rights, but not the negatives. (In this case, Universal also forgot to renew the copyrights on dozens of episodes.)

There are a number of explanations for why this is so. Simple incompetence is one. The sheer size of the company’s holdings is another. And accidents do happen. Vault fires have destroyed more material than incompetence ever did, and Universal had a devastating one as recently as 2008, though the 35mm elements for Dragnet seem to have gone missing well before then.

The suggestion has been offered that Jack Webb’s estate must be sitting on them. But Webb and his Mark VII Productions sold the early Dragnet material to MCA, as noted. The later seasons were produced as a work for hire, and neither Webb nor Mark VII ever had those originals.

Is there a chance that the Webb estate has copies? Dupe negatives, maybe?

Webb did indeed maintain a film vault, and he did hold original camera elements for other shows he produced. Unfortunately, he disposed of the contents of that vault, for tax and insurance reasons, around 1976. The late film historian Robert Birchard was just out of college at the time, and had the unhappy assignment of overseeing that destruction. Lost were the original 35mm elements for the Mark VII shows Noah’s Ark (1956-57) and Pete Kelly’s Blues (1959), along with a set of 16mm Dragnet episodes, among other things. All of those prints are now long gone.

Webb works through lunch with assistant director Sam Roman, October 30, 1953.

How about other 16mm prints? This is a real puzzler for me. Considering how successfully Badge 714 played in syndication, the collectors’ market ought to be swimming in those prints. But it isn’t. In thirty years of collecting 16mm, I can’t remember ever seeing a single episode advertised in The Big Reel or Film Collectors World. Why are they so rare? I have no idea, but about the time the 1967 “color Dragnet” appeared, Badge 714 was pulled from syndication to prevent oversaturation. This likely prevented a lot of prints from slipping into collectors’ hands in the first place.

They’re not completely gone, of course. A few dozen episodes are available on YouTube and the DVD collectors’ market, transferred from stray 16mm prints. (Wikipedia says there are 52 episodes in circulation, but I’ve got 64 myself and I’m sure there are at least a few more out there.) That’s a fair sample, but considering there were 267 episodes produced, the survival ratio is pretty miserable for such an iconic series.

In terms of image quality, some of these 64 look very good, but a great many circulate only as copies-of-copies-of-copies, so if you’re shopping around, lower your expectations accordingly. One edition I like is a five-disc, 25-episode set released in 2004 by Madacy, easy to find on Amazon and eBay. For diehard collectors, a much larger set is available from Randy Narramore (randyn (((at))) earthlink (((dot))) net). I’ve bought this set and others from Randy in the past. He’s reputable and his prices are very fair, but unavoidably the image quality in the Dragnet set varies from beautiful to blecch.

A show as popular, compelling and influential as Dragnet deserves better, but unfortunately this is as good as it’ll ever get. I hope to be proven wrong.

 

“With Tonight’s Guests… Bette Davis and the Who!”

You’d probably never expect to see Ronald Reagan on the same stage with the Jackson Five. But during the golden age of the TV variety show, it was fine to book two performers from opposite ends of the entertainment spectrum. Incongruous couplings happened all the time. Sometimes they’d appear together and sometimes separately, but the following list proves that when it comes to variety shows, expect the unexpected—

 

Jackie Robinson and Bela Lugosi (Texaco Star Theater, 9/27/49)

Frank Sinatra and Lon Chaney Jr. (Texaco Star Theater, 11/28/50)

Jane Russell and Jerry Lee Lewis (The Steve Allen Show, 8/11/57)

Liberace and Lou Costello (The Steve Allen Show, 8/18/57)

Errol Flynn and Don Adams (The Steve Allen Show, 12/1/57)

Lenny Bruce and the Three Stooges (The Steve Allen Show, 4/5/59)

Nat King Cole and Rin Tin Tin  (Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall, 10/21/59)

Jimmy Durante and Ray Charles  (Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall, 2/22/61)

Sophia Loren and Mel Brooks (The Steve Allen Show, 11/29/61)

Tallulah Bankhead and the Beach Boys (The Andy Williams Show, 5/2/66)

Elvis Presley and Charles Laughton (The Ed Sullivan Show, 9/9/56)

Lana Turner and the Electric Prunes (The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, 4/16/67)

Bette Davis and the Who (The Smother Brothers Comedy Hour, 9/17/67)

Arthur Godfrey and the Bee Gees (The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, 2/4/68)

Kate Smith and Jefferson Airplane (The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, 11/10/68)

John Wayne and O. J. Simpson (The Bob Hope Special, 11/27/68)

Sid Caesar and the Grateful Dead (Playboy After Dark, 1/18/69)

Lucille Ball and George Carlin (The Carol Burnett Show, 11/24/69)

Ronald Reagan and the Jackson 5 (The Sonny and Cher Show, 9/15/72)

Kate Smith and Chuck Norris (The Donny and Marie Osmond Show, 11/16/75)

Roy Rogers and Sherman Hemsley (Tony Orlando and Dawn, 2/25/76)

Abe Vigoda and the Bay City Rollers (The Tony Orlando and Dawn Rainbow Hour, 12/7/76)

Buddy Hackett and ABBA (Dick Clark’s Live Wednesday, 11/15/78)

 

Slap Leather!

Vintage TV westerns tend to be violent. Really violent. And considering all the gun violence that rages across the network frontier, it was inevitable that a government official would step in and demand that everybody lay down their firearms. That’s what happens in a Gunsmoke I saw recently (2:25, “Bureaucrat,” March 1957). Marshal Dillon is ordered by a visiting supervisor from Washington to make Dodge City a gun-free zone. The idea is to eliminate the shooting deaths which are a weekly feature of this show.

So far, the script doesn’t care whether you see this as a common-sense step toward public safety, or as an assault on the Second Amendment. The citizens of Dodge see it as a means of being rendered helpless to defend themselves against the sort of people who don’t obey gun laws (or any other laws). I won’t bury you in plot details but in the end, the experiment in gun control is dropped after failing completely.

The script was based on a Gunsmoke radio play by John Meston, offering a muscular defense of frontier justice along with a swat at government intrusion. A lot of these early Gunsmokes are steeped in the grim insecurity of the Cold War, when the threat of sudden death on a massive scale was a very real danger. From that danger come these masculine studies in keeping the wolf from civilization’s door.

If this episode had been from the late-‘60s, written by someone from the Rod Serling – Sterling Silliphant School of Earnest Social Commentary, we’d probably see Dodge City’s loudest gun rights advocate accidentally shoot his own little girl to death. Or maybe he’d lead an angry mob to gun down an Indian suspect (who turns out to be innocent), as the wise old government bureaucrat sighs. Personally, if I have to choose, I prefer the Meston approach, but the level of violence would be about the same either way.

I’m not sure that you can have a really compelling western series without violence. Dramatically, threatened or implied violence can be more effective than the real thing. For example, take this episode of Wanted: Dead or Alive (1:15, “Rawhide Breed,” December 1958), one even grittier than usual for this two-fisted series. Steve McQueen’s bounty hunter character is stranded in the Arizona desert with a companion. Hostile Apaches are scattered everywhere, and the sanctuary of an Army fort is many miles away. McQueen and friend are traveling on foot. They’ll die if they don’t find water. They manage to capture a young Apache, and McQueen tries to intimidate him into revealing the location of the nearest water hole.

Any other show would have the hero shout at the Indian, or appeal to his sense of mercy. But this is Wanted: Dead or Alive, so McQueen threatens to slice the Apache’s nose off.

A scriptwriter from the Serling-Silliphant School would now have McQueen be overwhelmed by remorse for resorting to such a brutal display: “Look what I’ve become! The savage one is me!” He’d recoil in shame and drop to his knees, whereupon the unexpectedly kindly Indian would point out the water hole, and both would drink together.

But this is a Samuel Peeples script, the product of an earlier era. McQueen never does slice off the truculent Apache’s nose (imagine getting that past Standards and Practices!). He drops the knife with a sigh of resignation— not over his own violent impulses, but because the threat doesn’t work. The first moment McQueen is distracted, the Apache runs away. Soon there are encounters with other Apaches, all of whom are gunned down just before they can kill our protagonists.

There’s no attempt to explain why the Apaches are out for blood. They’re just there to move the action along. Is that bad? Is it lazy writing? Not necessarily. Westerns exist in a universe in which violence spurs action, and actions spur violence. If we can accept those ground rules in Game of Thrones, we can certainly accept them in a ‘50s western. (Admittedly, I’d probably feel differently about this episode if I were of Apache descent.)

The paradox about westerns is that if you take out the violence, all you have left is a travelogue, whereas too much violence reduces your story to a Punch-and-Judy show of monotonous gunfire and men endlessly wincing and falling over. You have to strike the right balance. The producers of Rawhide liked to tackle character studies in which complex people confront their inner demons in a parched landscape, but viewers would write in and complain that they weren’t seeing enough killing (or cattle). Similarly, Chuck Connors recalled how the fans felt a little cheated whenever The Rifleman was able to resolve the week’s conflict without resorting to his awesome rapid-firing rifle.

