TFTP Will Return After These Messages: Three Commercials from 1954

Posted to Internet Archive by user 'HappySwordsman' (all three)
Length - 1:08 (top), 1:19 (middle), 1:18 (bottom)

Every Wednesday, TFTP takes a break from regular programming to bring you a selection of classic commercials. We will return after these messages...

Only two of these three commercials from 1954 feature a product spokesman on a set that looks like a well-appointed, wood-paneled study. The third is a classic product demonstration. Commercials of the 1950s, besides being longer and more leisurely than those we are familiar with today, also were drawn from definite genres, of which the stately product testimonial and the practical product demonstration are two.

The first ad, featuring "Super Circus" star Mary Hartline, is a demonstration of Dixie paper cups. The ad was clearly a live one in which a member of the program's cast pitches the product, and Hartline discusses the benefits of Dixie cups at a time when disposable paper cups were apparently still a novelty to many viewers. Ads number two and three, for Colgate toothpaste and Welch Family Wine, respectively, show the versatility of the wood-paneled-study genre of commercial; just about any product could be pitched within these confines and seem respectable. As a result, 1950s TV was lousy with them.

TFTP Kids: "Time for Beany" from Paramount TV Network (c. 1954)

Posted to YouTube by user 'dentelTV1' (all three)
Length (total) - 29:39

"Time for Beany" was a pioneering kids TV program that aired in the early-1950s on the ad-hoc Paramount Network of stations. (Movie studio Paramount Pictures created this small network, that existed from 1948 until 1955, consisting mostly of a few stations it owned.) Animator Bob Clampett, who had worked on Looney Tunes cartoons for many years, created the Beany and Cecil puppet characters that are the stars of "Time for Beany".

Although the production values are not very sophisticated (a characteristic that "Time for Beany" shares with other early childrens' TV shows), the characters Beany, a young boy clad in a propeller beanie, and Cecil, a friendly dragon (that was basically a sock puppet), proved to be distinctive and popular. In this episode, they venture into the jungle to try and find a mysterious and elusive white gorilla. Along the way, they encounter some jungle natives that are pretty offensive stereotypes to us now (let's just say that the threat of being boiled alive in a large kettle is involved). Finally, they find the white gorilla (an actor in a white gorilla suit, of course), who roughs up Cecil a bit but nothing worse.

"Time for Beany" garnered considerable accolades in its time--it won one of the first Emmys for children's programming. Some of the voice actors for the show are notable, too, including Stan Freberg, later to become a cutting-edge comedian, and Daws Butler, later to become a legendary cartoon voice actor. Clampett went on to create a successor program, "Beany and Cecil", which featured the same characters using traditional cel animation. That program aired from 1959 to 1962 (partially under the "Matty's Funday Funnies" umbrella title), with repeat episodes airing right up until 1969, giving Beany and Cecil a solid two-decade run of entertaining children.

TFTP's Monochrome March: "See It Now" w/ Edward R. Murrow on CBS (Mar. 9, 1954)

Posted to YouTube by user 'KD'
Length - 25:50

College basketball has March Madness. TFTP: Television from the Past has Monochrome March! 

For the entire month of March, TFTP brings you posts featuring monochrome programs and clips in glorious black-and-white!

Edward R. Murrow is perhaps the most legendary newsman in radio and television history. And his attempt to report on and expose the malfeasance of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the mid-1950s is one of the things that made him legendary. This 1954 episode of Murrow's "See It Now" is where he did most of his work in exposing McCarthy--with a huge assist from McCarthy himself.

The bulk of the episode consists of film and audio clips of McCarthy making various statements about the supposed threat of communism in America, often juxtaposed with other clips where he contradicts himself. Murrow introduces the clips and provides framing statements at the beginning and end of the program, but for the most part he lets McCarthy's own words do him in. Murrow's statement at the end of the program has become famous for blaming the state of American politics for the problem of McCarthy, quoting Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar": "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars but in ourselves."

