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.

Christmas at TFTP (On This Day Edition): "The Bob Hope Special" from NBC (Dec. 19, 1968)

Posted to YouTube by user '20th Century Vision'
Length - 1:01:08

It Was 49 Years Ago Today: Bob Hope did dozens of specials on NBC over the course of several decades between the 1950s and the 1980s. This is one that is not so much a Christmas special as one that happened to air during the Christmas season--forty-nine years ago today on December 19, 1968.

Unlike many of Hope's specials over the years, this special consists of one long sketch, a parody of the secret agent show "Mission: Impossible". The Hope version is called "Mission: Ridiculous", and he plays a secret agent fighting an outfit called "B.R.O.A.D.S." made up of all women. (The initials were a take-off of the tendency of these spy shows to fight an enemy with similar names.) The women (played by Janet Leigh, Carol Lawrence, and Nancy Ames) have kidnapped Santa Claus for offenses (not made entirely clear) against women. Hope goes through several vignettes--including visiting the North Pole where Leigh poses as Mrs. Claus, flying on a Cuban airline with a Fidel Castro lookalike, and appearing in a Hong Kong nightclub where all of the characters are horrible Asian stereotypes (and Hope's accent is completely offensive).

A couple of musical performances are worked into this hackneyed story: one number sung by Ames in character as a spy posing as a flight attendant on the Cuban airline, and another by Glen Campbell, who is Hope's cellmate in a Cuban jail. Jerry Colonna pops up as a judge in the Cuban jail scene, while Santa--imprisoned at B.R.O.A.D.S headquarters--turns out to be Wally Cox.

The topical jokes in Hope's opening monologue seem like they would have been groaners to contemporary audiences in 1968, and they are completely impenetrable and unfunny now. Bob Hope was never on the cutting edge of comedy, not even in his 1940s heyday as a movie star, and the shoddy quality of this program shows just how sloppy he was as a comedic craftsman despite the fact he was beloved by mainstream audiences. This special is a shining example of how NBC by this point would put on the air literally anything that Hope put together.