Some observers would crown the HBO series Deadwood as the greatest TV western of all, and if ever there was an adult western, it’s this one. You get a good measure of historical authenticity, and complex characters whose personalities are revealed slowly over time. Nobody’s purely good or bad, and every relationship includes a degree of conflict. There’s violence to be sure, but primarily there’s misery, a grueling unpleasantness that makes this the least fun western ever. (Its most memorable episode is all about a guy trying to pass a kidney stone, an hour of agony for character and viewer alike.)

Is it art? Maybe. But I guess it’s art that I can get along without. It’s not the level of violence that gets oppressive, but the ugliness and the ennui. There are unforgettable things in Deadwood, but I lost interest in the show. It spends so much time gazing into its own filthy navel that it stopped entertaining me and I drifted away in the middle of the third season.

For the most part, I have even less interest in the antiseptic old kiddie westerns like The Roy Rogers Show and The Gene Autry Show. The dopey sidekicks are incredibly annoying, and the stories tend to be uninspired. I need a western with a little more meat on its bones than that. But there are juvenile westerns worth watching, especially if you really, really like dogs (The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin), horses (Fury, The Adventures of Champion) or trains (Casey Jones).

There are also women’s westerns. Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman is the most conspicuous example, but I’d add Here Come the Brides and Little House on the Prairie to that category and maybe The Big Valley too. The Virginian crosses into that territory pretty frequently as well. There’s nothing wrong with this sub-genre, but it just doesn’t appeal to me and I’m not sure why. There are plenty of shows I like that explore love, relationships and family life. But I don’t want that stuff to crowd out the shoot-outs and the saloon fights, so we’re right back to the dilemma of striking the right balance.

The level of violence isn’t really a concern, at least as long as my young son isn’t watching it with me. I want whatever level of violence the story needs.

For me, the perfect TV western will have the advantages of brevity, authentic location shooting, plenty of action, a hero I can admire, and plots that are complex enough to be intellectually stimulating without sagging under the weight of extraneous detail. Gunsmoke comes close, but it’s too frequently formulaic (stranger comes to town —> conflict ensues —> someone gets killed).

A few sentimental favorites aside, a clear winner emerges. It’s Have Gun – Will Travel. It avoids the genre’s fatal extremes: the simple-minded shoot-‘em-up horse operas of the classical tradition, and the tiresome brooding, self-absorbed anti-heroes of the modern. Violence is only used for dramatic impact; it’s there as often as the story requires it, but no more. It’s got Richard Boone and that perfect voice of his.

The show doesn’t preach at me. It isn’t trying to save the world. It’s entertaining without ever being silly. It’s intelligent enough to be compelling without being ponderous. It’s got the authentic western scenery, and at 25 minutes an episode, it moves.

Usually the bad guy gets blown away in the end. Sometimes he only gets exposed, shamed and shunned, which can be just as well. Whatever works.

There are episodes here and there in which Paladin describes how his gun was hand-crafted to his exact specifications to ensure perfect balance. That describes the show itself… perfect balance.

 

Most Memorable Moments

When you watch a lot of vintage TV in a sleepy trance long past your bedtime, you find that certain moments make a strong impression— moments that poke the imagination or stir an old memory. These were the five most memorable moments from the eighty-odd vintage shows I watched last month.

It plays better when you can hear the crunching metal.

Elephant Squashes a Police Car – CHiPs (1:10, “Highway Robbery,” December 1977) – This series ran out of gas long before it left the air, but a lot of weird things pop up in the early episodes. In this one, a circus guy is transporting an elephant on the freeway, which gets loose and lumbers around until it’s finally caught— but not before it caves in the hood of a police car by sitting on it.

   **************************************

Molly Music – The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd (1:01, “Here’s Why Cosmetics Should Come in Unbreakable Bottles,” May 1987) – This NBC “dramedy” was a big favorite of mine in the late ‘80s, but I hadn’t seen so much as a clip in the last quarter-century. Because of music clearance issues, it’s never had an official DVD release and it may never get one. I went ahead and bought a set on the bootleg market, fully aware that it would consist of second- or third-generation VHS dubs. Someday I’ll write up a guide to vintage TV bootlegs, or just a review of this particular show. But for now, I’ll just say that it was magical to pop the first disc into the machine and hear the Molly Dodd theme music again after all those years. It’s lilting but jazzy, a little like the Jeeves and Wooster theme (See? I do watch more than just westerns and cop shows). I was surprised to find that I remembered the tune completely, along with the visual vignettes that accompany it. Funny how much you remember without realizing it.

Ah, Molly. I never forgot you.

  ***************************************

The Beast of Big Ghost Basin – Cheyenne (2:14, “Big Ghost Basin,” March 1957) – This was definitely an offbeat episode of the Warner Bros. western, really more of a mystery story. A bloodthirsty beast has been attacking people in the middle of the night out in Big Ghost Basin. Nearly everyone who’s encountered it has been crushed to death by it, so no one really knows who (or what) the beast is. It can’t be a bear, because it leaves no claw marks.

While watching this, I was apprehensive that the monster would turn out to be something stupid, like a rustler in a costume or something. But I was hopeful that it would be a cool-looking Sasquatch-like creature. After all, Warner Bros. had some money to spend, and Cheyenne was the studio’s top TV attraction at the time. The suspense builds as the episode slowly reaches its climax. Cheyenne hides out in the Basin with his rifle, ready to stop the monster’s killing spree. He confronts the beast, and kills it with multiple rifle blasts just as it’s about to charge.

That’s one savage rug.

So what does the monster turn out to be? A bear. What? Wait a minute— why doesn’t it have any claws, then? Because this bear, we’re told, had been caught in a forest fire, which burned off his claws and made him really mean. Are they kidding? I stayed up past midnight for this? And when we get to see the thing, it’s nothing but a guy draped in a bearskin rug (funny how the fire burned off his claws but not his fur).

This episode wasn’t the worst thing I watched all month— that prize goes to The Hitchhiker (5:07, “The Miracle of Alice Ames,” July 1989)— but after that great build-up, it was the most disappointing.

***************************************

Ponch’s Hot Date – CHiPs – The same episode I mentioned above had a remarkable conclusion. Remarkably creepy, that is. Our Highway Patrolman hero Ponch has spent the whole episode lusting after the hot billboard model whose portrait appears in suntan lotion ads all over town. He can’t stop talking about how much he’d love to go out with her, and we can guess what’s running through his imagination. Well, by a wacky coincidence, Ponch’s supervisor is friends with her family. He sets up a blind date.

Blind dates can be awkward.

When Ponch shows up at the girl’s house with a bouquet of roses, he meets her and beholds the same familiar face, that of a 25-year-old woman. But— surprise! She’s got the body of a ten-year-old girl. How old is she? “Fifteen… on my next birthday,” she smiles, taking Ponch’s arm and cozying up to him. (The very odd-looking actress is Wendy Fredericks, in her only known role apart from a failed pilot.) She’s wearing a little pair of shorts and knee socks.

Ponch’s patrolmen pals, his supervisor, and even the girl’s father are all on hand with big grins on their faces. What’s even creepier is that they’re holding cocktails and smoking cigars, as if they’re eager to watch what happens next. That’s where the episode ends.

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Dan Tanna’s Drive – Vega$ (1:01, “Centerfold,” September 1978) – The great supporting cast includes Morey Amsterdam, Tony Curtis, Abe Vigoda and Vic Tayback, but the really remarkable moment in this show had nothing to do with them, and almost nothing to do with the plot. Never mind the details, but it’s sort of a side-plot, involving the hero’s efforts to find a missing lion (yes, in Las Vegas). Eventually he does, and we’re treated to shots of star Robert Urich driving down the Strip in an open convertible with a live lion in the passenger seat. No process shots, no rear-projection (and no stagehand wearing a lion-skin rug, either); it’s real, surreal, and pure Aaron Spelling. That’s showmanship!

 *************************************************

Have lion, will travel.

Honor roll: I watched more than eighty episodes of vintage TV last month, and these were the five I liked best:

Lawman (2:35, “The Swamper,” June 1960)

Adam-12 (4:11, “Assassination,” December 1971)

Dallas (7:30, “End Game,” May 1984)

Jake and the Fatman (1:06, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” October 1987)

Frasier (2:07, “The Candidate,” November 1984)

 

Review: THE RED SKELTON SHOW, Season One

The legacy of a great television comedian follows a three-step path. While your show is still in production, you’re loved. You’re a star. Everything you do generates goodwill. Then, after your show has had its run, you ease into the second stage: you’re respected. People remember you, your show has probably gone into syndication and/or home video. Maybe you’ve receded into the background somewhat, but you’re still a presence. You’re still a familiar figure in popular culture.

But eventually comes the third step: you’re forgotten. This usually takes a while to happen, and it arrives quietly, like falling leaves in autumn. Your fans have become senior citizens. Some of them remember you, some don’t. Your show isn’t seen much anymore. The youngest couple of generations don’t know you at all.

This dynamic has played itself out many times in television’s brief history: George Gobel, Bill Dana, Don Adams, Joey Bishop, Jimmie Walker, Brett Butler, etc. If TV’s silver-plated names seem to be more prone to this syndrome than the gold-plated names, that’s only because there are relatively few gold-plated talents in comedy. But it happens sooner or later to everyone, and it happened to Red Skelton.

