TFTP On This Day: "Scrabble" from NBC (Apr. 5, 1993)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Digifangsn'
Length - 21:20

It Was 25 Years Ago Today: Scrabble the board game has been a family favorite for decades. "Scrabble" the TV game show, while not quite matching up to that record, did have a healthy, two-part run on NBC, first from 1984 to 1990, then for a brief time in 1993. The episode above, which aired 25 years ago today on April 5, 1993, is from the short second run of "Scrabble".

The host for both runs was game-show mainstay Chuck Woolery. Woolery brought his easygoing and amiable demeanor to a game that did not really have the easiest gameplay. "Scrabble" the game show has only a passing similarity to Scrabble the board game, and that similarity is mainly cosmetic. Contestants are shown words with one letter completed on a Scrabble-like board, words which they then have to guess based on other letters that they can choose from to fill in the word.

This gameplay--apart from being somewhat convoluted--is completely different from what one does when playing the board game Scrabble, which involves a player taking an assortment of letters and creating words from them. Nonetheless, contestant Jean, who cleans up on all of her opponents in this episode, seems to have gotten the hang of it.

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: Promo for Daytime Line-Up from NBC (1956)

Posted to YouTube by user 'MattTheSaiyan'
Length - 1:00

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

Network program promos don't get much more bare bones than this 1956 NBC daytime promo (unless they're strictly slides with announcer voiceover). The first half of this minute-long promo is a rather crude stationary drawing of two women with a voiceover of two women chatting with each other about TV. One of them is suggesting to the other viewing the morning line-up of shows on NBC. The voiceover conversation between the two continues into the second half of the promo as slides appear of the three shows under discussion, before ending with a slide that lists all three programs.

The three programs promoted are (1) "Home" with Arlene Francis, which had moved to a new timeslot; (2) game show "The Price is Right" with Bill Cullen ("that one with the bidding for prizes and all that" as described by one of the women); and (3) "Truth and Consequences" with Bob Barker.

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "Art Linkletter's House Party" from CBS (Aug. 21, 1961)

Posted to YouTube by user 'historycomestolife'
Length - 11:27

Art Linkletter is one of the towering figures of the first twenty years or so of American television. Along with a few other figures, such as Arthur Godfrey, Garry Moore, and maybe a couple of others, Linkletter was a versatile television personality who utilized his easygoing and affable manner in an array of programs in the 1950s and '60s.

"Art Linkletter's House Party" was the centerpiece of his presence on American TV for all those years. A daytime variety program on CBS from 1952 until 1969, "House Party" started out as a radio program in 1945, and Linkletter continued to host the radio version as well through most of the TV program's run (until 1967). The program was kind of a grab bag of segments, including Linkletter chatting with a guest on stage about an activity, interviewing audience members about oddities, and Linkletter's most famous feature "Kids Say the Darndest Things" in which he interviewed small children to humorous results (and which resulted in a couple of very popular books in the late-1950s/early-1960s era).

The clip above, the first ten minutes or so of a "House Party" episode from 1961, in about the middle of the show's run, has examples of the first two types of segments mentioned above. First, Linkletter converses on stage with a dentist who has spearheaded a dental mission to "primitive" Madagascar. (The conversation is groan worthy today due to its outdated perspective on the culture found there.) Then, Linkletter ventures into the audience to talk briefly with several different audience members.

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "Arthur Godfrey Time" from CBS (Jan. 1958)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Panonni 9'
Length - 14:27

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

Arthur Godfrey, although an obscure figure to most people now, was a superstar of network radio and early television throughout the 1940s and 1950s. He was a folksy, informal figure (evident in this clip) who pioneered the deployment of these qualities in a broadcasting career that spanned forty years between the early-1930s and the early-1970s. At his peak in the mid-1950s he had three different TV programs--"Arthur Godfrey and Friends" (a weekly prime-time variety show), "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts" (a talent-competition show), and "Arthur Godfrey Time" (a weekday morning talk show).

"Arthur Godfrey Time" started as a radio program, before beginning its eight-year run on the CBS weekday morning TV schedule between 1951 and 1959. (It ended on radio, too, airing until 1972 on CBS radio on weekday mornings.) Airing usually between about 10:30 and 11:30 am each weekday, the program ran for thirty, sixty, and ninety minutes at different times. As with many programs during this era, commercials were integrated into the program itself, which we see here with the short opening ad spot for Glamorene and with Godfrey's later demonstration of the carpet cleaning qualities of the same product.

