January 1, 1951
The
Zenith Radio Corporation of Chicago demonstrates the first pay television
system.
The company sent movies over
the airway via scrambled signals, and the 300 families who participated in the
test could send telephone signals to decode the movies for $1 each. Three
movies were shown in the demonstration: April Showers with Jack Carson, Welcome
Stranger with Bing Crosby, and Homecoming with Clark Gable and Lana
Turner. During the four-week test, test families ordered more than 2,600
movies.
Simple though it seems,
putting movies on TV at all, let alone sending them over the phone, was a
technically complex proposition taking years to come to fruition. A motion
picture presented 24 frames per second-a rate that created an annoying flicker
on TV. The earliest attempts to broadcast movies on TV took place in 1928 and
included an extremely blurry hockey game and an excerpt from the movie The
Taming of the Shrew. Improvements in technology eventually led to the
regular broadcasting of movies on TV.
Despite Zenith's
experiments with movies-by-phone, pay movies did not become popular until later
in the century, following the spread of cable TV in the 1960s and '70s.
Although cable TV had been created in the late 1940s to give rural households
better television reception, it was not until the 1960s, when cable became
widely available in urban areas, that cable companies began introducing their
own networks accessible only to subscribers.
In
1975, cable networks began using satellites to distribute their programming to
heavily regulated local cable operators. In the late 1980s and early '90s, the
size of the cable industry exploded, and many companies offered more than 100
channels to their clients. Now, more than 10,000 cable systems operate
throughout the United States. Their specialized programming features everything
from foreign news and shopping clubs to sports coverage and classic movies.
Cable companies still also offer an array of pay-per-view movies accessible
with a touch of the customer's remote control.
January 1, 1971
Tobacco ads representing $20 million dollars in
advertising were banned from TV and radio broadcast.
January 5, 1961
Mr. Ed debuted.
The show would run for six years.
Mister
Ed is
an American television situation comedy produced by Filmways that first aired
in syndication from January 5 to July 2, 1961, and then on CBS from October 1, 1961, to February 6,
1966. The show's title character is a talking horse, originally appearing
in short stories by Walter R. Brooks.
Mister
Ed is
one of the few series to debut in syndication and be picked up by a major
network for prime time.
The stars of the show are Mister Ed, a palomino
horse
who could talk ("played" by gelding
Bamboo Harvester and
voiced by Allan Lane), and
his owner, an eccentric and enormously klutzy yet friendly architect named
Wilbur Post (portrayed by Alan
Young). Much of the program's humor stemmed from the fact
Mister Ed would speak only to Wilbur, as well as Ed's notoriety as a
troublemaker. According to the show's producer, Arthur
Lubin, Young was chosen as the lead character because he
"just seemed like the sort of guy a horse would talk to". Lubin, a
friend of Mae West, scored a coup by
persuading the screen icon to guest star in one episode.
In the United States, reruns aired on Nick
at Nite from March 3, 1986, to February 1, 1993. Sister
station TV
Land also reran the show from 1996-98 and again from
2003-06. The series is currently broadcast every morning on This TV,
along with sister series The Patty Duke Show.
As of January 1, 2011, the first two seasons of the show are available on Hulu.
The show was derived from a series of short
stories by Walter R. Brooks, which
began with The Talking Horse in the 18-Sep-1937 issue of Liberty.
Brooks is otherwise known for the Freddy
the Pig series of children's novels, which likewise
feature talking animals who interact with humans.
The concept of the show was similar to Francis the Talking Mule,
with the equine normally talking only to one person (Wilbur), and thus both
helping and frustrating its owner.
The first horse that played Mister Ed for the
pilot episode was a chestnut
gelding. However, the permanent equine star of the show was Bamboo
Harvester (1949–70), a crossbred
gelding of American Saddlebred, Arabian
and grade ancestry.
Mister Ed the horse was voiced by ex-B-movie
cowboy star Allan "Rocky" Lane
(speaking) and Sheldon Allman
(singing, except his line in the theme song, which was sung by its composer, Jay
Livingston).
Ed was voice-trained for the show by Les Hilton.
Lane remained anonymous as the voice of Mister Ed, and the show's producers
referred to him only as "an actor who prefers to remain nameless,"
though once the show became a hit, Lane campaigned the producers for credit,
which he never received. The credits listed Mister Ed as playing
"himself"; however, his family tree name was Bamboo
Harvester. Ed's stablemate, a quarterhorse named Pumpkin,
who was later to appear in the television series Green
Acres, was also Ed's stunt double in the show.