The Red Skelton Show was a staple of network television for twenty solid years. It went off the air in 1971, and ever since then his fame has slowly, quietly diminished— not because his stuff is no longer funny, but because it’s no longer easy to find, and… well, because of that three-step syndrome.

His specialty was sketch comedy (preferably for live audiences), and television was the perfect medium for him. Throughout those twenty seasons, it placed in Nielsen’s Top Ten nine times. But the culture changed swiftly in the late 1960s. The young and the urban now had the spotlight to themselves. The networks were suddenly so eager to court the Pepsi Generation that they’d scrap anything and anyone whose main appeal lay outside that demographic. That included Skelton. His show had been a Tuesday-night staple (seventh in the ratings), when CBS abruptly cancelled it. He moved to NBC but was denied his traditional timeslot; his show was cut from an hour to thirty minutes, and its format was changed. The ratings suffered, and rather than repair the damage, NBC closed it down.

Saturation re-broadcasts in the syndication market have kept a lot of old TV shows alive. But unlike I love Lucy or The Honeymooners‘ “Classic 39,” Skelton’s show typically wasn’t shot on film. It either went out live, or it was shot on videotape, which made it relatively unattractive for later syndication. Skelton owned the rights to his shows, and the experience of being pushed off the air by CBS and NBC permanently soured his enthusiasm for the medium. So, unlike Lucy, Red never did make it to syndication. Like the saying goes: out of sight, out of mind. My parents’ generation saw Red Skelton every week; mine never saw him at all.

A Bob Hope cameo appearance, 11/25/51.

I’m too young to remember when The Red Skelton Show was on the air, and it took me a long time to get around to giving Red a try. I didn’t know him. I’d always guessed that his material was basically the loud, broad, wacky kind of thing that Jerry Lewis did, and I’m not much of a Jerry Lewis fan.

But then I set those expectations aside and began watching some Skelton shows, and I found them to be really enjoyable. There’s slapstick, sure (and it works), but there’s also some standup comedy, pantomime and a dash of topical humor. What I enjoy most of all are his ad-libs, which are less cerebral than Fred Allen’s but just as funny, and executed perfectly. Any time a supporting player steps on his line, or a prop misbehaves, you can bet Red will instantly mark the event with a fast wisecrack, and that it’ll be both good-natured and hilarious. In fact, the ad-libs frequently draw the biggest laughs of the whole episode.

In the years since his death, his estate has allowed a broad sampling of The Red Skelton Show to be released on video. Timeless Media/Shout Factory has issued several DVD collections, all of which are still in print. They’re not bad, but they’re a hodgepodge: the shows are edited (sometimes heavily), they’re seldom in chronological order, you aren’t given the broadcast dates, and there’s often a giant “bug” in the lower right corner of the screen, to deter piracy. Don’t get me wrong. It’s still good stuff. It’s just not presented very well.

But a couple of years ago, Timeless/Shout released a brand new set, and this time they really did it right. The Red Skelton Show: The Early Years, 1951-1955 presents 92 episodes (plus an unaired dress rehearsal for one of them), mastered from rare 16mm kinescopes from the comedian’s personal collection. Kinescopes can vary in image quality, but these all look great. You get the broadcast dates for each one (the earliest is dated 10/21/51 and the latest is from 3/8/55). At least three of the episodes have been available elsewhere, but not with this quality.

I’d like to focus on the show’s debut season. Twenty-seven of the episodes in the set are from Season One (October 1951 – June 1952). Skelton was a big hit this year, and the show has a lot of vitality to it. It was aired live, although each week’s offering includes a filmed “Skelton’s Scrapbook” sketch which always works in a plug for the sponsor’s product, Tide detergent. Early episodes this season include a musical segment with a nightclub or recording act (I was delighted to find that the guests one week were Foy Willing and the Riders of the Purple Sage, my favorite cowboy harmony group.) The musical acts disappear about half-way through the season, though, which is odd considering Skelton’s mounting fatigue.

Incredibly, he was doing a weekly radio show, a live television show and a movie or two a year at this point. It’s no wonder that Season One’s later episodes are generally a notch or two below the quality of the earlier ones. But they’re all enjoyable.

Skelton dropped the radio show and discontinued the live telecasts in Season Two, which made his schedule less exhausting. But doing the show on film came at a price: some of the old electricity was gone, and the canned laugh track had the effect of subduing the comedy rather than enhancing it. Ratings fell, Procter and Gamble pulled out, writers came and went. But Skelton soon recovered the lost ground; deciding to tape the show before a live audience was probably the key. Big guest stars began popping up from mid-1954 onward, and he seems to have made it his mission every week to reduce his flustered co-star to helpless hysterics. When he succeeds (and he often does), the results are television gold.

There are some beloved TV comedies of the 1950s that I watch (and enjoy) without actually cracking a smile. This isn’t one of them. Certainly, some episodes are better than others, but Skelton’s batting average is pretty high. There’s some laugh-out-loud comedy here.

The man obviously loved his work, and he’s a delight to watch. So yes, The Red Skelton Show is good stuff, and I recommend this collection.

 

Adventures in Film Collecting

Long before home video, film buffs were collecting their favorite movies on 8mm or 16mm film. From the 1920s onward, various dealers popped up to offer little tin projectors and murky-looking prints of old cartoons and silent comedies.

The variety and the quality got much better over the years, and by the 1960s-70s, film collecting was almost mainstream. Millions of middle-class families owned a reasonably good projector, a shoebox full of home movies, and maybe a few cartoons or “old-time” movies to keep the kids interested.

I got into the hobby myself at age 11 in 1976, buying Super 8mm prints of silent movies from the legendary Blackhawk Films. My mania for vintage TV didn’t emerge until many years later.

By then, film collecting had gone through a near-death experience. Around 1980 a spike in the price of silver drove prices sky-high, and many collectors drifted away to video discs and VHS machines. We die-hards carried on, buying and selling our prints through ads in collector papers like The Big Reel and Film Collectors World.

Brand-new film prints became harder to find. But by then, there were tens of thousands— in fact, probably hundreds of thousands of prints in circulation. All of us found some real treasures over the years.

The lair of a typical film collector.

Among film buffs, there’s a very common bias against anything produced for television. The golden age of Hollywood has a mystique that television has never been able to share. The typical film collector might specialize in silent comedies, or in talkie B-westerns or whatever. But relatively few collectors have much interest in vintage television, even though the TV stuff can be just as entertaining and fascinating as the movies, if not more so.

I have an old friend from the San Diego area who shared some of his collecting adventures for this blog. He’s one of the few film buffs I know who never considered television to be second-class entertainment. He prefers to remain anonymous, so we’ll just call him “George Lugner” (a name producer Mark Goodson once used when he guested on his own show, I’ve Got a Secret).

The stories you are about to hear are true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent… and the not-so-innocent.

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Q: How and when did you get into film collecting?

Lugner: I bought my first Super 8mm prints about 1968. In those days, you could go to Sears and buy little condensations of 1950s science fiction movies, so it was easy. Besides classic comedy, my focus has always been on horror, science fiction and fantasy. I made the jump to 16mm in 1972 or ’73— the quality was so much better with 16mm, but 16mm was a lot more expensive— and a year or two after that, I began collecting my all-time favorite TV show, The Adventures of Superman with George Reeves. Harley Jeske had Superman dupes for fifty or sixty bucks each. Then I started networking with other film collectors, they connected me with their contacts, and I was on my way.

Q: How many of those Supermans did you have by the time I met you, in 1981 or ’82?

Lugner: Twenty of thirty. It took a lot of time, and a lot of looking, but eventually I got them all. And along the way, I was upgrading. If I had a dupe of an episode and an original came along, I’d buy the original and sell off the dupe.

Q: I met you at Sean Rock’s house in San Diego. He was a big film buff. Besides having theater chairs and a huge outdoor screen in his backyard, he’d turned his living room into a screening room, with a separate projection booth. I’d never seen TV shows on film, projected onto a screen, until then. The difference between seeing them that way, versus on a little TV set between commercial breaks, was like night and day.

Lugner: Some of the prints we showed were mine. But Sean and his crowd were mostly into movies. I’d put a terrific first-season episode of Superman on the screen and the room would almost empty out.

Q: They’d all salivate over a two-reel short subject. But a 25-minute movie made for TV? Forget it.

Lugner: Right.

Q: I still got to see a few great TV things on the big screen there. I remember a good one was an episode of a 1950s anthology show, and it had Bert Lahr and Margaret Hamilton from The Wizard of Oz in it.

Lugner: Right, Bert Lahr discovers a gold mine in the New York City subway system and Hamilton plays his wife. I don’t remember what series that was from. (Editor’s note: It was a very obscure show, Rendezvous (1:12, “A Very Fine Deal,” December 6, 1958).)

The murderous wax figures of “The New Exhibit.” That one in the middle gave me a few sleepless nights.

Q: One of you guys brought in a print of the first hour-long Twilight Zone I’d ever seen (4:13, “The New Exhibit,” April 4, 1963). I remember being very creeped out by it, seeing it in the dark on the big screen in Sean’s living room. To this day, it’s the only Twilight Zone that ever really got to me.

Lugner: That was mine, another print that I picked up and then traded away— or sold away. I also showed another one of those at Sean’s, “He’s Alive” with Dennis Hopper.