In the following weeks, McCarthy asked for and got a chance for rebuttal to Murrow's presentation in this episode, to which Murrow provided a further response. Ultimately, McCarthy's downfall was the result of his censure in the U.S. Senate in December of 1954, a result that this episode of "See It Now" probably helped to hasten.

TFTP Late Night: "The Tonight Show" w/ Steve Allen, premiere episode from NBC (Sep. 27, 1954)

Posted to YouTube by user 'CatThatHasNoName'
Length - 1:48

"The Tonight Show", now hosted by Jimmy Fallon, has a long and venerable history of over 60 years, less than half of which now was hosted by the "King of Late Night" Johnny Carson. The program's first host, from 1954-1957, was comedian Steve Allen. For the inaugural "TFTP Late Night" post, which will periodically highlight programs from the late-night daypart of TV, we bring you this short clip from Allen's first "Tonight" show on September 27, 1954.

At the very beginning, the program was referred to as "Tonight!" (complete with exclamation point); Allen's tenure later took on the name "Tonight Starring Steve Allen". A late-night network TV program was still a novelty when "Tonight!" went on the air--the only previous attempt was the short-lived "Broadway Open House" in 1950-51. This explains Allen's joking in this clip about the theatre "sleeping" 800; people were not used to watching TV at that hour.

Although not evident in this clip, much of the structure of the late-night TV talk show was established by Allen during his "Tonight" stint, including the desk, the monologue, comedic sketches, interviews with guests, and musical numbers. We do see here Allen's easygoing manner and sharp wit, which helped him to establish the late-night talk show as a durable television genre.

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "The Pinky Lee Show" from NBC (1954)

Posted to YouTube by user 'MeditationsBySharri'
Length - 27:23

TFTP's Monochrome Monday brings you a classic black & white TV program or clip every Monday morning to kick off the week....

"The Pinky Lee Show" was perhaps the epitome of the manic, unhinged kids show of the 1950s. Pinky Lee began as a vaudeville slapstick comic of the "baggy pants" variety--which was the genesis of his trademark checked suit and hat that he continued to wear in his TV shows. He also carried over from vaudeville the kind of frantic and physical style of comedy that made his early-1950s prime-time variety show and this afternoon kids' show such fonts of nonstop zaniness.

The episode above demonstrates this with the chasing around kissing audience members and jumping into a woman's lap during his opening song. It continues in the Sherlock Holmes parody sketch that follows, where Lee is hunting for clues with a magnifying glass and it turns into a manic dance number. Pinky's regular distribution of "Pinky Pops" turns into yet another crazy song and dance routine, and the zany goes right through the end of the episode, with a number where Pinky brings down several adults from the audience to participate in a sort of dance-line.

Lee's kids' show, which was nominated for an Emmy in 1956, represented the peak of his career. He'd appeared in a few movies in the 1940s and early-1950s, and had both a half-hour variety show and a 15-minute sitcom for about a year each in the early-1950s. But this kids' show, with its audience gallery, its juvenile sketches, and its opportunity for Pinky Lee to demonstrate his strengths as a comic is what he's best known for today.

TFTP Will Return After These Messages: Kelloggs Commercials w/ Superman (1954)

Posted to YouTube by user 'tvdays' (all three)
Length - 1:04 (top), 1:01 (middle), 1:02 (bottom)

Every Wednesday, TFTP takes a break from regular programming to bring you a selection of classic commercials. We will return after these messages...

As the sponsor of "The Adventures of Superman" in the 1950s, Kellogg's cereal had many different Superman-related commercials in that era. Here are three of them from 1954, all featuring premiums that kids could get with boxtops from Kellogg's cereals.

In the first commercial above, the premium is a snappy Superman belt--just like Superman himself wore! Kids could add to their Man of Steel wardrobe with the Superman t-shirt offered in the second commercial. Finally, they could through the third and last commercial obtain a flying Superman glider toy (which they could play with while wearing their Superman belt and t-shirt, naturally).

Premiums--in which a consumer would send in boxtops or other packaging elements ("proof of purchase") in exchange for some sort of gift--were central to childrens' programming going all the way back to the network radio days of the 1930s, and "The Adventures of Superman" brought the tradition into the earliest era of TV.