It is often said the crew was able to get Mister
Ed to move his mouth by applying peanut butter to his gums in order for him to
try to remove it by moving his lips. However, Alan Young said in 2004 that he
had started the story himself. In another interview, Young said, "Al Simon
and Arthur Lubin, the producers, suggested we keep the method a secret because
they thought kids would be disappointed if they found out the technical details
of how it was done, so I made up the peanut butter story, and everyone bought
it. It was initially done by putting a piece of nylon thread in his mouth. But
Ed actually learned to move his lips on cue when the trainer touched his hoof.
In fact, he soon learned to do it when I stopped talking during a scene! Ed was
very smart."
Others argued that examination of Mister Ed
footage shows Ed's handler pulling strings to make him talk, and that this
method was at work at least some of the time. Young later said during an
interview for the Archive of American Television that a nylon string was tied
to the halter
and the loose end inserted under his lip to make Ed talk, saying that he had
used the peanut butter fable for years in radio interviews instead of telling
the truth. The loose thread can be seen tied to the halter, and it is clearly
not taut as it would be if it were being pulled. Young also states in the AAT
interview that after the first season, Ed didn't need the nylon – Alan and
trainer Les were out riding one day and Les started laughing, telling Alan to
look at Ed, who was moving his lips every time they stopped talking, as if
attempting to join in the conversation. This difference is visible when
comparing first season episodes to later ones, as it is clear that early on
he's working the irritating string out, sometimes working his tongue in the
attempt too, and later on he tends to only move his upper lip, and appears to
watch Alan Young closely, waiting for him to finish his lines before twitching
his lip.
Young added in the Archive interview that Ed saw
the trainer as the disciplinarian, or father figure, and when scolded for
missing a cue, would go to Alan for comfort, like a mother figure, which Les
said was a good thing.
There are conflicting stories involving of the
death of Bamboo Harvester, the horse that played Mr. Ed. By 1968, Bamboo
Harvester was suffering from a variety of health problems. In 1970 he was euthanized
with no publicity, and buried at Snodgrass Farm in Oklahoma.
However, a different version was given by Alan
Young. Young wrote that he'd frequently visit his former
"co-star" in retirement. He states that Mr. Ed died from an
inadvertent tranquilizer administered while he was "in retirement" in
a stable in Burbank, California where he lived with his trainer Lester Hilton.
Young says Hilton was out of town visiting relatives and a temporary care giver
might have seen Ed rolling on the ground, struggling to get up. Young said Ed
was a heavy horse and he wasn't always strong enough to get back on his feet
without struggling. The theory is the care giver thought the horse was in
distress and administered a tranquilizer and for unknown reason, the horse died
within hours. The remains were cremated and scattered by Hilton in the Los
Angeles area at a spot known only to him.
A different horse that died in Oklahoma in
February 1979 was widely thought to be Bamboo Harvester, but this horse was in
fact a horse that posed for the still pictures of "Mr. Ed" used by
the production company for the show's press kits. After Bamboo Harvester's
death in 1970, this horse was unofficially known as Mister Ed, which led to him
being reported as such (including sardonic comments on Saturday Night Live's
Weekend Update)
following his own death.
Young said that when the Oklahoma horse death
story came out in 1979, he knew it wasn't the real Mr. Ed, but didn't have the
heart to "shatter their illusions" that the horse being memorialized
wasn't the real Mr. Ed. He believes it was the horse used for early publicity
photos.
The other main character throughout the series
was Wilbur's tolerant (to a point) young wife, Carol (Connie
Hines). The Posts also had two sets of neighbors, whom Ed
delighted in making Wilbur appear as eccentric as possible. They included the
Addisons, Roger (Larry Keating) and
his wife Kay (Edna Skinner), who
both appeared from the pilot episode until Keating's untimely death from
leukemia in 1963; thereafter, Skinner continued appearing as Kay alone, without
mention of Roger's absence, until the neighbors were recast. In the "official"
pilot episode — two were filmed because the horse in the first pilot was unruly
and difficult to work with — Roger caught Wilbur and Ed "conversing"
and realized that Mr. Ed could talk, but since Ed only spoke to Wilbur — Post
diffused the potential calamity by sufficiently convincing Addison that he was
a ventriloquist and could "throw" Mr. Ed's voice. Following the
Addisons, the Posts' new neighbors were Col. Gordon Kirkwood, USAF (Ret.),
portrayed by (Leon Ames),
Wilbur's former commanding officer, and his wife Winnie (Florence MacMichael).