Q: Tell me about other TV show prints that passed through your hands over the years. I was mainly into silent movies in those days, but I remember you had stray episodes of shows I’d never heard of then, like M Squad.

Lugner: Most of it was things I didn’t necessarily want to keep forever, but I’d grab it to watch, and re-sell. I had the Three Stooges on Ed Wynn, an original (1:25, March 11, 1950). I had pilots for Get Smart— the 25-minute syndicated version, and the unaired 30-minute pilot.

Q: I still remember when you ran that for us at your parents’ place. I’m not a huge Get Smart fan, but that pilot was great.

Lugner: I had pilots for Land of the Giants, Lost in Space (with and without Dr. Smith)… all of this is out on Blu-Ray now, but in those days it was all unseen and forgotten. I had the Batman pilot. I had a gorgeous print of the Star Trek “Trouble with Tribbles,” which I ran at one of the early comic conventions for a standing-room-only crowd. None of them had ever seen the original Star Trek up on a movie screen, and it went over like gangbusters, people laughing and applauding and enjoying it all together as one big audience. That sort of thing eventually stopped. They stopped using collector prints at shows like that.

Q: I remember you had those little fillers with Korla Pandit playing the organ.

Lugner: Yeah, those all ran fifteen minutes or so. They were made so that TV stations would have something to fill out the hour with, when a movie ran short. They couldn’t just run commercials for ten or fifteen minutes straight, so they’d run these Korla Pandit things. At one time I had thirty or forty. I think I still have a couple of them. Those came from a collector whose niece was selling them off really cheap.

Q: I remember watching those with you in your parents’ garage. He kept looking up from his keyboard with a mysterious smile and then looking down again.

Lugner: At one time I had this reel that was nothing but openings, closings and commercials from The Abbott and Costello Show, where they were pushing Chunky candy bars. I knew a guy who really collected Abbott and Costello, so I called him and let him know it was available. I asked for $500, and instantly he says “Sold!” I felt great. Then he tells me he would’ve offered me two grand for it.

Q: I don’t think the DVDs of that show have the original closings on them.

Lugner: No. Once I had an episode of The Felony Squad with Russell Johnson in it. He played an arsonist (2:26, “The Human Target,” March 18, 1968). I knew that he was going to be appearing at a convention that was coming up, so I film-chained it and made a VHS copy. I gave it to him and he was ecstatic, which was nice.

Q: How about kinescopes? Did you ever run across very many of those?

Lugner: Now and then. I probably had some one-of-a-kind kinescopes to shows you’ll never see again. One had Dick York from Bewitched, one of those shows they did live on the air. I think it was a cop show. There was one shot where there’s a guy on a gurney, and they wheel him in and they bump the wall, which shakes like it’s about to fall over. I’m trying to remember the title. (Editor’s note: This may have been Eye on New York (“Night of the Auk,” December 1, 1956).) I had a couple Colgate Comedy Hours with commercials. I had a Jackie Gleason Show with a live Honeymooners sketch in it, and commercials of Jackie pushing products.

Q: Tell me about that package of Felix the Cat cartoons. Somewhere around 1985 or 1986 you suddenly had a ton of Felix cartoons from the 1920s, which had been released to television in the ‘50s. I bought a bunch of those from you.

Lugner: Well, there was a guy named Mack Plummer, who’s still around. He called me one time and offered me complete runs of three or four shows I wanted: every episode of each. I said okay and wrote him a check. He came back saying there was a delay and that he needed more money. I wrote another check. He never did come up with the prints. What happened was, he was involved in a video store that was in trouble and he spent my money trying to save this store. So I started talking mail fraud if he couldn’t make good on what he owed me, or at least make an effort. In the end I was only able to get this package of Felix cartoons. In the ‘50s someone turned up these silent Felixes, and slapped soundtracks on them: just tinkly piano music and occasionally a guy going “Me-wowwww,” you know. And independent stations would run them. I had about fifty of them. A few were still silent for some reason, and there were some duplicates here and there.

Q: There are a lot of eccentric collectors and dealers. You told me about this one guy who’s a major TV collector and his house is full of stacks of boxes of film reels, including stuff he’d get in the mail and then never open.

Lugner: He’s still around. He’s ticked off every person he’s ever come in contact with. He was involved in one of the annual film conventions until he alienated everybody there. When I met him, he was living with his elderly mother, who couldn’t have been sweeter, and he would talk down to her. After she died, he inherited the house and it became the dumping ground for his film collection. Film everywhere. In his room was just a cot, a table with rewinds, and big racks of films. He used to make good money selling trailers and clips to things like Entertainment Tonight, but when the internet came in, it killed off that business.

Q: Wow.

Lugner: There was another guy who’d rent films from Universal 16. He’d keep the prints and mail back a box with bricks in it. He never got in trouble for it; he’d just play dumb.

Q: There were guys who’d get film prints from TV stations.

Lugner: Well, until around twenty years ago, anytime you saw a movie or a syndication TV show on your local station, you were seeing a 16mm film print. A station would lease a package of prints of old movies (or they’d lease an old TV series) for five years, with an option to renew. If the station didn’t want to pay to renew that lease, they could either destroy the films and mail in a form, saying the films were destroyed… or they could box up all those prints and mail them back to Bonded. Well, if you’re some guy working at the TV station, you know it’s a lot easier to just carry the prints out to the dumpster and be done with it.

I’m sure they lock the dumpsters now.

Q: I remember hearing about a collector who found an entire run of I Love Lucy in a dumpster, and loaded up his car with Lucys.

Lugner: Yeah, there was a guy in L.A. who’d drive over to Channel 11 and check their dumpster every week on the day before trash day. Eventually he hit the jackpot and there was a whole run of I Love Lucy, still in the yellow Viacom cans. Another time, Channel 51 in San Diego threw out their entire film collection. My friends Matt and Ross were working close to the station, and they heard about it, so they went over there on their lunch break and just loaded up their cars.

Q: I remember that.

Lugner: And the equipment got junked too. These expensive machines that would run the films and send them out over the air…. they were just sitting there in the rain. The real heartbreaker was Channel 6. I knew they had a ton of film, and I knew that eventually it would all go in the trash. And I knew a guy who worked there. I’d call him every few months to touch base and let him know I’d make it worth his while, if he’d tell me when it was time to dump the prints. And then one day they threw out all the prints, and the guy never told me.

Q: And throughout all of these years, you were steadily working on your Adventures of Superman collection.

Lugner: I was looking for episodes from the mid-’70s all the way until the mid-‘90s. I finally got every one of them, all 104 episodes.

Q: I remember a lot of them had the original bumpers at the commercial breaks— “The Adventures of Superman will continue in just a moment!”

Lugner: The down side of collecting on film is that the color can start to go red. You can pick up scratches. The print can turn vinegar. When I discovered that some of the color prints were just beginning to turn warm, I began selling them off. I got as much money for the bad ones as I did for the good ones. I don’t have many Supermans left now.

Q: And besides all the episodes, you had pilots for Superboy and Superpup.

Lugner: My prize was “Stamp Day for Superman,” which was a special short made by the government where Superman tells everybody to buy savings bonds. Dupes were all over the place, but I wanted an original. Finally I met a guy who had one, which he’d personally bought direct from the U.S. Treasury for about two hundred dollars. (There was a time when you could buy things like that from the Treasury, like Abbott and Costello pitching savings bonds.) It was almost pristine mint. I’ve never found another original. So that was my prize. I even sent it to a film lab to have it coated, to treat it. But then the print couldn’t breathe, and it turned vinegar. Finally the vinegar was so bad that it couldn’t be projected anymore. But I kept it for another two or three years anyway! Finally I threw it out and didn’t look back. All of that took the wind out of my sails as far as film collecting went. That was about 2007.

Q: I’ve sold 99% of my 16mm. It’s still the golden age of collecting, but video just makes way more sense than film.

Lugner: There’s still no substitute for the way film looks, projected on a big screen. But yeah.

Q: Tell me about the “Warehouse O’ Film.” I’ve been hearing about that place for years, but only in bits and pieces.

Lugner: Jay Masterson had this warehouse. I knew collectors who shopped there, but they kept it a secret from me. It was the promised land for film collectors. Finally I happened to meet the guy at the Ray Courts show. (Editor’s note: this was the forerunner of the Hollywood collectors’ shows, at which dealers sell their goods and yesteryear’s celebrities sell signed photos.) He handed me a flyer and I went up there the next week.

Q: When and where was this?

Lugner: Mid-‘80s. In Burbank, he had a warehouse. Just big gorilla racks, piled floor to ceiling with pallets of film. Boxes of film everyplace. New lab prints. Well, nearly new. Everything was priced very reasonably. Movies, cartoons, TV— cartoons were five dollars each— he just wanted to get things out of there and he had new stuff arriving on a regular basis.

Q: He had complete runs of various TV series?

Lugner: Maybe every TV series you’d see in syndication was there. He had TV shows for about twenty bucks in the box, but Supermans were fifty. Most of the color prints looked pristine because Warners had done some restoration on those. Some of the Batmans he sold were red but they were in good shape otherwise. He had original Bilkos, still in their boxes, and over time I bought about fifty of them. F Troop… you name it. Bryce Schwab would buy complete runs of Batman, Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, The Green Hornet and so on. Mint low-fades.

