TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "Our Miss Brooks" from CBS (May 20, 1955)

Posted to YouTube by user 'balsamwoods'
Length - 22:04

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

Like many early TV shows, "Our Miss Brooks" started out as a radio program (in 1948) and then was adapted for TV (in 1952). The radio and TV versions ran simultaneously then until both left the air in 1957. Eve Arden starred in both versions as Madison High School English teacher Connie Brooks. Arden was surrounded by a supporting cast made up of staff members and students of Madison High, including Gale Gordon (later best known as Lucille Ball's foil in her 1960s sitcoms) as Principal Conklin and Robert Rockwell as biology teacher Philip Boynton.

The episode above, from May of 1955, shows the dynamic between stuffy Principal Conklin and well-meaning but flighty Miss Brooks. It also is a great example of that perennial sitcom trope--the misunderstanding. Conklin wishes for Madison High to have a new mascot for the school's football team (to show up a rival at another high school); through a misunderstanding stemming from having received only part of a note from Conklin, Brooks ends up getting him a different mascot than he had in mind.

TFTP Comedy: "The Monkees" (series premiere) from NBC (Sep. 12, 1966)

Posted to YouTube by user 'pedroverito'
Length - 25:03

"The Monkees" represented the confluence of two big trends in popular culture in the mid-1960s: first, that of mop-topped four-piece pop music combos, a trend launched, of course, by the Beatles (the Monkees, due to the contrivance of their very existence, were famously the "Pre-Fab Four" to the Beatles' "Fab Four"); the second trend was that of the zany hijinx of 1960s situation comedies. Shows like "The Beverly Hillbillies", "Bewitched", "Gilligan's Island", and "Get Smart" (and others) had laid the ground of zany hijinx well before the Monkees got to it in the fall of 1966.

The episode above is the first of the Monkees' eponymous sitcom "The Monkees". The group had been created with the express purpose of starring in the sitcom, and the original idea had been for the four to be just actors playing musicians. As time went on, the group (Davy Jones, Peter Tork, Michael Nesmith, and Micky Dolenz), which had several hit singles in the last half of the 1960s, took greater and greater control of its own music, and they now have a respectable reputation as a late-1960s pop music mainstay.

This premiere episode isn't really a pilot per se--there's no deliberate setting up of relationships or establishment of the overall situation of the series, as in most pilots--but it is a great example both of the slapstick and zany humor that this series would practice and of this type of humor that was found more generally in 1960s sitcoms. At the beach, Davy saves from drowning a princess from an obscure (fictional) country, and the boys spend the rest of the episode trying to defeat the nefarious plot by her uncle to kill her and seize power. Hilarity ensues.

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "The Burns and Allen Show" from CBS (Jul. 17, 1952)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Shokus Video'
Length - 29:32

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

George Burns and Gracie Allen were a comedy team (and a marital team) that lasted for decades through vaudeville, radio, and television. By the time their TV show--a pioneering situation comedy--premiered in 1950, their act and their appeal had been long established. George was the straight man, calm and bemused in the face of ditzy Gracie's hijinx. Although in the episode above George strays further than usual into wackiness, this division of comedic labor held for the most part in "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show", which aired on CBS from 1950-1958.

Like most TV programs from this earliest period, "The Burns and Allen Show" was originally aired live. We see here many of the trappings of that mode of presentation, including an actual curtain that raises at the beginning of the story. Also like most programs from this earliest period, it had a single sponsor, in this case Carnation Evaporated Milk, featured in the opening and closing as well as in an ad at the very end of the program.

The plot in this episode (from July 1952) is a version of one that would become a sitcom staple: mistaken identity. George thinks that everyone else thinks he's a great singer, when they actually think the opposite. This leads to some comic moments throughout the episode, as George and Gracie banter with friends at home and then as they become mistaken for another couple (one with a husband who can sing well) by a record producer.