Winnie actually called her husband "Colonel" and referred to him as
"The Colonel" in the presence of others; she never called him by his
given name. Ames and MacMichael appeared on the series from 1963-65. In 1963, child
actor Darby
Hinton, cast thereafter as Israel Boone on NBC's
Daniel Boone,
guest-starred as 'Rocky' in the episode "Getting Ed's Goat." Jack
Albertson appeared occasionally from 1961-63 as Kay
Addison's older brother Paul Fenton. Mae
West and Clint
Eastwood also appeared in different episodes as
themselves.
For the final season, the show focused strictly
on the home life of the Posts, which was made more interesting when Carol's
grumpy and uptight father, Mr. Higgins (Barry
Kelley), who appeared occasionally throughout the entire
series, apparently moved in with Wilbur and Carol during the final episodes.
Mr. Higgins loathed Wilbur since Wilbur's quirky eccentricity always clashed
with his own emotionless and uptight personality. Carol's father never stopped
trying to persuade her to divorce Wilbur, whom he often referred to as a
"kook" because of Wilbur's clumsiness. Alan Young performed
double-duty during the final season of the series, also directing nearly all of
those episodes.
Although Connie Hines retired from acting a few
years after the show's cancellation in 1966, she and Alan Young made public
appearances together.
The theme song was written by the songwriting
team of Jay Livingston and Ray
Evans and sung by Livingston. After using only the music
to open the first eight episodes, a decision was made to replace the
instrumental-only version with one containing the lyrics. Livingston agreed to
sing it himself, at least until a professional singer could be found; however,
the producers liked the songwriter's vocals and kept them on the broadcast.
A joke/controversy concerning the theme song has
existed since at least the 1980s: that the tune contains "satanic
messages" if played in reverse. This YouTube
video suggests that some portions
reverse to "sing this song for Satan"
and "Satan is the singer". Over the years, many radio stations have
kept this rumor alive, mostly as a parody of the whole "backmasking"
controversy.
The series was sponsored from 1961-63 by Studebaker
Corporation, an American car manufacturer which stopped
manufacturing cars in the United States in 1964 and its Canadian unit stopped
producing cars in 1966, but that company survives today in a different field as
Studebaker-Worthington Leasing Company.
Studebakers
were featured prominently in the show during this period. The Posts are shown
owning a 1962 Lark convertible, and the
company used publicity shots featuring the Posts and Mister Ed with their
product (various cast members also appeared in "integrated
commercials" for Lark
at the end of the program). The Addisons are shown owning a 1963 Avanti.
Ford Motor Company provided the vehicles starting at the beginning of 1965. It
is also interesting to note that, in the first episode ever aired, the Posts
were driving a 1961 Studebaker Lark.
January 5, 1971
ABC's Alias Smith and Jones aired for the first time.
Alias
Smith and Jones began with a made-for-TV movie of the previous year called The
Young Country, about con artists in the Old West. It was produced, written and
directed by Roy Huggins, who served as executive producer of AS&J and,
under the pseudonym of John Thomas James, at least shared the writing credit on
most episodes.
Roger
Davis starred as Stephen Foster Moody, and Pete Duel had the secondary but significant
role of Honest John Smith. Joan Hackett played a character called Clementine
Hale; a character with the same name appeared in two AS&J episodes, played
by Sally Field. This pilot was rejected, but Huggins was given a second chance
and, with Glen A. Larson, developed Alias Smith and Jones. Both The Young
Country and the series pilot movie originally aired as ABC Movies of the Week.
Alias
Smith and Jones was made in the same spirit as many other American TV series,
from Huggins' own The Fugitive to Renegade, about fugitives on the run across
America who get involved in the personal lives of the people they meet. The
major difference was that Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry were guilty of the
crimes that they were accused of committing, but were trying to begin a
non-criminal life.
The
series was modeled on the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford (Universal contract player Ben Murphy
was offered to the producers because he was considered a Paul Newman lookalike.)
There were a number of similarities between the film and the TV series: One of
the lead characters in the film was called Harvey Logan (played by Ted
Cassidy). In real life Harvey Logan was also known by the nickname of "Kid
Curry", Harvey Logan was an associate of the real Butch Cassidy and unlike
the TV version, the real Kid Curry was a cold-blooded killer.