Q: But how did Jay get all of this film in the first place?

Lugner: He got them from Bonded Film Services. They originally came from the studios— the labs— and they’d go out to TV stations. Then when the leases expired, the stations would either destroy them (or toss them out and say they were destroyed), or they’d get sent back to Bonded.

Q: But how did Jay get them?

Lugner: If the prints came back to Bonded and they were considered too old to keep in circulation, Bonded didn’t want them anymore. It would embarrass the stations to run something with a splice or a scratch in it, so Bonded figured that when the print had gone through the equipment so many times, its working life was over and it needed to be retired. Now there’s a trace amount of silver in film. That’s where Jay comes in. He would pick up a load of film, sign something saying he was going to reclaim the silver, and now he’s got all these prints.

Q: I see.

Lugner: I think he told me he was paying them about $1.10 per fifty pounds of film. So officially, his warehouse is full of stuff for silver reclamation. But if you come in and you’ve got cash in your pocket, he’ll make you a deal.

Q: Now I get it.

Lugner: He was a great guy. Most of the collectors called him Jabba, like Jabba the Hutt, because he weighed about four hundred pounds. He’d sit behind his desk, give orders to a couple of Mexican guys working for him, and they’d go pull prints for you. But if he knew you were looking for something in particular, he’d tell you he had it, and then he’d charge you twice as much for it. But it would still be cheap. Behind his desk was what he called the “gems.” For example, mint Star Treks for fifty bucks each, which I would later on sell for $200 or $300 each.

Q: And you made a living selling film prints, basically.

Lugner: This was before the internet. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have borrowed every nickel I could find and I’d have bought as much stuff as I could get, which would have been a lot! Film collecting is mostly on the internet now. The big collectors are on eBay— there’s a big Bewitched collector. There’s a Lucy collector, who’s sold almost all of his prints by now…

Q: So whatever happened to the “Warehouse O’ Film”?

Lugner: The Northridge earthquake hit and damaged the warehouse. He said “Screw it,” closed up shop, moved to Vegas and died on his toilet. Like Elvis.

The Lost in Space pilot. Penny knows that a little picture tube can’t compare to the big screen.

 

TV Shows Referencing Other TV Shows

TV shows nowadays refer to each other all the time. A character on 30 Rock mentions Community. A character on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air mentions Saved by the Bell. Characters on The Simpsons and Family Guy mention other shows on a regular basis.

Society has become saturated with pop culture, and TV simply reflects that reality. But it hasn’t always been this way.

Go back further— past the last twenty years— and these references become much more rare (at least if we exclude stuff like parody sketches on variety shows). In vintage television, a character might watch TV or talk about a TV show, but it’ll almost invariably be a non-existent show. Even a station’s call letters are fictional. Why? I can understand why phone numbers in Televisionland always begin with 555, but why is it so wrong to mention an actual show that viewers might recognize?

There are exceptions to the rule. The most conspicuous is probably I Love Lucy (6:13, “Lucy and Superman,” January 1957) with George Reeves, which is all the more unusual because his The Adventures of Superman was still on the air, and not on the same network. Another familiar reference can be found on The Honeymooners (1:01, “TV or Not TV,” October 1955), in which Norton watches Captain Video. The Honeymooners was on CBS, and Captain Video was on DuMont… or at least it had been. The dying DuMont had cancelled the show six months before Norton turned his set on, but I guess that’s the magic of television for you.

On The Patty Duke Show (1:7, “The Babysitters,” October 1963), Patty babysits a little brat who keeps shouting “I wanna watch Wagon Train! I wanna watch Wagon Train!” That venerable western was still on the air at the time, but without Ward Bond it was lumbering toward cancellation. Patty was whipping it in the ratings, and it had moved over to her network (ABC) anyway, so mentioning it on her show wasn’t exactly plugging the competition.

On Emergency! (1:10, “Hang-Up,” April 1972), the guys at Station 51 are seen enjoying Adam-12 on their TV— and it’s not just a dummy voice-over, but a lengthy clip from the climax of a recent episode (4:08, “Ambush,” November 1971). An emergency call comes in and the guys have to rush away, leaving woebegone Fireman Gage to spend the rest of the show wondering how that Adam-12 episode ended. Ultimately, in a moment of tranquil enlightenment worthy of Kung Fu‘s Kwai Chang Caine, he resigns himself to the need to just wait for the re-run.

Both shows were produced by Jack Webb’s Mark VII Limited and aired on NBC, so the plug makes sense from a business standpoint. Oddly, though, the stars of Adam-12 had already appeared (in character) in the Emergency! pilot. Months later, everyone from Emergency! would appear (in character) on Adam-12 (5:4, “Lost and Found,” October 1972). The fact that these shows exist in overlapping fictional and real-life universes is something even Kwai Chang Caine couldn’t have wrapped his head around.

More straightforward is an episode of CHiPs (1:09, “Hustle,” November 1977) in which highway patrolmen Jon and Ponch pull over a driver who turns out to be Broderick Crawford, star of Highway Patrol from twenty years earlier. It’s not Crawford’s character who gets pulled over (fat chance of that ever happening), but the actor who played him. Ponch is overjoyed and peppers the visibly annoyed Crawford with old Highway Patrol dialogue. “I don’t believe it! ‘Twenty-one-fifty, over!’ Right? Right?… Boy oh boy… I’ve watched you for years, over and over and over…”

Crawford tries to ignore Ponch, turns to Jon and drawls, “You know, I was making those Highway Patrol shows long before you were born.” Jon replies, “Yeah, they don’t make TV shows like that anymore.” As an in-joke it falls a little flat, because CHiPs isn’t Highway Patrol on motorcycles— it’s Adam-12 on motorcycles with a dash of Car 54, Where Are You? thrown in.

‘Fifties nostalgia was the bread and butter of Happy Days (at least in its early seasons, when the show was worth watching). That included several nods to the TV of the era, most conspicuously the time You Asked for It comes to town to televise Fonzie’s motorcycle stunt (3:3, “Fearless Fonzarelli,” September 1975), and the time Richie attends a Howdy Doody telecast (2:17, “The Howdy Doody Show,” February 1975). Happy Days gets bonus points for bringing in Jack Smith and Buffalo Bob Smith to appear as themselves, but I’d have liked to see Broderick Crawford confront Fonzie even better.

The references I like best are oblique, unspoken. There’s a late episode of Dallas (I think it’s 14:13, “90265,” February 1991) in which a character disdainfully drops hints about a TV show with a backwards-talking dwarf. That’s obviously Twin Peaks, which was waging a doomed struggle to avoid cancellation at the time. Perhaps the fact that Dallas and Twin Peaks were on competing networks (CBS and ABC respectively) explains why the title remained unspoken.

Later, Dallas itself would be subtly referenced, on Walker, Texas Ranger (3:17, “Blue Movies,” February 1995). One character mentions J.R. Ewing in passing, but there are other clues suggesting that this was almost a tribute episode. Making one-shot guest appearances were Howard Keel and Cathy Podewell, former Dallas stars, and the skyscraper housing the office of Dallas’ perennial gadfly Cliff Barnes is prominently seen. Since Walker was produced by longtime Dallas showrunner Leonard Katzman— and this episode was directed by veteran Dallas director Michael Preece— it was inevitable that a little homage would be paid.

Oblique references aren’t always so sentimental. There’s an early episode of Vega$ (1:08, “The Pageant,” November 1978), in which the central character, detective Dan Tanna, is hired by a man who wants to find the thug who beat and raped his daughter. The man is played by Robert Reed, the father of The Brady Bunch; the daughter is played by Maureen McCormick, his Brady daughter. There’s no way that was just a crazy coincidence. Maybe someone in the casting office had a sick sense of humor, but we can at least be grateful that Reed wasn’t hired to play the rapist.

Someone wants to watch Wagon Train.

 

Ten Pleasant Surprises

As a companion piece to last week’s post, here are ten shows I liked. They’re not the greatest shows. They’re not even necessarily among my top favorites. But each of them turned out to be a lot better than I expected.

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Bat Masterson (1958-1961) – A surprisingly slick-looking western from Ziv, with far better-looking costumes and sets than you’ll find in the typical TV oater, Bat Masterson is a real standout. As played by Gene Barry, Bat is an unusual western hero. He’s a cultured gentleman in the William Powell tradition, roaming the West and finding adventure everywhere. He’d rather dispatch the villain with one swing of his silver-tipped walking cane than with a six-shooter, and he’d rather beat a crook at his own game than simply call for the sheriff to arrest him. Barry plays nearly every scene with a twinkle in his eye, and although I tend to prefer two-fisted westerns, Bat Masterson is an unexpected delight, thanks largely to the finesse of his confident, genial performance. It’s the ideal western for people who normally don’t care for westerns (which seems to be nearly everybody these days), and for western fans who are ready for a fresh approach.

