Earlier this month I wrote about F Troop and whether or not the ABC sitcom was supposed to continue for a third season only to be canceled by the new owners of its producer, Warner Brothers (all signs point to this being true). Here’s a promotional spot for the premiere of F Troop in which Forrest Tucker introduces the show:
View a Promotional Spot for F Troop
(Courtesy of Maureen)
And here’s a brief spot featuring Ken Barry advising viewers to watch F Troop on Thursdays for its second season:
View a Promotional Spot for F Troop
(Courtesy of Maureen)
During its first season the show was seen on Tuesdays and was filmed in black and white. For its second season, ABC moved the show to Thursdays and it was filmed in color, meaning this second spot was likely also seen in color by viewers with color sets.
Related:
That Ken Berry clip was a billboard that aired where a sponsor ID would normally go. Forrest Tucker did one as well; he made a point of saying that F TROOP would air right after BATMAN.
And I wonder if ‘Batman,’ still a highly-rated show but clearly not at the top as it was for its first season, served as an excellent lead-in to the 2nd season of ‘F Troop’ on Thursday nights in 1966-67.
Here’s a fact: Immediately following ‘F Troop’ at 8:30 pm on the ABC schedule for that season was ‘The Tammy Grimes Show.’ Anybody remember that one? The ratings were so awful for ‘Tammy Grimes’ that the network canceled it before the month of September was out and in its place aired a nighttime version of ‘The Dating Game.’ ‘The Green Hornet’ was also a new addition to the ABC prime-time lineup but aired on Friday nights; both it and ‘F Troop’ would be gone at the conclusion of the season.
Yes, the second one was a “sponsor I.D.” for any of ABC’s shows that didn’t have “full participating sponsorship”…and there were several in the mid-’60s (those commercial breaks consisted mostly of ABC promos and PSA’s). That could just have easily been seen after the Saturday morning “MILTON THE MONSTER” opening title, right after Milton says, “Brought to you by…”.
As for new Warner Bros. management discontinuing the series after season two [purely for economic reasons], executive producer William T. Orr himself confirmed their decision to Jeff Kisselhoff in his 1991 oral TV history book, “The Box”. I’ll “shoot” his quote to you when I have a chance…….
This is what Bill Orr told Jeff Kisseloff concerning the demise of “F TROOP”, by way of explaining his idea to “extend” the life of his early ’60s Warner Bros. TV shows for future syndication:
“ABC was the last network to go to color. When they did, I told Jack {Warner, his father-in-law} and Benny Kalmanson {the studio’s East Coast executive V.P.} that we should shoot in color, but print them in black and white. That way, we would have the color when we got to syndication.
“‘It’ll cost more to paint the sets.’
“I said, ‘So what?’ but he killed it. In the long run, it cost us millions. Today, all those shows would be on if they were in color. The only thing on is ‘F TROOP’. The first year of that was black and white and the second year was in color, and then Benny had it taken off because we were three thousand dollars over budget.”