I represent the first generation who, when we were born, the television was now a permanent fixture in our homes. When I was born people had breakfast with Barbara Walters, dinner with Walter Cronkite, and slept with Johnny Carson.
Read the full "Pre-ramble"
Barbara
Eden reprises
her world-famous role as the magical Jeannie; also reprising their roles from
the original series were Bill Daily as Tony's fellow
astronaut and best friend Roger Healy, and Hayden Rorke (in his final film
role) as NASA psychiatrist Dr. Alfred Bellows. The role of Tony Nelson was
played by Wayne
Rogers,
best known for his role as Trapper John McIntyre on the 1970s series M*A*S*H. Larry
Hagman was
unavailable to reprise his role as Tony Nelson reportedly because he was too
busy filming his CBS series Dallas at the time.
The
film was directed by William Asher (who was also director
of the 1960s show Bewitched) and the teleplay was
written by Irma Kalish.
October 23, 1925
Talk show host Johnny Carson is born in Corning, Iowa. After studying journalism in college, Carson began
working in radio and television. He began writing for TV shows in the 1950s and
hosted his own show, Carson's Cellar, in 1951. He began occasionally
guest hosting for Jack Paar on The Tonight Show and became the show's
permanent host in 1962. He retired in 1992 and died in Los Angeles on January
23, 2005.
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, aka The Burns and Allen Show, began on CBS Television.
The show was originally staged live before a studio audience
(during its first three months, it originated from the Mansfield Theatre in New York, then
relocated to CBS' Columbia Square facilities in Los Angeles). Ever
the businessman, Burns realized it would be more efficient to do the series on
film (beginning in the fall of 1952); the half-hour episodes could then be
syndicated. From that point on, the show was shot without a live audience
present, however, each installment would be screened before an audience to
provide live responses prior to the episodes being broadcast. With 291
episodes, the show had a long network run through 1958 and continued in
syndicated reruns for years.
Cameron is also an active Christianevangelist, currently partnering with Ray Comfort in the evangelical ministry The Way of the
Master, and has co-founded The Firefly Foundation with his
wife, actress Chelsea Noble.
He stated that his main priorities in life are: "God, family,
career — in that order," and he says that this decision has had
negative consequences on his career.
that we could use to momentarily forget about those
things that leave a bad taste in our mouths
The Hilarious House of Frightenstein is a Canadian children's television series, which was produced by Hamilton, Ontario's independent station CHCH-TV in 1971. It was syndicated both in Canada and internationally, and occasionally still appears in some television markets. In Canada, the series has not aired on broadcast TV for several years, but is available on streaming service Crave.
A quirky sketch comedy series that included some educational content amid its zany humor, the show's cast included Billy Van, Fishka Rais, Guy Big, Mitch Markowitz, Vincent Price, and Julius Sumner Miller. Van played most of the characters on the show.
The game show You Bet Your Life, starring host
Groucho Marx, airs its first TV episode.
The show had debuted on radio in 1947. Thanks to Marx's sarcastic humor and
improvised wisecracks, the show became a hit first on radio and then on
television. The show ran until 1961.
October 5, 1990
20/20 Buckwheat Hoax
The ABCnewsmagazine20/20 aired a segment purporting to be an
interview with Buckwheat, then a grocery bagger in Arizona. However, the interview was actually with a man named Bill English, who
claimed to be the adult Buckwheat. English's appearance prompted public
objections from George McFarland, who contacted media outlets following the
broadcast to declare that he knew the true Buckwheat to have been dead for 10
years. Confronted directly by McFarland on the television newsmagazine A Current Affair,
English refused to retreat from his claim, maintaining that he had originated
the role of Buckwheat, with other actors playing the character only after he
had left it. The next week, 20/20 acknowledged on-air
English's claim had been false and apologized for the interview. Fallout from
this incident included the resignation of a 20/20 producer, and
a negligence lawsuit filed by the son of William Thomas. English died in
1994.
October 6, 1960
Surfside 6 Priemired
Surfside 6 was one of four detective TV
series produced by Warner Bros. around that time, the others
being 77 Sunset Strip (set in Los
Angeles), Hawaiian Eye (set in Hawaii), and Bourbon
Street Beat (set in New
Orleans). Plots, scripts (changing the names and locales), characters, and
almost everything else crossed over from one series to another, not a difficult
feat since they were all actually shot on the studio's backlots in Los Angeles.