TFTP Game Shows: "What's My Line?" w/ debut of Fred Allen as panelist, from CBS (Aug. 15, 1954)

Posted to YouTube by user 'What's My Line?'

"What's My Line?" was one of the most durable and popular prime-time game shows of the 1950s and 1960s (it ran from 1950-67, with a syndicated version then continuing until 1975). The four-person panel (which from early in the show's run included Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Bennett Cerf) guessed the profession/vocation of contestants, with one celebrity mystery guest (for which the panelists were blindfolded, so as not to recognize the person) thrown into each episode.

The show was thought to have hit its stride only around the time of this episode, the first with fourth panelist Fred Allen, the great radio comedian. Allen had a legendary wit that is evident in his exchanges here, and although he never really adapted well to television, his run as a "What's My Line?" panelist may be his TV high-point.

This episode's mystery guest, "Buffalo" Bob Smith, host of the iconic "Howdy Doody" kids show (that was in the heart of its 1947-60 TV run at this time), has some fun with Allen, too, at one point doing a Fred Allen impression as one of his voice-disguising gambits. (Mystery guests usually disguised their voices as well, so panelists wouldn't be able to ID them that way.) Overall, in addition to being a landmark episode with Allen's debut, it's a good example of a typical mid-1950s "What's My Line?" episode.

TFTP Variety: "Coke Time with Eddie Fisher" (Sep. 29, 1954)

Posted to Internet Archive's Classic TV Collection

Eddie Fisher is a name that not many people today would recognize, but he was a major A-list celeb in the 1950s; he was as famous for his wives as he was for his singing--he was one of Elizabeth Taylor's husbands after having been married to Debbie Reynolds (with whom he was the parent of "Star Wars" star Carrie Fisher). This post features a complete episode of Fisher's show "Coke Time".

"Coke Time" was Fisher's main star vehicle for a good chunk of the 1950s, running from 1953 to 1957 on NBC. Each episode of the twice-weekly series (as in the one featured here) had Fisher simply singing three or four songs, with few frills and little staging, punctuated with a commercial or two for Coca-Cola. "Coke Time" is a good example of a program that had the sponsor's name in the name of the show, which was, of course, very common in the late-1940s and 1950s.

The show is also a good example of a program type that would disappear by the end of the 1950s but which was fairly widespread at the time: the 15-minute-long musical variety show, a program type in which Perry Como and Dinah Shore were likewise featured at different times in the '50s. The quarter-hour show was used for genres other than music (such as news and interview shows), but the combination of genre and length was an easy one to fill with a a handful of songs and call it a show.

TFTP Will Be Back After These Messages: TVs from the Past -- Early Television Set commercials (1950/1954)

Posted to YouTube by user 'MattTheSaiyan'

In watching old TV commercials, it's always interesting to see what the sellers of products thought buyers were interested in, interests that then became the selling points in the ads themselves. Based on these two commercials for television sets, one from 1950 and the other from 1954, potential TV set buyers were really worried about how well a TV set could show close-ups.

The first ad, for a 1950 Westinghouse TV, has something called an "electronic magnifier" that you could somehow overlay on the screen to take a TV image and magnify it. The fact that they don't actually show this feature in operation and that the images they show of wrestlers are clearly not authentic images off of a TV screen should have made potential buyers of this set a little wary. The peculiar shape of the screen on this set is a good example of just how different early TV sets were from the ones that viewers became used to just a few years later.

The second TV set ad is from 1954, and by this time apparently there were already some people who were ready to replace their first TV set with an upgraded model. So the RCA television set being advertised is shown to have a much better ability to show close-ups than earlier TVs with smaller screens. A 21" inch set was a large screen in those days, and you can see why compared to the older 10" set! The price comparison between the 1950 set and the 1954 set in these ads is interesting, too, and shows the way in which technology improves and becomes cheaper at the same time; the 1950 Westinghouse model has a retail price of $259.95, while the much bigger and better 1954 RCA set is only $199.95.