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Destroy All Podcasts DX Episode 269 - The Betty White Show

Hosts: Jeremy, Mike, Nicole

This is about wish day or some crap, giving ungrateful brats presents, and people who are no good at improv. NO GOOD, I TELL YOU.

Click [HERE] to tell us about how great pigeons are.

Video after the cut.

AttachmentSize
DAPDX-269.mp347.3 MB
Posted 24 December, 2012 - 03:10 by Destroy All Pod...

Comments

4 comments posted
Hi sweetie!

Merry Christmas! I love you!

Jeremy will have to read this as feedback next time you're on a podcast ;)

RobotBastard's picture
Posted by RobotBastard on 24 December, 2012 - 16:57
Hello yourself, darling.

Hello yourself, darling.

VF5SS's picture
Posted by VF5SS on 24 December, 2012 - 18:10
Since nobody hasn't given any

Since nobody hasn't given any anecdotes in the comments on this page, I figured I might as well begin.

Unfortunately I did not come from 1954, my parents did, but I only have a dad who's memories are too muddled these days to put into words, and a mother who passed away 5 years ago, so much of this is going by the recollections, memories and other trivia I picked up along the way (this is why it is important to have those talks with your parents when you were 10, never forget that).

Television in the beginning was like a red-headed stepchild of the entertainment world. The movie studios themselves really distance themselves from it as they saw it as a threat to their industry. This is why the programming like the aforementioned Betty White Show seems very bland and boring compared to what Hitchcock was putting out. It took time before the movie studios could transition themselves well into the new medium of the "idiot box". Before then, selection on the tube was very slim. My mom had told me her early memories of watching cartoons on TV involved them showing mostly very old titles from the silent era (1910's, 1920's, featuring the likes of Bobby Bumps, Farmer Alfalfa, Felix the Cat and others), as these were made available at first. It would be nearly another decade before the later works of the "Golden Age of Hollywood Cartoons" would make their way to the small screen. Of course you had original upstarts from the likes of those like Jay Ward and Alex Anderson who praised the screens with their 5 minute cliffhangers starring Crusader Rabbit., but such production values was such that getting adequate animation for television had to wait years before two MGM directors by the names of Joe and Bill would show how it's done.

On the live-action front, you had a number of filmed programs aired on TV, alongside a schedule of mostly live/staged productions. These would be broadcast live, though not every station might have proper connection to the network feed to receive the show at the scheduled time. The only way to save these programs was to make what are called "Kinescopes" on film, this required pointing a film camera at a CRT monitor and recording the program as it happened. These kinescopes would be bicycled around the country to those stations that didn't have microwave feeds or had to take up more than one network affiliate to provide programming for their communities. It would be decades before having separate network affiliates in a given market was possible. We also have to remember much of TV's early talent definitely came from radio and how both mediums performed to very different results. There was certainly a lot of experimentation in the way they were trying to replicate the success of the former medium to the new one, and not everyone managed to make the transition well (some of course continued to be heard in the cartoon world like Mel Blanc who use to had his own show on radio).

Television was such a quaint medium at a time when you might have first saw it at a bar or department store, or have heard of a local neighbor buying a set for his family down the street. My parents though were children during that time, and their memories were probably tied more with the shows they grew up with like Howdy Doody or Winky Dink & You (the latter my mom recalled brilliantly because she tried to draw on the TV set without the "Magic Screen" you were suppose to send for). You noted of the two ads that showed up during the program you watched, that was probably common for the time as well. Though in those days advertising on TV was a much different beast than it became today, as sponsors practically owned the shows they were sponsoring as their names would in the title and they were the sole sponsor of said program (much of that changed after the Quiz Show Scandal later in the 50's, mostly blamed because of them). In those days you often had a lot of advertisements presented live (much in the way home shopping channels would present products live during their shows), which can at times backfire or lead to other situations such as the following two clips I'm including of some famous bloopers of TV advertising's past...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSVT_jBXKL4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NHq3Yze6s0

While you stated they didn't have the means to superimpose titles over the screen of the regular action, such a technique was possible in those days that required the use of a cross-dissolve between two cameras to achieve that effect, though it presented a problem of the picture darkening while the captions (white text over a black card) appeared very ghostly. It wasn't until the 60's when the use of luminescence keying devices came into use that isolated the white parts of a video and keyed those over another source. This is not the same as "Chroma-key" or the use of a blue/green screen that became possible with color broadcasting later on. Here's a demo film about that that came out in '61 promoting a TV station's use of the new video tape recording media coming into use.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZUbtrZUAY8

And because I took this comment off-topic anyway, here's one more clip I like to bring up I saw recently, a documentary on the new medium of TV as stations were springing up in the northeastern section of Ohio that was produced 60 years ago...
http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/news/news_archives/video-vault-cleveland-tv-right-before-your-eyes

Chris@StudioToledo's picture
Posted by Chris@StudioToledo on 18 January, 2013 - 17:24
Incidentally, Easter Seals is

Incidentally, Easter Seals is different from Christmas Seals, as the Christmas Seal stamps are through the American Lung Association and Easter Seals is a separate organization. Just wanted to point it out since I remember both organizations well but do miss the boring Easter Seals Telethons I use to see produced locally in town.

Chris@StudioToledo's picture
Posted by Chris@StudioToledo on 13 March, 2013 - 20:56