Surfside 6 had a memorable theme song, written by Jerry
Livingston and Mack David. The theme has often been parodied in popular
culture. The lyrics varied from week to week, but "Surfside 6" and
"In Miami Beach!" stayed intact. When the women were introduced, the
melody picked up with back-up singers singing "Cha Cha Cha" when the
announcer introduced Margarita Sierra, who vamped exaggeratedly and winked at
the camera during this brief weekly sequence.
The
series was originally slated to consist of thirteen variety episodes, thirteen
dramas starring Sinatra, and ten dramas hosted by Sinatra, filmed at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood rather
than broadcast live. Sinatra was paid $3 million for the series, and granted
near total artistic freedom.
The
drama segments of the show fared less well against the variety episodes in
ratings and the final total was fourteen live variety shows, eight filmed
variety shows, four dramas starring Sinatra, and six dramas hosted by Sinatra.
Rather than 36 episodes for the season, ABC cut its losses and reduced the
total number to 32.
Sinatra
hated rehearsing, and tried to make eleven shows in fifteen days; the series
subsequently received a critical mauling and was Sinatra's last attempt at a
television series.
October 7, 1960
Route
66 primered.
The show ran
weekly on CBS from 1960 to 1964.
It starred Martin Milner as Tod Stiles and, for
two and a half seasons, George Maharis as Buz Murdock. Maharis
was ill for much of the third season, during which time Tod was shown traveling
on his own. Tod met Lincoln Case, played by Glenn Corbett, late in
the third season, and traveled with him until the end of the fourth and final
season.
The series is best remembered for its Corvette convertible and its
instrumental theme song (composed and performed by Nelson
Riddle), which became a major pop hit.
Route 66 was a hybrid between episodic television drama, which has
continuing characters and situations, and the anthology
format (e.g., The Twilight Zone),
in which each week's show has a completely different cast and story. Route
66 had just three continuing characters, no more than two of whom appeared
in the same episode. Like Richard Kimble from The Fugitive, the
wanderers would move from place to place and get caught up in the struggles of
the people there. Unlike Kimble, nothing was forcing them to stay on the move
except their own sense of adventure, thus making it thematically closer to Run for Your Life,
Movin' On, and Then
Came Bronson. Later examples of this traveling protagonist
format are programs such as Bearcats!, Quantum Leap, The Incredible Hulk,
The
A-Team, and Supernatural.
This semi-anthology concept, where the drama is centered on the guest stars
rather than the regular cast, was carried over from series creator Stirling Silliphant's previous
drama Naked City (1958-1963).
Both shows were recognized for their literate scripts and rich
characterizations. The open-ended format, featuring two roaming
observers/facilitators, gave Silliphant and the other writers an almost
unlimited landscape for presenting a wide variety of dramatic (or comedic)
story lines. Virtually any tale could be adapted to the series. The two
regulars merely had to be worked in and the setting tailored to fit the
location. The two men take odd jobs along their journey, like toiling in a California
vineyard or manning a Maine
lobster boat, bringing them in contact with dysfunctional families or
troubled individuals in need of help.
Tod and Buz (and later, Linc) symbolized restless youth searching for
meaning in the early 1960s,
but they were essentially non-characters. We learn almost nothing about them
over the course of the series. All we are told is that, after the death of his
father, Tod Stiles inherits a new Corvette and decides to drive across America
with his friend Buz. Tod, portrayed by clean-cut Martin Milner, is the epitome
of the decent, honest, all-American type. He is the moral anchor of the series.
By contrast, the working-class Buz (George Maharis) is looser, hipper, more Beat
Generation in attitude. His third-season replacement, Lincoln Case
(Glenn Corbett), is a darker character, an army veteran haunted by his
past. He's more introspective with a sometimes explosive temper, but is
nonetheless a reliable companion on this soul-searching journey.
The series concluded in Tampa with the two-part episode "Where There's
a Will, There's a Way," in which Tod Stiles got married, and he and Linc
finally settled down. This made the series one of the earliest prime-time
television dramas to have a planned series finale resolving the fate of its
main characters.
The show was filmed and presented in black and white throughout its run.
This was not unusual for early 1960s episodic TV.
U.S.