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I Led 3 Lives (1953-1956) – What circulates of this show is sold under the counter from collector/dealers, and the image quality isn’t as good as I’d like. But it’s strangely compelling, presenting the adventures of “Comrade Herb” Philbrick and his dealings with communist subversives in Eisenhower’s Middle America. Our traitor is actually working for the FBI, gathering information and passing it along so the bad guys can be rounded up (typically just as they’re on the verge of discovering his identity and killing him). The show was produced by Ziv right alongside Highway Patrol, which instantly became a durable favorite in syndication. But I Lived 3 Lives collapsed into obscurity, as anti-communism gradually became something most Americans snickered at. Maybe the show got silly later on, but the episodes I’ve seen are surprisingly suspenseful, and vastly more interesting than the avalanche of “secret agent” shows that came along a decade later. I Led 3 Lives was based on a book by the real-life Herbert Philbrick, who really was an undercover operative for the FBI and really did help bring down enemy agents, and those realities keep the show (however barely) from descending into camp self-parody. It’s easy to be amused today, watching Joe Friday lecture hippies on Dragnet about the dangers of marijuana, but the historical reality behind I Led 3 Lives insulates it from the same condescension… somewhat.

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Jake and the Fatman (1987-1992) – Admittedly I’ve only seen the earliest episodes, but you can’t blame me for that; CBS DVD released only the first two seasons (a scant 32 episodes combined) before giving up and locking the vault. The majority of the show’s episodes are out of view, and even the bootleggers don’t seem to have them. I began watching the first season on the hunch that it’d be worth a try. After all, I already loved William Conrad from Cannon and radio’s Gunsmoke, so I knew he wouldn’t disappoint as a cranky prosecutor in Jake and the Fatman— and he doesn’t. The really pleasant surprises are Joe Penny as his suave investigative cohort, and the brisk, witty scripts. Wisely, the producers leave all the legwork to Penny; half of the corpulent Conrad’s scenes are delivered while sitting down or leaning against the witness stand. He could be fairly spry back in his Cannon days, but by this point he’s very heavy, and I bet he waddles across a courtroom pretty slowly in these final seasons. During its original run, Jake and the Fatman was regularly paddled in the ratings by the likes of Night Court and Doogie Howser, M.D.; it also underwent a second-season change of locale, and some turbulence in the producers’ office. In spite of all that, what I’ve seen has been very, very good, and now I love William Conrad more than ever.

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Make Room for Daddy (1953-1956) – The syndication package and official DVDs of The Danny Thomas Show begin with the show’s fourth season (1956-1957). I’d never seen anything of it until fairly recently, but I enjoyed it, and it got me curious about those missing three seasons. During that period, it was known as Make Room for Daddy, a sitcom about a nightclub singer, his homemaker wife and their two small children. You have to dig a little to find episodes of Daddy, but those I’ve seen are terrific. The most obvious difference between Daddy and the Thomas Show is the presence of Jean Hagen as Danny’s wife. Hagen and Thomas didn’t get along, and as soon as her three-year contract was up, she was gone like spit on a skillet. Surprisingly, she really doesn’t make a very vivid impression in those episodes of Daddy (maybe that’s why she was so unhappy, I don’t know). What does distinguish them are the performances of the children, Sherry Jackson and especially Rusty Hamer. In the first season, Hamer is so tiny that you’d hardly expect him to know his lines, but in fact his comic timing and delivery are outstanding, and he regularly gets bigger laughs than the star. In later seasons, he’s less compelling as he gets older, less cute and less precocious (and as the show truly becomes The Danny Thomas Show in every sense) But the talent is undeniably there, which makes his 1990 suicide all the more tragic. He’s hardly the only thing that’s appealing about Make Room for Daddy, which benefits from some sharp writing as well as Sheldon Leonard’s flair for sitcom production. But he’s definitely the most memorable.

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Racket Squad (1951-1953) – Hal Roach Studios had a wonderful twenty-year golden age from roughly 1918 to 1938, producing some of the most beloved comedies in film history. But the studio limped into the 1950s as a hub for some very low-rent television production, much of it pretty bad (watch any episode of The Trouble with Father to see how painful 1950s TV could be). Racket Squad was one of its few successes, and ironically the dim lighting and skimpy sets helped rather than hurt it. The show looks so cheap that you pity the people participating in it, but the rock-bottom budget creates a noirish look that’s just perfect for Racket Squad’s shadowy underworld of scam artists and the bunko schemes they run in the bad part of town. The con games are patiently dramatized in full detail, and are sometimes elaborate. Unlike almost every other crime show, Racket Squad is more about the workings of a criminal operation than about the process of gathering evidence and catching bad guys. In fact, the “squad” consists of one officer, “Captain Braddock” (Reed Hadley), who mainly just narrates each episode before stepping in during the final scene to nab the con man. Hadley delivers his lines as if he’s doing a radio drama, clearly enunciating every syllable in a rich velvety voice, and while some will snicker at the old-timey style of his performance, he’s one of my favorite things about the show. You kind of need to be in the mood for Racket Squad. But I don’t think I’ve seen a bad episode yet.

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The Real McCoys (1957-1963) – TV history is crowded with situation comedies that never make you laugh, but which are beloved anyway for the characters in them. I usually hate those shows: I might be the only TV buff in America who can’t stand I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, The Munsters, Hogan’s Heroes and the rest of those contrived, heavily laugh-tracked sitcoms. To me, they’re just not funny, and the only interesting character in the lot runs a concentration camp. Maybe I’m just cold on that whole era, because there are sitcoms of the Eisenhower years that aren’t laugh riots either, yet I have far more patience with them (Bachelor Father and The Donna Reed Show, for example). The Real McCoys is usually good for a smile, at least, and I really love the characters in it. In fact, I guess I love The Real McCoys the way everyone else loves The Andy Griffith Show. Americana, country people and rural values all appeal to me. The McCoys are a family of West Virginians who’ve inherited a farm in California’s San Fernando Valley, which was largely agricultural back then. Walter Brennan is his crotchety best as family patriarch Amos McCoy, but regular viewers soon discover that the character is confined by sitcom conventions. You’ll see irascible Amos, headstrong Amos, contrite Amos and reflective Amos, roughly in that order and seldom in any other varieties, but he’s very endearing. Even more lovable is Kathy Nolan as the young wife of the family, and her departure after the fifth season thrust a pitchfork through the heart of the show. Unforgivably, her character’s absence would go basically unexplained in the sixth and final season— not that anyone was paying attention by then, as the show had been moved into a timeslot against Bonanza, which destroyed it in the ratings. But really, the producers’ indifference had killed it already. In its early seasons, The Real McCoys is a pretty good little sitcom, with the potential to be much more. Yes, the scripts are usually boilerplate and it’s lumbered with a laugh track it doesn’t need, but there’s also a sweetness that’s missing from most of TV’s funnier and better-remembered comedies.

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Simon and Simon (1981-1989) – I only started watching this show when I learned that it was set in my old home town of San Diego. After being spoiled by the fabulous wall-to-wall location shooting of The Streets of San Francisco, I was disappointed to find very little of San Diego in Simon and Simon’s first season (despite what Wikipedia says). I also found the show to be pretty unfocused in its early episodes. But then it began to grow on me. The two leads are likable and have a good rapport with each other; Gerald McRaney is particularly good. I don’t usually care much for detective shows, but this one takes itself lightly, it has a sense of humor, and it avoids going overboard with gunplay and socks to the jaw. It’s about a pair of brothers who run a small detective agency. Like Jim Rockford of The Rockford Files, Simon & Simon always get their man but you have to wonder if they’ll be able to make the next car payment. Come to think of it, this is a great detective show for female viewers; not because the two leads are pretty-boys (they aren’t), but because the show is more interested in the relationship between them than in high-speed chases and exploding sports cars. That’s not to say that this is the thirtysomething of detective shows, only that neither of these guys is another Mike Hammer— nor do they need to be. I only watch Simon and Simon about once a month, but I always look forward to another hour with Rick and A.J. Just skip the first nine or ten episodes.

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Spartacus (2010-2013) – I don’t watch super-hero movies. I get bored with the endless cartoony fight scenes, thudding soundtracks and oversaturated special effects.  That’s why I was surprised by how well I liked Starz’ Spartacus series. It’s got all of the above, with lots of gratuitous sex and brutality besides. Maybe what saved the show for me was that it’s rooted in history rather than in comic books. I’d found HBO’s expensive series Rome to be lugubrious and uninvolving, but Spartacus has you empathizing with the characters, while doing a better job of explaining the social dynamics of the Roman Empire than you’d expect. But make no mistake: this is anything but dry and intellectual material. You’re seldom more than ten minutes away from the next bloody gladiator sword fight, and you’ll get plenty of naked slave girls, back-stabbing palace intrigue and savage arena battles, all with just enough variation to keep the material fresh. (There are way too many shots of blood spurting out of guys’ mouths in sloooooooow motion, though.) The first season (Spartacus: Blood and Sand) is the best, thanks largely to Andy Whitfield in the leading role. Tragically, unbelievably, Whitfield developed lymphoma before the first season was even off the air, and died a year or so later. He was replaced in the second and third seasons by Liam McIntyre, who’s good but not quite up to Whitfield’s standard. Several of the other actors (notably Peter Mensah) are superb. The final (third) season is almost a re-tooling of the show, in which Spartacus and his gladiator friends lead a slave revolt across Italy, climaxing in a showdown with the army of Julius Caesar. If you know your ancient history, you know how the story ends. That ultimate confrontation is as good as anything in the whole series, but that final season suffers from the absence of some key characters who’d been killed off in earlier seasons. Perhaps to make up for their loss, a lot of attention is lavished on the young Caesar, so much so that I hoped the series would go marching along as a showcase for his adventures, but alas, no.