The
TV series also featured a group of robbers called the Devil's Hole Gang,
loosely based on the Hole in the Wall Gang from which Cassidy recruited most of
his outlaws. In order to lend them an element of audience sympathy, Heyes and
Curry were presented as men who avoided bloodshed (though Curry did once kill
in self-defense) and were always attempting to reform and seek redemption for
their "prior ways".
The
names "Smith" and "Jones" originated from a comment in the
1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when, prior to one of their final
hold-ups, the characters are outside a bank in Bolivia and Sundance turns to
Butch and says: "I'm Smith and you're Jones."
January 6, 1936
Porky Pig makes his world debut in a Warner Brothers
cartoon, Gold Diggers of '49.
When Mel Blanc joined Warner Brothers the following
year, he became the famous voice behind Porky as well as the Warner Brothers
characters Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester, and Tweety.
January 8, 1966
The final episode of "Shindig!" was
broadcast on ABC-TV.
The show
featured the Kinks and the Who. Shindig! is
an American musical variety series which aired on ABC from September 16, 1964]-January 8,
1966. The show was hosted by Jimmy O'Neill, a disc jockey in
Los Angeles at the time who also created the show along with his
wife Sharon Sheeleyand production executive Art Stolnitz. The
original pilot was rejected by ABC and David Sontag, then Executive Producer of
ABC, redeveloped and completely redesigned the show. A new pilot with a new
cast of artists was shot starring Sam Cooke.
That pilot aired as the premiere episode.
Shindig! was conceived as a short-notice replacement
for Hootenanny, a
series that had specialized in folk revival music. The folk revival had fizzled in 1964 as
the result of the British Invasion, which damaged the ratings for Hootenanny and prompted
that show's cancellation.
Shindig! focused on a broader variety of popular music
than its predecessor and first aired for a half-hour every Wednesday evening,
but was expanded to an hour in January 1965. In the fall of 1965, the show
split into two half-hour telecasts, on Thursday and Saturday nights.
Shindig!'s premiere episode was actually the second pilot, and
featured Sam Cooke, The Everly Brothers and The Righteous
Brothers. Later shows were taped in
Britain with The Beatles as the guests. The series featured other "British invasion" bands and performers including The Who, The Rolling Stones and Cilla Black. Shindig continued
to broadcast episodes from London throughout its run.
Many popular performers of
the day played on Shindig! including Lesley Gore, Bo Diddley, and Sonny and Cher, The Beach Boys, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, The Supremes and The Ronettes.
Shindig!'s success prompted NBC to air the similar series Hullabaloo starting in January 1965 and other producers to
launch syndicated rock music shows like Shivaree and Hollywood A Go-Go.
In March 1965, Little Eva performed
her hit song "The Loco-Motion"
in a live but short version of the song. This is the only known video clip of
her singing the song.
Shindig! is one of the few rock music shows of the era to
still have all of the episodes available to watch.
January 9, 1996
The first episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun aired on NBC.
The premise of the show revolves around an
extraterrestrial research expedition attempting to live as a normal human
family in the fictional city of Rutherford, Ohio, said to be 52 miles
(84 km) outside of Cleveland, where they live in an attic apartment. Humor was
principally derived from the aliens' attempts to study human society and,
because of their living as humans themselves while on Earth, to understand the
human condition. This show reflects human life from the perspective of aliens
and many sources of humour are from the learning experiences the alien
characters have. Most of the episodes are named after the protagonist
"Dick". In later episodes, they became more accustomed to Earth and
often became more interested in their human lives than in their mission.
Dick Solomon (John Lithgow), the High Commander and leader of the expedition, is
the family provider, and takes a position as a physics professor at Pendelton
State University. Information officer Tommy (Joseph
Gordon-Levitt) has been given the
body of a teenager and is forced to enroll in high school (later college),
leaving security officer Sally (Kristen
Johnston) and communications officer Harry (French Stewart) to spend their lives as twenty somethings hanging
out at home and bouncing through short-term jobs. The show also revolves around
their relationships with humans, mostly their love interests.
January 10, 1971
Masterpiece
Theatre debuts.
Among
the show's many presentations are Upstairs Downstairs (1974-1977), I,
Claudius (1978), and A Tale of Two Cities (1989). Program hosts
included Alistair Cooke and Russell Baker.