Route 66 is well-remembered for its cinematography and location
filming. Writer-producer Stirling Silliphant traveled the country with a
location manager (Sam Manners), scouting a wide range of locales and writing
scripts to match the settings. The actors and film crew would arrive a few
months later. Memorable locations include a logging camp, shrimp boats, an
offshore oil rig, and Glen Canyon Dam, the latter
while still under construction. It is one of very few series in the history of
television to be filmed entirely on the road. This was done at a time when the United
States was much less homogeneous than it is now. People, their
accents, livelihoods, ethnic backgrounds and attitudes varied widely from one
location to the next. Scripted characters reflected a far less mobile society,
in which people were more apt to spend their entire lives in one small part of
the country. Similarly, the places themselves were very different from one
another visually, environmentally, architecturally, in goods and services
available, etc. Stars Martin Milner and George Maharis both mentioned this in
1980s interviews. "Now you can go wherever you want," Maharis added
by way of contrast, "and it's a Denny's."
The roster of guest stars on Route 66 includes quite a few actors who
later went on to fame and fortune, as well as major stars on the downward side
of their careers. One of the most historically significant episodes of the
series in this respect was "Lizard's Leg and Owlet's Wing." It
featured Lon Chaney, Jr., Peter
Lorre and Boris Karloff as themselves,
with Karloff donning his famous Frankenstein monster make-up
for the first time in 25 years and Chaney reprising his role as the Wolfman.
The show was filmed at the O'Hare Inn, near O'Hare
Airport, Chicago, Illinois. Dutch
singer Ronnie Tober had a small guest role with Sharon Russo, Junior Miss
America.
In a 1986 interview, Martin Milner reported that Lee Marvin credited him
with helping his career by breaking Marvin's nose "just enough" to
improve his look. This happened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
during a scripted fistfight for "Mon Petit Chou," the second of two
episodes in which Marvin appeared.
Two late third-season episodes, which aired one week apart, each featured a
guest star in a bit part playing a character with a profession with which they
would later become associated as stars of their own respective mega-hit
television series. In "Shadows of an Afternoon," Michael
Conrad can be seen as a uniformed policeman, many years before he
became famous in his regular role as Police Sgt. Phil Esterhaus on Hill
Street Blues. And in "Soda Pop and Paper Flags," Alan
Alda guested as a surgeon, a precursor to his career-defining role
as Dr. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce on M*A*S*H. Also in the first
season episode The Strengthening Angels that aired November 4, 1960 Hal Smith, who played town
drunk Otis Campbell in The Andy Griffith Show,
also plays a drunk named Howard and is listed in the credits as
"Drunk".
A 4th season episode, "Is It True There Are Poxies at the Bottom of
Landfair Lake?", featured guest stars Geoffrey
Horne and Collin Wilcox. In the
episode's storyline, Wilcox's character pretended to get married to Horne's,
although it turned out to be a practical joke. A few years after appearing in
this episode, Horne and Wilcox would in real life be briefly married to each
other.
A noteworthy in-joke
occurs during the 4th season episode "Where Are the Sounds of Celli
Brahams?" In this segment, Horace
McMahon guests as a Minneapolis, Minnesota,
festival promoter. At one point, his character confesses to Linc his failed
ambition to be a policeman. Linc remarks that he looks like a policeman Linc
once knew in New York City. McMahon had
starred as Lt. Mike Parker on the New York-based police drama Naked City from 1958-63,
another television series overseen by the creative team of Stirling Silliphant and Herbert B. Leonard.
The original
working title of the series was The Searchers, according to George
Maharis. That title was also the title of the 1956 film The Searchers directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne, so the series was renamed.
The
show actually had very little real connection with the US Highway providing its name. Most of the locations
visited throughout the series were far afield from the territory covered
by "The Mother Road." U.S. Route 66 the highway was briefly referred to in just
three early episodes of the series ("Black November," "Play
It Glissando," and "An Absence of Tears") and is shown only
rarely, as in the early first season episode "The Strengthening
Angels".
The
episode "I'm Here to Kill a King," which was originally
scheduled to air on November 29, 1963, was removed from the schedule
because of President John F. Kennedy's assassination one week earlier. It was not
aired until the series went into syndication. This episode, and "A
Long Way from St. Louie," are the only ones filmed outside the United
States. Both were filmed in Canada, the latter in Toronto.
Sam
Peckinpah wrote and directed an episode of season 2, "Mon Petit
Chou," in 1961.