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Starsky and Hutch (1975-1979) – This show’s whole premise eventually became a cliché: a pair of snarky undercover cops in a fast car bust some heads and bring down the bad guys, week after week. Worse, you really have to work overtime suspending disbelief when watching this show. Starsky and Hutch never have to fill out reports, their car always looks pristine, and most of their investigative work consists of asking their Skid Row pal Huggy Bear what the word on the street is. But in the hands of producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg, this wheezy material becomes a lot of fun. The stars have good chemistry, the plots are just involved enough to keep you engaged, and there are car chases and fist fights galore. I’m fascinated by all the location shots in the most wretched areas of 1970s downtown Los Angeles, and I love Lalo Schifrin’s rumbling, ominous theme music and how the stories race along from start to finish. Better yet, the show is a goldmine for appearances by future stars on the rise (Suzanne Somers, Jeff Goldblum, John Ritter) and past stars on the way down (Lola Albright, Joan Blondell, Jose Ferrer, Sylvia Sidney). It’s the television equivalent of a greasy burger and fries, but hey… sometimes that’s what you’re hungry for.

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The Texan (1958-1960) – Taciturn western heroes were all over the dial during the Eisenhower/Kennedy era. Most of them failed to really stand out, but one who does is Rory Calhoun of The Texan. He’s got a penetrating stare and when he barks a command, people jump. In the very next scene, he can project warmth and a calm sort of amiability. He’s got a lot of star power, and I don’t know why he isn’t regarded more highly today. Maybe he needed to be a couple of inches taller and twenty pounds heavier, I don’t know. But he carries himself as if he could mop the floor with Steve McQueen of Wanted: Dead or Alive, and I bet he could do it. Calhoun co-produced The Texan himself and it’s a first-class show, with very solid scripts and good performances. I hear it began fraying at the seams in the second season (as audiences flipped the dial to ABC for Cheyenne). But I sure like what I’ve seen. You probably already need to like TV westerns to get into The Texan. But if you do, you may have already seen your share of shows that never got very compelling because they lacked a rugged, dynamic star (I’d put Bronco, Destry, Tate and Cimarron City in that category). Calhoun really owns every scene in which he appears— he’s right up there with Richard Boone of Have Gun Will Travel in that regard— and that kind of power makes The Texan a true standout.

 

Ten Bitter Disappointments

I have to admit right off that I haven’t watched more than a season’s worth of any of these. If the episodes I haven’t seen are markedly better than what I have seen, then I owe an apology to fans of the following:

I thought Jessica Lange was a fine actress until…

American Horror Story (2011-present) – I love horror shows, and I don’t require them to be scary. But I do need to find myself involved in the story, to identify with the characters, and to feel some tension as things unfold. I really wanted to like the acclaimed American Horror Story, and the opening episode was promising. But I really couldn’t get into this show. It wasn’t just a matter of finding the characters cold and annoying. The horror being attempted was of the dark foreboding variety, which works a lot better in a Lovecraft short story than it does on television. The filmmakers’ attempts to jazz things up with random bursts of gory shock violence just muddied the waters. Not only did I not watch the later seasons, I couldn’t bring myself to sit through more than the first four or five episodes before bailing on it. The show has such a devoted following that there’s got to be something there, but I couldn’t see it. Maybe it’s my own fault for not being patient enough to let things unfold, but when the journey is this tedious, I can’t expect the destination to be any different.

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Baretta goes undercover as a gay man (couldn’t you tell?)

Baretta (1975-1978) – The tough, gritty crime genre was a perfect fit for the downbeat malaise of the 1970s, and Stephen J. Cannell knew how to put a compelling show together. Baretta has all the right ingredients, and I was eager to dive in. It’s tough and gritty all right— and frequently violent, bleak and ugly besides. Baretta is the kind of show where street hookers get beaten up and babies are born addicted to heroin. It’s compelling and it’s got the “social relevancy” that ‘70s producers were so eager to cultivate. But is it entertaining? No, not really, except when police detective Baretta dons one of his many disguises, such as an Hispanic, a black man or a gay man. These performances are so wildly stereotyped that you’ll either find them hilarious or hideously offensive. That might explain why Universal issued just the first season on DVD (a measly twelve episodes at that), and then abandoned the project. A good number of later episodes are on the black market, but I’ve heard that the entire fourth (and final) season has vanished from the face of the earth, possibly a casualty of the big vault fire at Universal Studios in 2008. Anyway, I was quite disappointed to find Baretta isn’t nearly as appealing as I expected, but Robert Blake is so dynamic in it that I’ll probably revisit the show sometime. I’ll probably even find it compelling, and that’s the name of that tune.

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Billy Barty hits a guy in the crotch. Now THAT’S comedy

Bizarre (1980-1986) – Like Fridays and Mad TV, Bizarre was an ensemble sketch comedy series created in the wake of Saturday Night Live’s success. It had a competitive edge, being a Canadian production (also airing on cable’s Showtime) which happily presented material that would never get past the Standards and Practices desk of an American network. And I don’t mean just a boob or a bad word here and there, but some really weird humor worthy of the show’s title. You never know what’s going to happen next on Bizarre. That and the talent of its appealing lead comedian, John Byner, are the show’s real strengths. You get the exploits of Super Dave Osborne too, but once you’ve seen his same basic joke five or six times, it begins to get stale. The show was shot on a very tight budget, and the evidence is everywhere— the only music consists of about a half-dozen recorded bits, which are re-used endlessly; the sets are tiny and skimpy. For much of its history, the show had only two credited writers. The cast and crew would bang out 24 episodes in 10 weeks every summer, to be aired throughout the year. Under circumstances like that, it’s no wonder that the show is often disappointing. Still, the only deadly weakness of Bizarre is the same as that of all the other sketch comedy shows: not enough funny material with which to fill all that air time. What keeps the show from being forgettable is that when it’s good, it’s really very good. It’s just not that good very often. Had it been given the resources it needed in order to really succeed, it would be legendary today, and I include it among these Ten Bitter Disappointments only because it had the potential to be so much better than it is. (Ten volumes were released on DVD; Volume One is Bizarre at its best, but I’d say the others are for aficionados only.)

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Checkmate (1960-1962) – From the production company of Jack Benny (of all people!) came Checkmate, an offbeat crime show in which three investigators spend the whole program preventing the crime from happening in the first place. And that’s what’s wrong with the show. The most interesting thing that might happen… never does. What’s left are lots and lots of dialogue scenes. The cast is very good (particularly Sebastian Cabot) and the guest stars are truly exceptional, but I kept waiting for it to get fun.

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Dead Man’s Gun (1997-1999) – Very few western shows get made anymore, and I’m not sure whether that’s because the audience just isn’t there, or because the current generation of filmmakers doesn’t know how to make them very well. Deadwood gets by on the strength of the acting alone, but the others (Hell on Wheels, The Adventures of Brisco County etc.) tend to offer good action sequences but little more than that. Those shows at least had interesting continuing characters, something necessarily lacking in Dead Man’s Gun, a Canadian-made anthology series. The premise has a lot of potential: a cursed, hand-crafted gun passes from one owner to another, bringing tragedy and death. In the next episode, somebody else has acquired it and the curse continues. The show was filmed at beautiful, lush locations— no western series ever had such green landscapes— and the acting is pretty good, with everyone from Ed Asner to Michael Moriarty popping up. The trouble is that the stories aren’t very interesting. The scripts are so tame that they could’ve passed muster on The Loretta Young Show, and frankly they’d have worked a lot better in a tidy half-hour format rather than the sixty long minutes allotted to them here. It’s not a terrible show. I’d rather watch all 44 episodes back-to-back than sit through another episode of Californication. But it falls so short of its dynamite premise that it ranks as a real disappointment. I do envy whoever ended up with that beautiful prop gun, though.

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Death Valley Days (1952-1970) – I was eager to sample this show when beautifully restored episodes began airing on Encore Westerns. And to be honest, a couple of them weren’t bad at all. But the others were pretty tedious. Plenty of TV dramas feel draggy in a one-hour format, but this show is only half that length, and the budgets are too skimpy to do the material justice. Worse, none of them were set anywhere near Death Valley, perhaps an unreasonable expectation on my part. Like most of the shows in this list, it’s not a terrible program. I just found it disappointing. Also disappointing: the package airing on Encore Westerns begins with the episodes from 1963 or 1964 onward, because the surviving elements on the earlier seasons weren’t in good enough condition to be used.

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Dynasty (1981-1989) – I feel guilty about including Dynasty here, because I’m aware that the show was revamped after the first season, and that’s as far as I could get. Well, I did stick around for the second season’s debut, but I still didn’t care for it. The first season presents two families: a blue-collar family of tedious people moaning about their problems, and a wealthy extended family of ugly people who sleep around on each other when they aren’t shouting at each other. After that season, the blue-collar folks mostly go away and Joan Collins comes on board. I promise I’ll revisit this show, and give it an honest try. After all, Dynasty was the most successful of Dallas’ many illegitimate offspring, and I love Dallas. J.R. Ewing does awful things, but he’s such a charming rogue that his misdeeds make him fascinating. From what I’ve seen of Dynasty, the show is packed with people who do just as much scheming and back-stabbing as J.R., but nobody does it with a twinkle in his eye. This show really needs that twinkle.