January 1, 1951
The company sent movies over
the airway via scrambled signals, and the 300 families who participated in the
test could send telephone signals to decode the movies for $1 each. Three
movies were shown in the demonstration: April Showers with Jack Carson, Welcome
Stranger with Bing Crosby, and Homecoming with Clark Gable and Lana
Turner. During the four-week test, test families ordered more than 2,600
movies.
Simple though it seems,
putting movies on TV at all, let alone sending them over the phone, was a
technically complex proposition taking years to come to fruition. A motion
picture presented 24 frames per second-a rate that created an annoying flicker
on TV. The earliest attempts to broadcast movies on TV took place in 1928 and
included an extremely blurry hockey game and an excerpt from the movie The
Taming of the Shrew. Improvements in technology eventually led to the
regular broadcasting of movies on TV.
Despite Zenith's
experiments with movies-by-phone, pay movies did not become popular until later
in the century, following the spread of cable TV in the 1960s and '70s.
Although cable TV had been created in the late 1940s to give rural households
better television reception, it was not until the 1960s, when cable became
widely available in urban areas, that cable companies began introducing their
own networks accessible only to subscribers.
In 1975, cable networks began using satellites to distribute their programming to heavily regulated local cable operators. In the late 1980s and early '90s, the size of the cable industry exploded, and many companies offered more than 100 channels to their clients. Now, more than 10,000 cable systems operate throughout the United States. Their specialized programming features everything from foreign news and shopping clubs to sports coverage and classic movies. Cable companies still also offer an array of pay-per-view movies accessible with a touch of the customer's remote control.
January 1, 1971
Tobacco ads representing $20 million dollars in advertising were banned from TV and radio broadcast.
January 5, 1961
Mr. Ed debuted.
The show would run for six years.
Mister
Ed is
an American television situation comedy produced by Filmways that first aired
in syndication from January 5 to July 2, 1961, and then on CBS from October 1, 1961, to February 6,
1966. The show's title character is a talking horse, originally appearing
in short stories by Walter R. Brooks.
Mister
Ed is
one of the few series to debut in syndication and be picked up by a major
network for prime time.
The stars of the show are Mister Ed, a palomino
horse
who could talk ("played" by gelding
Bamboo Harvester and
voiced by Allan Lane), and
his owner, an eccentric and enormously klutzy yet friendly architect named
Wilbur Post (portrayed by Alan
Young). Much of the program's humor stemmed from the fact
Mister Ed would speak only to Wilbur, as well as Ed's notoriety as a
troublemaker. According to the show's producer, Arthur
Lubin, Young was chosen as the lead character because he
"just seemed like the sort of guy a horse would talk to". Lubin, a
friend of Mae West, scored a coup by
persuading the screen icon to guest star in one episode.
In the United States, reruns aired on Nick
at Nite from March 3, 1986, to February 1, 1993. Sister
station TV
Land also reran the show from 1996-98 and again from
2003-06. The series is currently broadcast every morning on This TV,
along with sister series The Patty Duke Show.
As of January 1, 2011, the first two seasons of the show are available on Hulu.
The show was derived from a series of short
stories by Walter R. Brooks, which
began with The Talking Horse in the 18-Sep-1937 issue of Liberty.
Brooks is otherwise known for the Freddy
the Pig series of children's novels, which likewise
feature talking animals who interact with humans.
The concept of the show was similar to Francis the Talking Mule,
with the equine normally talking only to one person (Wilbur), and thus both
helping and frustrating its owner.
The first horse that played Mister Ed for the
pilot episode was a chestnut
gelding. However, the permanent equine star of the show was Bamboo
Harvester (1949–70), a crossbred
gelding of American Saddlebred, Arabian
and grade ancestry.
Mister Ed the horse was voiced by ex-B-movie
cowboy star Allan "Rocky" Lane
(speaking) and Sheldon Allman
(singing, except his line in the theme song, which was sung by its composer, Jay
Livingston).
Ed was voice-trained for the show by Les Hilton.
Lane remained anonymous as the voice of Mister Ed, and the show's producers
referred to him only as "an actor who prefers to remain nameless,"
though once the show became a hit, Lane campaigned the producers for credit,
which he never received. The credits listed Mister Ed as playing
"himself"; however, his family tree name was Bamboo
Harvester. Ed's stablemate, a quarterhorse named Pumpkin,
who was later to appear in the television series Green
Acres, was also Ed's stunt double in the show.
