I’ve long been intrigued by the story behind the first pilot episode filmed for Star Trek. As any good Star Trek fan knows, NBC passed on this pilot — which starred Jeffrey Hunter and was produced by Desilu — but ordered a second, this one with William Shatner, and picked up the series for the 1966-1967 season. The original pilot was later edited into a two-part episode called “The Menagerie” which aired as part of Star Trek’s first season. I am not aware of any definitive history of “The Cage,” just plenty of stories told and retold over the years, but here’s a comprehensive analysis by TrekWeb’s Bill Williams of the various versions that have been released on Laserdisc, VHS and DVD. And Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki, also has some information.
Kraft Television Theatre premiered on May 7th, 1947. Because it was broadcast year-round there were no true seasons, no hiatuses or summer breaks. Furthermore, anniversary shows were shown during May. So I’m saying Season Two began on May 5th, 1948 and ended on April 27th, 1949. The series was pre-empted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 1948 for convention reports and the Louis-Walcott fight.
Only three complete episodes exist at the four big television archives, two at the Library of Congress and one at UCLA’s Film & Television Archive. Excerpts from another episode, broadcast as part of the sixth anniversary show, are held by both institutions.
The Honeymooners — Ralph, Alice, Ed and Trixie — are one of television’s most beloved foursomes. Although The Honeymooners the sitcom only ran for one season from 1955-1956 (the “Classic 39″ episodes), sketches featuring the characters date back to 1951 when they were part of DuMont’s Cavalcade of Stars. When Jackie Gleason jumped to CBS in 1952 with The Jackie Gleason Show, the Honeymooners came with him and sketches were broadcast from 1952 to 1955 and then again from 1956 to 1957. Plus, there were more sketches (many of which were remakes of earlier ones) broadcast during the 1960s in color.
Sketches from the 1952-1959 version of The Jackie Gleason Show (Art Carney left in 1957 and the Honeymooners sketches were dropped) were uncovered in 1984 by Ron Simon, curator for the Museum of Broadcasting (then the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) and immediately — and understandably — dubbed “lost episodes” by the media. (Based on the terminology I’ve been using these would be missing, not lost).
You can read more about the CBS Television Quiz in my Television Programs in 1941 article. In short, the hour-long quiz show premiered on Wednesday, July 2nd, 1941 (the day after commercial broadcasting officially began) and ran from 8:30-9:30PM. Gil Fates served as host and Frances Buss as scorekeeper. It was moved around two during its run and cut down to 55 minutes and later 50 minutes. It’s unlikely any footage from the series exists, given that it was broadcast before it became possible to record live television. Pictures could exist, however, and I’d love to see any.
A total of 15 episodes of this half-hour documentary series were broadcast by NBC between November of 1947 and March of 1948. How many stations they aired on is unknown. They were seen in New York City over station WNBT and possible over WRGB in Schenectady, WPTZ in Philadelphia and WNBW in Washington, D.C. According to a November 3rd, 1947 article in The New York Times, Eye Witness was intended to “promote video by explaining the medium.” The premiere telecast was from the station’s transmitter at the top of the Empire State Building with Dr. C. B. Jolliffee (RCA Laboratories Executive Vice President) as guest.
The article noted that the November 13th broadcast would visit NBC’s Studio 3-H at the RCA Building and the November 20th broadcast would come from a mobile pick-up. Another broadcast, date unknown, was from the RCA Exhibition Hall. Ben Grauer was announcer and host for the series, which was directed by Garry Simpson. Dr. Vladimir K. Zworykin was the guest on the February 25th, 1948 episode, which UCLA has in its collection. No other episodes are known to exist.
This panel discussion, featuring actual teenagers critiquing a new book each week, was broadcast by ABC from August 13th, 1948 to October 29th, 1948. It ran on Fridays from 7:30-8PM. I believe it was moderated by Margaret C. Scoggin. A total of 12 episodes were broadcast before the series. Beginning November 5th, a fifteen-minute program called Tales of the Red Caboose ran from 7:30-7:45PM with a fifteen-minute film filling out the rest of the half-hour.
Next to nothing is known about Teen-Age Book Club, not the names of the books covered or the names of the teenagers participating. Was there a regular panel that appeared each week? The guests listed in the following status guide come from The New York Times and may reflect writers and editors appearing each week and not the teenage reviewers. None of the episodes are known to exist, unfortunately, so there’s no way of knowing how each episode played out.
Many of the e-mails I receive are from people asking where they can find their favorite obscure television show on VHS or DVD. I get so many of these e-mails, in fact, that for the most part I’ve had to stop replying to them. The simple fact is most of the shows I write about here at Television Obscurities aren’t available commercially on DVD and probably never will. (A few were given VHS releases in decades past but are now long out of print.) Still, the fact that a certain show isn’t out on DVD doesn’t mean the episodes are lost.
A distinction should be made between television programs that are lost, missing and unavailable. I’ll attempt to lay out just what that means in the following paragraphs.
Forty years ago today, on Sunday, July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon, fulfilling President John F. Kennedy’s speech at Rice University on September 12th, 1962 when he declared:
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” (Read the full speech here)
Apollo 11, with Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins, lifted off on July 16th, 1969. The lunar module (named Eagle) with Armstrong and Aldrin aboard landed on the lunar surface at 4:18PM Eastern Daylight Time. Armstrong set foot on the Moon at 10:56PM EDT and famously proclaimed “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” Watch the late Walter Cronkite covering Armstrong’s first steps (those outside the United States may not be able to view it):
Apollo 11 returned safely to Earth on July 24th, 1969. According to a September 1st, 1969 article in Broadcasting, 93.9% of television households (53.5 million in total) watched an average of 15 hours and 35 minutes of network coverage of the Apollo 11 mission between July 14th and July 27th, making it the most-watched television event at that time [1]. Some 125 million viewers watched the Moon walk [2].
The grainy black-and-white footage of Armstrong setting foot on the Moon has become well-known in the past four decades. Due to technical issues relating to the way the video was shot on the Moon and then transmitted back to Earth, the original high-quality footage could not be shown on television at the time. Instead, it was converted to a format that could be broadcast, in the progress sacrificing quality. Unbelievably, recordings of this high-quality footage, beamed to three tracking stations by satellite, have been missing since roughly 1970.
A full-fledged search for the missing 14-inch spools tapes, which also include telemetry data, seems to have begun in 2006. Here’s a wonderful NPR article from July of 2006 about the missing tapes and the search to find them. According to this NASA press release from August of 2006 the tapes were missing, not lost.
Here’s a brief CNN.com video reporting on the missing tapes (those outside the United States may not be able to view it):
New, high-quality video from Apollo 11 was released by NASA on July 16th, 2009 but it was digitally restored from a variety of secondary sources (including the CBS News Archive and sites in Australia). This press releases notes that “a three-year search for these original telemetry tapes was unsuccessful. A final report on the investigation is expected to be completed in the near future and will be publicly released at that time.” Unfortunately, that seems to suggest that NASA now considers the tapes lost for good.
It’s unfortunate that the high-quality footage is missing but even the grainy video from 1969 is quite impressive to watch. The newly restored
Works Cited:
1 “Apollo 11 turns out as biggest show on earth.” Broadcasting. 1 Sep. 1969: 50. 2 “A Remote That Broke All the Records.” Broadcasting. 28 Jul. 1969: Page Unknown. (Read this article at Broadcasting & Cable)