Route 66 was devised by Stirling Silliphant, who wrote
the majority of the episodes. It was notable for its dark storylines and
exceptional realism. Tod and Buz would frequently become involved with
individuals whose almost nihilistic worldview made for
occasionally frightening television. Some 50 years after its premiere, Route
66 is still one of the few television series to offer such a range of
socially-conscious stories, including mercy
killing, the threat of nuclear annihilation, terrorism, runaways and
orphans. Other episodes dealt with the mentally ill, drug addiction or gang
violence. However, some stories were congenially lighthearted, such as a
memorable episode featuring Richard
Basehart as a folklorist trying to record the local music of an
isolated Appalachian
community, and a Halloween episode called "Lizard's Leg and Owlet's
Wing".
Even more unusual is the way it served up a kind of soaring dialog that has
been referred to as "Shakespearean" and
free-verse poetry. For instance, the boys encounter a Nazi hunter
named Bartlett on the offshore oil drilling rig where they work. Bartlett
describes the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust
thus: "Tod, I hope you live a long life and never know the blistering
forces that sear and destroy, turn men into enemies and sweep past the last
frontiers of compassion" and "once you've seen that dark, unceasing
tide of faces... of the victims...the last spark of dignity so obliterated that
not one face is lifted to heaven, not one voice is raised in protest even as
they died..." (from episode #4, "The Man on the Monkey Board").
The quirky, textured writing extended even to episode titles, which included
such oddities as "How Much a Pound is Albatross?" and "Ever Ride
the Waves in Oklahoma?". Other episode titles were drawn from a wide range
of literary sources, such as Shakespeare ("A Lance of Straw",
"Hell is Empty, All the Devils are Here") or Alfred
Tennyson ("A Fury Slinging Flame").
Many of the stories were character studies, like the above-mentioned one
featuring Richard Basehart as a man who uses people then tosses them away, as
if they are plastic spoons. The episode titled "You Can't Pick Cotton in
Tahiti" refers to small-town America as both a far-away, exotic Tahiti and
the "real America" compared to "phony-baloney" Hollywood,
and still offers food for thought. Many episodes offer moving soliloquies, into
which future Academy-Award-winning writer Stirling
Silliphant (In the Heat of the
Night) poured his deepest thoughts.
Despite all the adventure, travelogue, drama and poetry, the real subject of
the series was the human condition, with Tod and Buz often cast as a kind of
roving Greek
chorus, observers and mentors to broken-down prizefighters and rodeo
clowns, sadists and iron-willed matrons, surfers and heiresses, runaway kids
and people from all walks of life, forced by circumstances to confront their
demons.
One hallmark of the show was the way it introduced viewers, however briefly,
to new ways of life and new cultures. For instance, we get a glimpse of a
shrimper's life in episode 2 of season 1, "A Lance of Straw," and a
look at Cleveland, Ohio's Polish
community in episode 35, "First Class Mouliak". Here the young are
pushed by their parents into careers and even marriages they may not want, in
an effort to hold community and family together, albeit at the expense of the
happiness and well-being of the kids. This story featured Robert Redford, Martin
Balsam, Nehemiah Persoff and Nancy
Malone as guest stars.
One of the legacies Route 66 left behind is a dramatic and
photographic portrait of early-1960s America as a less crowded and less
complicated era—if not a less violent one—in which altruism and optimism still
had a place. That place was filled by two young men who seemed to represent the
best in us, the willingness to stand up for the weak, and who espoused
old-fashioned values like honesty and the physical courage necessary to fight
in their own and others' defense. In their role of wanderers, they appeared to
be peaceful rebels who seemed to reject, at least for a time, material
possessions and the American dream of owning a home. The boys were de facto
orphans adrift in American society; as such, they embodied facets of Jack
Kerouac's Beat Generation, a little bit
of Marlon
Brando's wild side from The
Wild One, James Dean's inability to
settle down and fit in from Rebel Without a Cause, and
the wanderlust of the above-mentioned Jim Bronson, the traveling writer and
loner who toured the USA on a motorcycle in the 1969-1970 series Then
Came Bronson. The use of the Corvette on Route 66, not
only as the boys' transportation but as their marquee and symbol of their
wandering spirit, created a link between America's Sports Car and America's
highways that endures to this day.
Given the unusual tenor of the show and the cost of keeping some 50 people
on the road filming for most of the year, it seems highly unlikely that
anything like Route 66 will ever be attempted again.