It is often said the crew was able to get Mister
Ed to move his mouth by applying peanut butter to his gums in order for him to
try to remove it by moving his lips. However, Alan Young said in 2004 that he
had started the story himself. In another interview, Young said, "Al Simon
and Arthur Lubin, the producers, suggested we keep the method a secret because
they thought kids would be disappointed if they found out the technical details
of how it was done, so I made up the peanut butter story, and everyone bought
it. It was initially done by putting a piece of nylon thread in his mouth. But
Ed actually learned to move his lips on cue when the trainer touched his hoof.
In fact, he soon learned to do it when I stopped talking during a scene! Ed was
very smart."
Others argued that examination of Mister Ed
footage shows Ed's handler pulling strings to make him talk, and that this
method was at work at least some of the time. Young later said during an
interview for the Archive of American Television that a nylon string was tied
to the halter
and the loose end inserted under his lip to make Ed talk, saying that he had
used the peanut butter fable for years in radio interviews instead of telling
the truth. The loose thread can be seen tied to the halter, and it is clearly
not taut as it would be if it were being pulled. Young also states in the AAT
interview that after the first season, Ed didn't need the nylon – Alan and
trainer Les were out riding one day and Les started laughing, telling Alan to
look at Ed, who was moving his lips every time they stopped talking, as if
attempting to join in the conversation. This difference is visible when
comparing first season episodes to later ones, as it is clear that early on
he's working the irritating string out, sometimes working his tongue in the
attempt too, and later on he tends to only move his upper lip, and appears to
watch Alan Young closely, waiting for him to finish his lines before twitching
his lip.
Young added in the Archive interview that Ed saw
the trainer as the disciplinarian, or father figure, and when scolded for
missing a cue, would go to Alan for comfort, like a mother figure, which Les
said was a good thing.
There are conflicting stories involving of the
death of Bamboo Harvester, the horse that played Mr. Ed. By 1968, Bamboo
Harvester was suffering from a variety of health problems. In 1970 he was euthanized
with no publicity, and buried at Snodgrass Farm in Oklahoma.
However, a different version was given by Alan
Young. Young wrote that he'd frequently visit his former
"co-star" in retirement. He states that Mr. Ed died from an
inadvertent tranquilizer administered while he was "in retirement" in
a stable in Burbank, California where he lived with his trainer Lester Hilton.
Young says Hilton was out of town visiting relatives and a temporary care giver
might have seen Ed rolling on the ground, struggling to get up. Young said Ed
was a heavy horse and he wasn't always strong enough to get back on his feet
without struggling. The theory is the care giver thought the horse was in
distress and administered a tranquilizer and for unknown reason, the horse died
within hours. The remains were cremated and scattered by Hilton in the Los
Angeles area at a spot known only to him.
A different horse that died in Oklahoma in
February 1979 was widely thought to be Bamboo Harvester, but this horse was in
fact a horse that posed for the still pictures of "Mr. Ed" used by
the production company for the show's press kits. After Bamboo Harvester's
death in 1970, this horse was unofficially known as Mister Ed, which led to him
being reported as such (including sardonic comments on Saturday Night Live's
Weekend Update)
following his own death.
Young said that when the Oklahoma horse death
story came out in 1979, he knew it wasn't the real Mr. Ed, but didn't have the
heart to "shatter their illusions" that the horse being memorialized
wasn't the real Mr. Ed. He believes it was the horse used for early publicity
photos.
The other main character throughout the series
was Wilbur's tolerant (to a point) young wife, Carol (Connie
Hines). The Posts also had two sets of neighbors, whom Ed
delighted in making Wilbur appear as eccentric as possible. They included the
Addisons, Roger (Larry Keating) and
his wife Kay (Edna Skinner), who
both appeared from the pilot episode until Keating's untimely death from
leukemia in 1963; thereafter, Skinner continued appearing as Kay alone, without
mention of Roger's absence, until the neighbors were recast. In the "official"
pilot episode — two were filmed because the horse in the first pilot was unruly
and difficult to work with — Roger caught Wilbur and Ed "conversing"
and realized that Mr. Ed could talk, but since Ed only spoke to Wilbur — Post
diffused the potential calamity by sufficiently convincing Addison that he was
a ventriloquist and could "throw" Mr. Ed's voice. Following the
Addisons, the Posts' new neighbors were Col. Gordon Kirkwood, USAF (Ret.),
portrayed by (Leon Ames),
Wilbur's former commanding officer, and his wife Winnie (Florence MacMichael).
