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 Signs-Off for the Week: Sign-Offs Through the Years - 1983 (WKRC/Cincinnati)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Chris O'Brien'
Length - 3:35

Each Friday afternoon, TFTP signs-off for the week with a classic station sign-off sequence for your enjoyment and to bid farewell until Monday...

And throughout 2018, we are featuring "Sign-Offs Through the Years", as we go year-by-year with each successive week.

This 1983 sign-off from Cincinnati station WKRC (the city's ABC affiliate at the time) is a rare one that does not feature the national anthem but does feature an alternate song, which here is "This is My Country". For all practical purposes, this film of "This is My Country", with its nationalistic lyrics and images of mythical American locations, serves as a functional equivalent to the national anthem.

"This is My Country" closes out the sign-off. Preceding it is the ownership/technical voiceover, which includes slides of the seals of the NAB Code and labor union for radio and TV broadcast engineers.

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 Will Return After These Messages: Commercial Block from WTTG/Washington, D.C. (Nov. 2, 1971)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Michael Pannoni'
Length - 13:43

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

This 1971 block of commercials is from Washington, D.C., station WTTG, which was independent at the time, but had previously been one of the key affiliates in the DuMont network and later became one of the first affiliates of Fox. In '71, it was owned by the Metromedia group of stations, which is what the "MM" stands for in the ID slides seen in this block.

A wide variety of commercials appear in the block, including for Bronkaid mist, Procter-Silex blenders, Westinghouse "Super Bulb" light bulbs, Soft-Weve toilet paper, Bromo Seltzer, Close-Up toothpaste, All laundry detergent, the board game Score Four, Tiparillo cigars (featuring a pre-fame Fred Willard!), Anacin and Dristan medicines, and Chase & Sanborn and Maxwell House coffees (the latter featuring comedian Danny Thomas and his daughter).

Several WTTG bumper slides and promos are also featured, including a few appearances of the same WTTG news bumper, an election day news promo for local WTTG news, and multiple instances of a bumper slide for the David Frost show (probably because it was that program that the commercial breaks were taken from).

TFTP Comedy: "The George Burns Special" from CBS (1976)

Posted to YouTube by user 'balsamwoods'
Length - 50:35

George Burns was 80 years old at the time of this CBS special in 1976. He'd been in show business for decades, including in the pioneering TV sitcom he starred in with his wife Gracie Allen in the 1950s and which was featured on TFTP back in January. This special (his first since 1959, as he notes in his opening monologue) came as he was making a bit of a comeback due to his Oscar-winning performance in the film "The Sunshine Boys" in 1975--and as he settled into the final phase of his career, which was mainly a schtick on his increasingly advancing age.

Much of the special consists of Burns standing and puffing on his cigar while offering quips (many of them about his increasingly advancing age) and short renditions of old-timey musical numbers in his syncopated spoke-sung style. These are punctuated by all the other segments of the special: his introduction of the Osmond Brothers, who lip-sync a song; his playing straight man to Madeline Kahn, who takes the ditzy female role that Gracie Allen had played; his banter with Walter Matthau (again with Burns playing straight man); his interplay with Johnny Carson, who comically attempts to provide Burns with an opening act for his special; and his introduction of Chita Rivera, who sings "All That Jazz" from her hit Broadway show "Chicago".

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "Rate Your Mate" from CBS (1951)

Posted to YouTube by user 'videoarchives1000'
Length - 26:31 (total)

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

Every single year of television history there have been pilot episodes made for programs that were never picked up by the network. The game show genre has had more of these pilots than most types. Here we have one of these game show pilots that was never picked up as a regular series.

"Rate Your Mate" was an early game show pilot by Goodson-Todman Productions, based on a radio version of the same concept, that was made for CBS in 1951. Goodson-Todman had been producing TV game shows for a few years by '51, with its early flagship program, "What's My Line?", having premiered the previous year. "Rate Your Mate" has some characteristics that are similar to other early-1950s game shows (Goodson-Todman or otherwise), including a format that features a married couple as contestants, relatively simple gameplay, extremely small stakes for winning (maximum $100 here), and fairly crude production values.

In "Rate Your Mate", hosted by comedian Joey Adams, one spouse goes into a soundproof booth while the other spouse guesses whether or not they will correctly answer questions that are posed to them. Some of the questions are straight factual questions but other ones involve models either wearing or displaying objects which must be correctly identified. Three different couples appear in this pilot, each with varying success.

TFTP Signs-Off for the Week: Sign-Offs Through the Years - 1982 (KCET/Los Angeles)

Posted to YouTube by user 'MicroJow'
Length - 2:22

Each Friday afternoon, TFTP signs-off for the week with a classic station sign-off sequence for your enjoyment and to bid farewell until Monday...