Nelson
Riddle was commissioned to write the instrumental theme when CBS
decided to have a new song, rather than pay royalties for the Bobby
Troup song "(Get
Your Kicks on) Route 66". Riddle's theme, however, offers an
unmistakable homage to the latter's piano solo (as originally recorded by Nat
King Cole) throughout the number. Riddle's Route 66
instrumental was one of the first television themes[1]
to make Billboard Magazine's Top 30,
following Henry Mancini's "Mr. Lucky Theme" in 1960. The song earned
two Grammy nominations in 1962.
George Maharis reported in a 1986 Nick
at Nite interview that people often ask him about "the red
Corvette." According to Maharis, the Corvette was never red. (The
misconception may partially stem from the box illustration on the official
board game, released by Transogram in 1962, which showed Tod and Buz in a
red-colored model.) It was light blue the first season, and fawn beige for the
second and third seasons. Both colors were chosen to photograph well in black
and white, but the show's cinematographer complained that the powder blue car
reflected too much light. The Corvette was replaced with a newer model annually
by series' sponsor General Motors but the show
itself never mentioned or explained the technicality.
October 10, 1950
The Federal Communications Commission issues the first
license to broadcast color television, to CBS.
However, RCA charged that CBS's color technology was
inadequate and contested the license, which was to go into effect November 3.
RCA's challenge worked: A restraining order was issued on November 15. Despite
this setback, CBS did broadcast the first commercial color TV program in June
1951. Color TV technology continued to evolve during the 1950s. In 1956, a
Chicago TV station became the first to broadcast entirely in color. Color
television sets, however, remained less popular than black and white sets until
the late 1960s. In 1968, color televisions outsold black and white televisions
for the first time.
October 10, 2010
Discovery Kids was
relaunched and rebranded as The Hub.
It was a joint operation by Discovery
Communications and Hasbro, Inc.
October 11, 1975
Saturday Night Live debuts.
The topical comedy sketch show featuring Chevy Chase,
John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin and
Laraine Newman, makes its debut on NBC; it will go on to become the
longest-running, highest-rated show on late-night television. The 90-minute
program, which from its inception has been broadcast live from Studio 8H in the
GE Building at Rockefeller Center, includes a different guest host and musical
act each week. The opening sketch of each show ends with one actor saying, “Live
from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”
Created by the Canadian-born comedy writer Lorne Michaels, SNL has
introduced a long list of memorable characters and catchphrases--from Gilda
Radner’s Roseanne Roseannada, to the Coneheads, to Billy Crystal’s Fernando
(“You look mahvelous”), to Dana Carvey’s Church Lady (“Isn’t that special?”),
to bodybuilders Hans and Franz (“We’re going to pump you up”), to Coffee
Talk host Linda Richman (“like buttah” and “I’m all verklempt”)--that have
become part of pop-culture history. The show, whose cast has changed
continually over the years, has also launched the careers of such performers as
Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley,
David Spade, Jon Lovitz, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tina Fey. Some SNL
sketches have even been turned into feature films, the two most successful
examples being 1980’s The Blues Brothers and 1992’s Wayne’s World.
The show was originally known as NBC’s Saturday Night because
there was another show on ABC called Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell.
However, NBC eventually purchased the naming rights, and since 1977 the edgy
comedy program has been called Saturday Night Live. Lorne Michaels
served as the show’s producer from 1975 to 1980, followed by Jean Doumanian
from 1980 to 1981. Dick Ebersol helmed the show from 1981 to 1985. Michaels
returned to the program that year, and has remained executive producer ever
since.
The influential comedian George Carlin hosted the debut episode of SNL.
Later that year, Candace Bergen became the first woman to assume SNL hosting
duties. She went on to host the program four more times. In 1982,
seven-year-old Drew Barrymore hosted the show, becoming the youngest person
ever to do so. Starting in 1976, Steve Martin has hosted SNL 14 times.
Since 1990, Alec Baldwin has hosted the show 13 times. John Goodman has hosted
the show a dozen times, beginning in 1989. Other frequent guest hosts include
Buck Henry, Chevy Chase, Tom Hanks and Christopher Walken. Musical guests
who’ve performed on SNL five or more times include Paul Simon, Tom Petty
& The Heartbreakers, James Taylor, Sting, Beck and the Foo Fighters.