Winnie actually called her husband "Colonel" and referred to him as
"The Colonel" in the presence of others; she never called him by his
given name. Ames and MacMichael appeared on the series from 1963-65. In 1963, child
actor Darby
Hinton, cast thereafter as Israel Boone on NBC's
Daniel Boone,
guest-starred as 'Rocky' in the episode "Getting Ed's Goat." Jack
Albertson appeared occasionally from 1961-63 as Kay
Addison's older brother Paul Fenton. Mae
West and Clint
Eastwood also appeared in different episodes as
themselves.
For the final season, the show focused strictly
on the home life of the Posts, which was made more interesting when Carol's
grumpy and uptight father, Mr. Higgins (Barry
Kelley), who appeared occasionally throughout the entire
series, apparently moved in with Wilbur and Carol during the final episodes.
Mr. Higgins loathed Wilbur since Wilbur's quirky eccentricity always clashed
with his own emotionless and uptight personality. Carol's father never stopped
trying to persuade her to divorce Wilbur, whom he often referred to as a
"kook" because of Wilbur's clumsiness. Alan Young performed
double-duty during the final season of the series, also directing nearly all of
those episodes.
Although Connie Hines retired from acting a few
years after the show's cancellation in 1966, she and Alan Young made public
appearances together.
The theme song was written by the songwriting
team of Jay Livingston and Ray
Evans and sung by Livingston. After using only the music
to open the first eight episodes, a decision was made to replace the
instrumental-only version with one containing the lyrics. Livingston agreed to
sing it himself, at least until a professional singer could be found; however,
the producers liked the songwriter's vocals and kept them on the broadcast.
A joke/controversy concerning the theme song has
existed since at least the 1980s: that the tune contains "satanic
messages" if played in reverse. This YouTube
video suggests that some portions
reverse to "sing this song for Satan"
and "Satan is the singer". Over the years, many radio stations have
kept this rumor alive, mostly as a parody of the whole "backmasking"
controversy.
The series was sponsored from 1961-63 by Studebaker
Corporation, an American car manufacturer which stopped
manufacturing cars in the United States in 1964 and its Canadian unit stopped
producing cars in 1966, but that company survives today in a different field as
Studebaker-Worthington Leasing Company.
Studebakers
were featured prominently in the show during this period. The Posts are shown
owning a 1962 Lark convertible, and the
company used publicity shots featuring the Posts and Mister Ed with their
product (various cast members also appeared in "integrated
commercials" for Lark
at the end of the program). The Addisons are shown owning a 1963 Avanti.
Ford Motor Company provided the vehicles starting at the beginning of 1965. It
is also interesting to note that, in the first episode ever aired, the Posts
were driving a 1961 Studebaker Lark.
January 5, 1971
ABC's Alias Smith and Jones aired for the first time.
Alias Smith and Jones began with a made-for-TV movie of the previous year called The Young Country, about con artists in the Old West. It was produced, written and directed by Roy Huggins, who served as executive producer of AS&J and, under the pseudonym of John Thomas James, at least shared the writing credit on most episodes.
Roger Davis starred as Stephen Foster Moody, and Pete Duel had the secondary but significant role of Honest John Smith. Joan Hackett played a character called Clementine Hale; a character with the same name appeared in two AS&J episodes, played by Sally Field. This pilot was rejected, but Huggins was given a second chance and, with Glen A. Larson, developed Alias Smith and Jones. Both The Young Country and the series pilot movie originally aired as ABC Movies of the Week.
Alias Smith and Jones was made in the same spirit as many other American TV series, from Huggins' own The Fugitive to Renegade, about fugitives on the run across America who get involved in the personal lives of the people they meet. The major difference was that Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry were guilty of the crimes that they were accused of committing, but were trying to begin a non-criminal life.
The series was modeled on the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford (Universal contract player Ben Murphy was offered to the producers because he was considered a Paul Newman lookalike.) There were a number of similarities between the film and the TV series: One of the lead characters in the film was called Harvey Logan (played by Ted Cassidy). In real life Harvey Logan was also known by the nickname of "Kid Curry", Harvey Logan was an associate of the real Butch Cassidy and unlike the TV version, the real Kid Curry was a cold-blooded killer.
