TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "The Arthur Murray Show" from DuMont (Oct. 22, 1950)

Posted to Internet Archive by user 'zigoto'
Length - 29:26

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

Although not widely remembered today, Arthur Murray was a huge cultural presence from the 1930s through the 1950s due to his franchised chain of dance studios and then his television programs. By the end of the 1930s, Arthur Murray Studios had begun to establish a presence in most major American cities, and it's safe to say that by the time his TV program started in 1950, around the time of the above episode, that "Arthur Murray" had become synonymous with dance instruction in the U.S.

Murray's TV show aired for a decade between 1950 and 1960, at different times on all four networks and at different lengths ranging from 15 minutes to 60 minutes. For almost all of its run the show was called "The Arthur Murray Party", except for the year-and-a-half that it was on the DuMont network, when it was simply called "The Arthur Murray Show".

In the clip above, which is the second half of an hour-long episode from October of 1950, from during the show's DuMont run, we see host Kathryn Murray, Arthur Murray's wife and business partner, vivaciously usher guests and dancing couples in and out of the spotlight. (Curiously, Arthur Murray himself does not appear in this half-episode; it's not clear whether or not he appeared regularly.) Actors Reginald Gardiner and Beatrice Lillie guest star on this episode and both appear in comedy bits (Lillie alongside a very young Carl Reiner).

The entire program comes off more or less like an infomercial for Arthur Murray Dance Studios, as the chain of studios and the lessons available therein is mentioned several times throughout. This includes one segment with a dancing couple who had had just two Arthur Murray Studio dance lessons!

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "School House" from DuMont (Mar. 22, 1949)

Posted to Internet Archive by user 'zigoto'
Length - 26:05

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

Although little-known today (except among those well-versed in TV history), from the late-1940s through the mid-1950s there was a fourth national TV network, the DuMont network. DuMont Laboratories was an electronics firm founded and run by inventor Allen DuMont, and the DuMont network was an offshoot of his television set manufacturing business. Many of the programs DuMont aired were a little eclectic, even peculiar, compared to the other networks. "School House" is one of those programs.

Sort of a hybrid between a musical variety show and a sitcom, "School House" is set in a high school classroom where Kenny Delmar presides as the professor. Several students from his class--which includes later notables such as Wally Cox and Arnold Stang--sing, dance, juggle, and recite poetry in the episode above, the only known surviving episode, which aired on Mar. 22, 1949. (The series aired for only a few months between January and April of 1949.)

Part way through the episode, there is a very interesting ad for DuMont television sets, although it is entirely within the setting of the show's classroom. Wally Cox and another student have wandered over to a large console television that happens to be stationed at the side of the classroom, and Cox pontificates to Delmar and the class (and, of course, the viewers) about the qualities of the DuMont TV set.

TFTP's Monochrome March: "Cavalcade of Stars" from DuMont (Oct. 26, 1951)

Posted to YouTube by user 'WABDtv'
Length - 49:48

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!

"Cavalcade of Stars" started in June of 1949 on the DuMont network as a garden-variety early TV variety show--with dancers, singers, comedy sketches, and rotating hosts. Starting in July of 1950, one of those rotating hosts -- soon to become the show's only host -- was comedian Jackie Gleason. Gleason had been kicking around Hollywood for a number of years by 1950 and had appeared the previous year in the first version of the "Life of Riley" TV sitcom. "Cavalcade of Stars" would become the vehicle by which Gleason rocketed to stardom in TV comedy.

By fall of 1952, Gleason had been snapped up by the more prestigious CBS and "Cavalcade of Stars" moved over to the Tiffany Network, renamed "The Jackie Gleason Show". But before that, Gleason had a couple of solid seasons on DuMont as his star rose, and this episode is from the middle of that period, October of 1951. Most of Gleason's famous characters originated on the DuMont show, including Charlie Bratten ("The Loudmouth") and Reggie Van Gleason (both of which appear in the above episode), as well as the Honeymooners--which had appeared for the first time a few weeks before this episode aired.