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Eat this cast!

Fear the Walking Dead (2015-present) – I’m a big fan of The Walking Dead. Occasionally it suffers from flagging energy, and its meandering narrative needs a sense of direction. But it’s been such a great show overall that I had high expectations for its pseudo-spinoff Fear the Walking Dead, especially with the same creative mind, Robert Kirkman, on board. The premise of the show is ideal, exploring how the zombie apocalypse got started in the first place. But things go seriously wrong almost immediately. The origins of the zombie invasion never do get spelled out (most of it unfolds in occasional vignettes in the background), and after just a couple of episodes we’re already past the tipping point and the zombies have taken over. Now what we’ve got is basically The Walking Dead with a different locale and a different set of people. Okay. I’d still be fine with that. But what ruins Fear the Walking Dead are the thoroughly unlikable characters and the things they do. The Walking Dead at least has a moral center which keeps us rooting for its characters. But people on Fear do things like torture a young National Guardsman. They do things like herd thousands of zombies into a National Guard camp in hopes of killing everyone in it. When people do this sort of thing on The Walking Dead, they’re the villains and we hate them for it. But with Fear, the protagonists do them, and we’re expected to cheer them on. And it’s not just what they do, it’s who they are that annoys me. Apart from the vicious Hispanic barber, you’ve got the usual family clichés of contemporary TV: the dad’s a dim bulb, the mom is an impossibly smart, resourceful, sensitive Superwoman and their pain-in-the-ass kids are snarky narcissists (the boy’s a junkie as well). By the end of the first season, I was honestly rooting for the zombies to overcome and devour the entire cast. If ever a show needed a major re-tooling, it’s this one.

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I even hated the main title’s font

Laredo (1965-1967) – A bunch of guys have wild times in the Wild West, in a show that veers from comedy to drama and back again, without ever seeming to know what it is and what it’s trying to do. For me it was jarring to get involved in a western drama and have it abruptly turn into slapstick. I didn’t like any of the characters (even the late Peter Brown’s, although I love his earlier show Lawman) and I didn’t like getting the impression that everyone involved is half-drunk and just goofing around while the cameras are rolling. It’s fine for a show to take itself lightly, but it’s still got to take itself seriously. Grab a Bonanza script and an F Troop script and shuffle the pages together, and you’ve got an annoying mess called Laredo.

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Mr. Lucky (1959-1960) – I love Blake Edwards’ Peter Gunn, and knowing that he more or less stepped away from that show to develop this one, I had high hopes. The first episode was all right and the second was better, but then it went into a downward spiral (at least for me). A guy has a boat and is visited by crooks. That’s every episode in a nutshell. I even found Mr. Lucky’s renowned theme music completely forgettable. John Vivyan doesn’t have the charisma to carry the show, and how many times can you watch someone get conked in the back of the head with a pistol before it gets stale? I guess I owe it to the show’s reputation to return to it at some point. But it won’t be anytime soon.

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Of these ten, I’m probably being the most unfair to Mr. Lucky. The one I’m most likely to watch again is Baretta, maybe Bizarre. Next week: Ten Delightful Surprises.

 

The Kinescope Collector

The surviving examples of early live television only exist because they were recorded on 16mm film. (Basically, a movie camera was pointed at a TV monitor in the studio, or at a TV station. The resulting film was called a kinescope.) Collecting 16mm film prints is a hobby that’s been around for decades, but the vast majority of collectors have been movie buffs who regard television as the hated interloper that destroyed the Golden Age of Hollywood. Okay, I’m embellishing a little. Most of them are just more intrigued with entertainment of the 1920s-1940s than with stuff from the 1950s-1960s, and I can understand that. I was that way myself. I was an active film collector for a third of a century, but all I ever bought were silent movies— apart from a few episodes of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, and an ep of Kung Fu that I still haven’t gotten around to watching.

Nowadays I’m pumping my collector friends for stories about any rare kinescopes they’ve found over the years. One of the best things about finding one is that you very possibly have the only existing copy of a broadcast that’s otherwise lost.

I know of a long-time collector in Southern California who was devoted to searching out rare early kinescopes. He prefers to remain anonymous here, but he’s justifiably proud of the rarities he’s found, and he agreed to a little interview.

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Me: Thanks so much for taking part. How did you happen to become interested in collecting 16mm kinescopes?

Mr. X: I did some minor collecting of 8mm films after my grandparents gave me a late-1940s Revere projector (which I still have, and it still runs). I was one of those audio-visual geeks in elementary school, junior- and high-school, up until college. I started operating 16mm projectors around 1963, but never really developed an interest for 16mm until the late ’70s.

Captain Video and His Video Rangers

In 1979, when I was living in Northern California, I was watching Creature Features on KTVU Channel 2. They advertised a retrospective of early ’50s science fiction TV shows at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley. I went to this, and an instant interest developed. They showed TV episodes such as Space Patrol, Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, and Tales of Tomorrow, among others that were made before I was born and had never seen before.

I started out as a novice collector, getting a little of everything– TV shows, features, cartoons, serials, etc. I subscribed to The Big Reel and other periodicals. I soon made contact with some people who had kinescopes for sale or trade. No stopping from there!

In the 1980s, and in the pre-eBay days of the 1990s, there were many kinescopes around for sale. However, as more and more collectors began to seek them out, they became scarcer and scarcer. I moved to Southern California and met a lot of collectors in Los Angeles. I really started to seek out kinescopes everywhere. However, even at that time they were becoming harder to find.

Man Against Crime

Then eBay hit. Suddenly there were no more fixed prices, and now I had to compete in bidding wars with deep-pocketed collectors, archives and international groups, so it started to slow to a crawl, unfortunately. A few people I knew kept an eye open for me on private lists, contacts and off-eBay sites. I still found a few pieces. However, the days of easy pickings and low prices drew to a close in the ’90s.

On that day when I attended that showing at the Lawrence Hall of Science, one of the films they showed had an unusual network ID. “This is the DuMont television network.” I had never heard of television networks other than the big three (NBC, CBS, ABC). What was this “DuMont” network? I then searched and discovered there had been a fourth network, started by television pioneer Dr. Alan B. DuMont from 1946 to 1955, and later closed/sold to Metromedia in 1956.

There were no 16mm kinescopes of their shows around, as they supposedly were destroyed in the late 1950s. Later on in my collecting days, suddenly some 16mm kinescopes (aka telerecordings) of DuMont TV shows showed up, and I was able to pick up a few, such as The Adventures of Ellery Queen, Rocky King: Inside Detective, and Captain Video and His Video Rangers.

Rocky King: Inside Detective

The only shows that seemed to exist on film were in archives such as UCLA’s, or (now) digitally at some other museums. These are by far the most interesting, since they are virtually non-existent (especially for collectors).

There are so many interesting kinescopes to mention, some of which I still have— and some I do not, for various reasons (primarily financial). An interesting genre that I have a few examples of are the TV detectives, such as Rocky King on DuMont, but also NBC’s Man Against Crime starring Ralph Bellamy and Martin Kane: Private Eye, starring Lee Tracy.

I’ve always been partial to science fiction, such as Space Patrol, Tom Corbett: Space Cadet and Tales of Tomorrow, and I have some fine kinescope examples of these shows. Despite limited budgets and crude technology, for their time they provided entertainment for both children and adults.

Lastly, a big area for me in my collection is dramatic anthologies, such as Studio One, Playhouse 90, The U.S. Steel Hour, Motorola TV Playhouse, Philco TV Playhouse, Robert Montgomery Presents, Climax! and others, when a new play was presented every week, live from New York.

Most TV shows from 1948-1958 were telecast from New York, and only a few like Playhouse 90, Climax! and Space Patrol originated in Hollywood.

Me: Have you found many one-off broadcasts? In other words, specials, newscasts, or local broadcasts from the Golden Age?

Mr. X: There are several I’ve had in my collection that are worth mentioning. One is especially timely, with the passing of Mike Wallace. I have a local New York CBS show he hosted on location in 1950, called All Around the Town, before its CBS network run in 1951/52. They visit a Standard Oil refinery in New Jersey, just across the river from New York City. Lots of technical problems, bad monitors, cameras etc. Quite crude but still very enjoyable! I still have this in my collection.

Another one was a local TV pilot show from Philadelphia with Hollywood actor Dick Foran, called The Phantom Sheriff. No one seems to know anything about this, and it appeared to be a work print (edits, grease pencil marks, cues etc.), which may or may not have been aired. It’s a western, shot back east on a TV station backlot, circa 1950s, so this is a real mystery. A collector friend from Philadelphia desperately wanted this, so I no longer have it.

Finally, I have some prints of a long-running TV show from San Francisco (it ran from 1952 to 1966, apparently), called Science in Action, produced by the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, in SF. Wonderfully crude, but entertaining at the same time. I have several of these, and they were run on local TV in San Francisco in that time period.

I look forward to your blog.

Me: Thanks, Mr. X!