The TV series also featured a group of robbers called the Devil's Hole Gang, loosely based on the Hole in the Wall Gang from which Cassidy recruited most of his outlaws. In order to lend them an element of audience sympathy, Heyes and Curry were presented as men who avoided bloodshed (though Curry did once kill in self-defense) and were always attempting to reform and seek redemption for their "prior ways".
The
names "Smith" and "Jones" originated from a comment in the
1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when, prior to one of their final
hold-ups, the characters are outside a bank in Bolivia and Sundance turns to
Butch and says: "I'm Smith and you're Jones."
January 6, 1936
Porky Pig makes his world debut in a Warner Brothers cartoon, Gold Diggers of '49.
When Mel Blanc joined Warner Brothers the following
year, he became the famous voice behind Porky as well as the Warner Brothers
characters Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester, and Tweety.
January 8, 1966
The final episode of "Shindig!" was broadcast on ABC-TV.
The show
featured the Kinks and the Who. Shindig! is
an American musical variety series which aired on ABC from September 16, 1964]-January 8,
1966. The show was hosted by Jimmy O'Neill, a disc jockey in
Los Angeles at the time who also created the show along with his
wife Sharon Sheeleyand production executive Art Stolnitz. The
original pilot was rejected by ABC and David Sontag, then Executive Producer of
ABC, redeveloped and completely redesigned the show. A new pilot with a new
cast of artists was shot starring Sam Cooke.
That pilot aired as the premiere episode.
Shindig! was conceived as a short-notice replacement
for Hootenanny, a
series that had specialized in folk revival music. The folk revival had fizzled in 1964 as
the result of the British Invasion, which damaged the ratings for Hootenanny and prompted
that show's cancellation.
Shindig! focused on a broader variety of popular music
than its predecessor and first aired for a half-hour every Wednesday evening,
but was expanded to an hour in January 1965. In the fall of 1965, the show
split into two half-hour telecasts, on Thursday and Saturday nights.
Shindig!'s premiere episode was actually the second pilot, and
featured Sam Cooke, The Everly Brothers and The Righteous
Brothers. Later shows were taped in
Britain with The Beatles as the guests. The series featured other "British invasion" bands and performers including The Who, The Rolling Stones and Cilla Black. Shindig continued
to broadcast episodes from London throughout its run.
Many popular performers of
the day played on Shindig! including Lesley Gore, Bo Diddley, and Sonny and Cher, The Beach Boys, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, The Supremes and The Ronettes.
Shindig!'s success prompted NBC to air the similar series Hullabaloo starting in January 1965 and other producers to
launch syndicated rock music shows like Shivaree and Hollywood A Go-Go.
In March 1965, Little Eva performed
her hit song "The Loco-Motion"
in a live but short version of the song. This is the only known video clip of
her singing the song.
Shindig! is one of the few rock music shows of the era to
still have all of the episodes available to watch.
January 9, 1996
The first episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun aired on NBC.
The premise of the show revolves around an
extraterrestrial research expedition attempting to live as a normal human
family in the fictional city of Rutherford, Ohio, said to be 52 miles
(84 km) outside of Cleveland, where they live in an attic apartment. Humor was
principally derived from the aliens' attempts to study human society and,
because of their living as humans themselves while on Earth, to understand the
human condition. This show reflects human life from the perspective of aliens
and many sources of humour are from the learning experiences the alien
characters have. Most of the episodes are named after the protagonist
"Dick". In later episodes, they became more accustomed to Earth and
often became more interested in their human lives than in their mission.
Dick Solomon (John Lithgow), the High Commander and leader of the expedition, is
the family provider, and takes a position as a physics professor at Pendelton
State University. Information officer Tommy (Joseph
Gordon-Levitt) has been given the
body of a teenager and is forced to enroll in high school (later college),
leaving security officer Sally (Kristen
Johnston) and communications officer Harry (French Stewart) to spend their lives as twenty somethings hanging
out at home and bouncing through short-term jobs. The show also revolves around
their relationships with humans, mostly their love interests.
January 10, 1971
Masterpiece Theatre debuts.
Among
the show's many presentations are Upstairs Downstairs (1974-1977), I,
Claudius (1978), and A Tale of Two Cities (1989). Program hosts
included Alistair Cooke and Russell Baker.
Stay Tuned
Tony Figueroa
Tony Figueroa
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