This is the opening portion of an "Arthur Godfrey Time" episode from early (probably January) 1958, at a time when the program ran for a full hour. Guests include actress Faye Emerson, playwright/composer Meredith Willson (of "Music Man" fame), singer Tommy Hunter, and Carmen Quinn. All of the guests are seated in panel fashion in chairs on either side of Godfrey at the start of the program, and the banter and conversation (which also includes the show's band) seems familiar to us because many morning talk shows (such as "Live with Kelly & Ryan" and "The View") still use it. The conversation on this particular morning is dominated by Willson's smash Broadway hit "The Music Man" that had recently opened, in which Emerson had been a minor investor, and for which Quinn badly wanted to get tickets.

TFTP On This Day: "Go" from NBC (Oct. 5, 1983)

Posted to YouTube by user 'excuseyou77'
Length - 21:58

It Was 34 Years Ago Today: Having premiered on Monday, Oct. 3, 1983, this episode of the game show "Go"--which aired 34 years ago today--is only the third episode of the series. Kevin O'Connell (before and after "Go" a longtime weatherman) hosted with game-show master Bob Stewart producing--and both would be out of a job by January of 1984 when the show was cancelled.

Two five-person teams (with one celebrity on each team) competed in a game that resembled the one where two people alternate in giving one-word each in a sentence meant to be a clue for guessing a word. (If this sounds a bit elaborate and incomprehensible, it is, and additional rules added on top of this may be one reason why the show only lasted four months.) In "Go", four of the team members gave clues in chain fashion while the fifth was the guesser. In essence, "Go" was a ridiculously overcomplicated (and much faster-paced) version of "Password".

The celebrities in this episode are Richard Kline, then at the height of his fame as a cast member of "Three's Company", and actress Elaine Joyce, by 1983 near the end of her remarkable decade-plus run as a go-to game-show celebrity guest (she appeared on everything from "Tattletales" and "Match Game" to "Super Password" and later versions of "What's My Line" and "I've Got a Secret").

TFTP Comedy: "Kovacs on the Corner" (1952)

Posted to Internet Archive

Ernie Kovacs was one of the great geniuses of early television comedy. He had a relatively brief but wide-ranging career--as a talk-show host, game-show panelist and host, morning-show host, and comedian--before dying prematurely in a car accident in 1962. This clip is a complete episode of a very short-lived Kovacs series called "Kovacs on the Corner", which was on NBC on weekday mornings for just three months in early-1952.

"Kovacs on the Corner" featured Kovacs in a slightly more laid-back style than that for which he is best known. Kovacs' pioneered a style of visual comedy on television that was not seen before or much since, utilizing sight gags, technical tricks unique to TV, and absurdism to create comedy. Here, in "Kovacs on the Corner", he is much more subtle and situational in his comedy. The "corner" of the title is a city neighborhood corner that comprises the show's sole set and on which Kovacs--assisted by singer and future wife Edie Adams--encounters different characters of the type one might meet on a street corner (policemen, street sweepers). Several musical numbers are featured, showing the easy facility with which early TV comedy shows crossed over into musical variety and back again.

Kovacs does show glimpses of his legendary humor here. A segment called "Swap Time" in which two ordinary people swap odd items (a torn bowler hat for an eight-pound block of ice) offers Kovacs the opportunity for some clever ad-libbing. An advertisement spoof in which Kovacs and Adams pitch "food" (holding a brown sack with the word "food" written on it) is a trenchant critique of TV commercials that foreshadows his later comedy. Although this episode is not typical of Kovacs' later comedy, it is both a good peek into his early career and a good example of a particular type of early musical/comedy variety show.

TFTP Promo: NBC Network Promo for Fall 1967 Morning Shows

This minute-long NBC promo highlights the network's fall 1967 weekday programming.  These, of course, were the now long-lost days when networks programmed this time period themselves (rather than allowing affiliates to run syndicated fare, as happens now), and for the most part the networks filled the mornings with game shows and occasional light variety. 

Featured in this promo are "Snap Judgment" with host Ed McMahon (in this period working the morning and late-night shifts for NBC); "Concentration" with host Hugh Downs (ballyhooed as the network's longest running game show); "The Pat Boone Show," a rather obscure and presumably short-lived variety half-hour starring the pop singer; "The Hollywood Squares," the long-running (and oft-revived) celebrity-centered game show that was near the beginning of its TV life; "Jeopardy" (in its original Art Fleming-hosted incarnation); and "Eye Guess," another fairly obscure show, one of the many game shows hosted by Bill Cullen.

This promo is a delight to watch, partially because its difficult to imagine any network running such a clip now (at least without intended irony).  Multiple images--some stylized drawings, some stylized photos of the hosts of the various shows--cascade in kaleidoscopic fashion across a 3x3 grid of squares that resembles the playing board for the aforementioned "Hollywood Squares."  Accompanying the images is an appropriately jaunty and lighthearted musical score that would be right at home in any of the shows from NBC's fall 1967 morning schedule.