This episode, after a brief monologue from Gleason (and his signature line "And away we go!"), begins with a dance number by the June Taylor Dancers, followed by a song from Georgia Gibbs. Gleason does a magic act which is followed by a musical/dance number called "Hangin' Around With You". The Loudmouth makes his appearance (with Art Carney's Clem Finch supporting) followed by a pair of songs. The show closes with a long sketch (that includes a comic musical performance) featuring Reggie Van Gleason, a character that lampoons upper class pretensions.

TFTP's Monochrome March: "You Asked for It" from DuMont (1951)

Posted to YouTube by user 'MeditationsBySharri'
Length - 29:22

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!

"You Asked for It" is a program that defies categorization and which has no real counterpart in today's TV landscape. The title is quite literal in that viewers sent in letters asking for something (an answer to a question, a particular type of guest or presentation) and the show gave it to them--with host Art Baker declaring "You asked for it!"

Airing on the DuMont network from 1950-51 and then ABC until 1959, "You Asked for It" fulfilled hundreds of such requests over the course of its run. In the episode featured here, soldiers get to see pin-up girls act out the pin-up photos they've appeared in, a pair of trained birds do charming tricks, a Hawaiian country music singer performs, and a group of actors from the "Our Gang" comedy shorts has a reunion. Baker interviews each of the former child actors about their lives since "Our Gang" and the actors are also reunited with crew members from their films (plus there is cake!).

Sponsored by Skippy peanut butter, several commercials are included here as well, including one very weird one in which host Art Baker tries to hypnotize the audience into liking Skippy.

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "Captain Video and His Video Rangers" from DuMont (1949)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Vintage Fanatic'
Length - 28:42

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

"Captain Video and His Video Rangers" was one of the first science-fiction programs to appear on television. It was also produced in the late-1940s/early-1950s period of TV when production techniques and production values were still developing. And on top of all that, it aired on the marginal DuMont network, an early fourth TV network that would be gone by the mid-1950s.

Because of all these reasons, "Captain Video" can look laughably primitive to us today. But a closer analysis shows a very interesting program that did what it could under the circumstances to present a pioneering sci-fi program for kids day in and day out for several years (from 1949 until 1955). The 1949 episode above is from relatively early in the show's run, and as a serial program, it's a little indecipherable without knowing what came before.

What happens in the episode here is that a group of emissaries, presumably representing different planets, are attending some sort of council meeting. Captain Video, who has just been in some sort of fight in the opening moments of the episode, is tasked, as an emissary in his own right, with visiting an absent representative. Included in the episode are a couple of "Video Ranger Messages" that are short homilies for the young boys viewing. Bizarrely, there are also a couple of segments in the episode that are scenes from some sort of totally unrelated western story.

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "Admiral Broadway Revue" from NBC/DuMont (Feb. 4, 1949)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Sid Caesar: Your Show of Shows / Caesar's Hour / Admiral Broadway Revue'
Length: 54:06

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

The "Admiral Broadway Revue" is famous now for being the first TV show that featured Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca together, before their legendary comedic partnership on "Your Show of Shows". It so happens that the program is also a great example of the TV variety show of the late-1940s--with a mix of comedy and music presented in a "revue" style format (defined by the Google as "a light theatrical entertainment consisting of a series of short sketches, songs, and dances").

The show only aired for about six months in the first half of 1949 (January to July), in an unusual arrangement in which it aired simultaneously on NBC and on the DuMont network. The episode featured here is the second one broadcast, and it features early performances by Caesar and Coca in the types of comic roles they would frequently portray later on "Your Show of Shows" (which started the following year, in 1950). Caesar plays a Russian busker who gets into a spat with a young couple, then a professor who demonstrates several different language dialects (prefiguring one of his most well-known later schticks); Coca plays a woman scientist and a comical torch singer. (The two do not appear together in this episode; that would happen for the first time later in the run "Admiral Broadway Revue".)

Caesar and Coca are far from the whole show, though, and there are a number of song performances in this episode, as well as a closing number that includes several kinds of circus acts. Like other variety shows of this era (and in contrast to a show like Milton Berle's "Texaco Star Theater") "Admiral Broadway Revue" did not have a permanent host, instead relying simply on the succession of acts--and an announcer introducing them--to maintain the forward motion of the program.