And throughout 2018, we are featuring "Sign-Offs Through the Years", as we go year-by-year with each successive week.

This 1982 sign-off from Los Angeles public TV station KCET has just two main parts: a minute-long promo for the Great Performances presentation of "Charterhouse of Parma", and a ownership/technical voiceover that is over a panoramic view of LA. (For reasons unknown, in the later part of the voiceover the camera pans and zooms in on the panorama.)

There's no national anthem film in this sign-off, as usual for most public television sign-offs that have been featured on TFTP (such as here, here, and here). The reasons for this, as for that mysterious zoom in this KCET sign-off, are unclear.

TFTP's Monochrome March, On This Day: "The Tonight Show" w/ Jack Paar - audio only (Mar. 29, 1962)

Posted to YouTube by user 'epaddon'
Length - 1:14:44

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!

It Was 56 Years Ago Today: We finish Monochrome March today with an item that is not a monochrome program per se, but the audio from a monochrome program--Jack Paar's final episode as host of the "Tonight Show", which aired 56 years ago today on March 29, 1962.

Many programs from the earliest period of TV history do not survive, but there are others for which the full program does not survive but the audio track does survive--and this last Paar "Tonight Show" episode is one of those. The program's audio above accompanies still images that attempt to illustrate what is going on in the audio track. Perhaps unsurprisingly given Paar's reputation, he spends a good chunk of this final episode settling scores, including with columnists Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen and those who criticized his visits to Cuba during his "Tonight Show" run (which took place as that country was undergoing revolution). Of course, a farewell show being what it is, there are plenty of testimonials to Paar as well, including from the likes of Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, Billy Graham, George Burns, Jack Benny, and Bob Hope.

Paar had been "Tonight Show" host for almost five years by March of 1962, having started in July of 1957 (succeeding first "Tonight" host Steve Allen). Paar's tenure on the "Tonight Show" had been famously rocky, and included a walkout of the show for several days in 1960 as a result of a dispute with NBC about censorship of jokes. (He quips in the monologue of this episode that the NBC legal department was having a luau to celebrate his leaving the program.) Paar was leaving at this particular time to launch a prime-time variety show on NBC that started in the fall of 1962. That program ran until 1965, and for a few years after Paar made an occasional TV special, but then he appeared on TV infrequently for the remainder of his life, which lasted until 2004.

TFTP's Monochrome March Will Return After These Messages: Miscellaneous Commercial Block from the 1950s

Posted to YouTube by user 'MattTheSaiyan'
Length - 12:25

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!

And every Wednesday, TFTP takes a break from regular programming to bring you a selection of classic commercials. Monochrome March will return after these messages...

This block of commercials from the 1950s features (among other products) cigarettes, bread, autos, and soap products. There are ads for Palmolive bar soap (for the "schoolgirl complexion look"), Snickers candy bars (an animated look at the layers of a Snickers bar), Jello Instant Pudding, and Spic & Span cleaning solution. There are three different Camel cigarette ads--two of which are animated, one with a lion tamer and lion, the other featuring water skiing. There are also three different Sunbeam bread ads--and only one of them is the same as those TFTP featured a few weeks ago.

As we begin to wrap up this year's Monochrome March, it's worth considering how different these ads are from those we are familiar with today. To begin with, they're much longer; a couple of the ads here clock in at around two minutes. Animation was much more prevalent in ads from the 1950s and '60s; animation is almost never used in commercials now. And there is an unmistakable air of innocence to many of these ads--a girl jump-roping to sell Sunbeam bread, clean-cut teenagers featured in the Palmolive ad. Heck, even in the cigarette ads the worst thing going on is whether or not the cigarettes will irritate your throat.

Maybe, in that era, things really were more black and white.

TFTP's Monochrome March: Network Promo from NBC (Mar. 21, 1958)

Posted to YouTube by user 'obsgia'
Length - 1:12

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!

Here is another monochrome network promo from the late-1950s, this one from NBC on March 21, 1958 (not 1957 as the YouTube title suggests). TFTP analyzed some of the qualities of 1950s program promos here, in a previous post on a promo from the late-1950s, and the above promo certainly has the same qualities (and limitations).

The above promo, which promotes that evening's prime-time line-up, comes during an episode of the NBC daytime game show "Treasure Hunt". It highlights three programs from the Friday night line-up: "Truth and Consquences" with guest star Lou Costello; "M-Squad" starring Lee Marvin; and "The Thin Man", the TV series adaptation of the movie series by the same name. The promotion for the three programs is held together by a puzzle-piece theme (evident in the promotional art and the voiceover).