TFTP Special: "Vincent Price's Once Upon a Midnight Scary" from CBS (Oct. 1979)

Posted to YouTube by user 'mrprice07'
Length - 46:56

Vincent Price was, of course, legendary for being associated with spookiness and horror, based on his appearance in a number of such films in the 1950s and 1960s, including "The House of Wax" in 1954 and several films based on Poe stories in the '60s. By the end of the '70s, Price's identification with such themes had reached near-camp levels, a status that certainly informs this 1979 Halloween special that he hosted.

The program is an anthology of three separate ghost stories, one classic and two contemporary: "The Ghost Belonged to Me" by Richard Peck (from 1976), "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (from 1820), and "The House With a Clock in Its Walls" by John Bellairs (from 1973). Price doesn't actually appear in any of the stories themselves, rather he appears in segments bookending the stories and provides a little bit of voiceover narration during them.

Price exploits his image to good effect in his segments, levitating a book off of a table, waking up inside a coffin, and holding a raven on his arm. As we celebrate Halloween tonight, the figure of Vincent Price and his spooky image helps us to appreciate the holiday.

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "Suspense" from CBS (Oct. 11, 1949)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Suspense1949'
Length - 29:29

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

As we approach Halloween tomorrow night, here is an episode of the early, black-and-white dramatic anthology program "Suspense" from October of 1949--starring the legendary horror movie star Bela Lugosi in an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's story "The Cask of Amontillado".

Half-hour dramatic anthology programs were a dime a dozen from the late-1940s through the mid-1950s. (Here's a sampling: "Armstrong Circle Theatre", "Crime Syndicated", "Fireside Theatre", "Gruen Playhouse", "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars", "The Silver Theatre".) "Suspense", with its emphasis on suspense stories, was a little different than most.

The Poe story is here updated to a World War II and immediate postwar setting (a period that was basically contemporary in 1949). Two army officers (one played by a young Ray Walston) take the deposition of a man (Romney Brent) who tells the story of how he sealed up a romantic rival (Lugosi) in the vault with the title cask. Lugosi offers a somewhat restrained performance while still providing the flair audiences by this time (nearly twenty years after "Dracula") had come to expect. (Honestly, most of it is in the accent, probably.)

Edgar Allen Poe has been a standby for spooky stories for well over 150 years, and this adaptation of one of his greatest stories does a pretty good job of providing one on the day before Halloween.

TFTP Signs-Off for the Week: Network Sign-Off from HBO (1979)

Posted to YouTube by user 'The Museum of Classic Chicago Television'
Length - 2:09

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

This week instead of a local station sign-off (the most common type), here is a network sign-off for cable pay-TV network HBO from 1979. Of course, to us now, the idea of a network like HBO signing-off for the night (and really any kind of TV station) is completely bizarre. But in the early days of cable (in 1979, HBO had only been around for about four years as a national network), programming practices were still evolving.

HBO's sign-off sequence at this time did not consist of much. Here following a promo for a Martin Mull special, it consists only of an animated segment that shows different actions that people take as they turn in for the night--turning off lights, checking on sleeping children, setting alarm clock alarms, locking doors, brushing teeth. With no voiceover of any kind, just a nice relaxing musical score, it's a pretty chill and low-key way of ending a day's programming, culminating with a final logo graphic in which the "HBO" logo (an early version of the same logo the network uses to this day) goes dark letter by letter. Then the clip cuts to color bars for about the last thirty seconds.

TFTP Cable: "Pinwheel" from Nickelodeon (early-1980s)

Posted to YouTube by user 'robatsea2009'
Length - 1:22

A few weeks back we featured a block of promos from early-1980s Nickelodeon, and this clip of the opening credits from the Nickelodeon program "Pinwheel" is from that same era. The segment is light, airy, and whimsical--setting a tone that is unrecognizable from the Nickelodeon of more recent years. "Pinwheel" is a type of program that has also long since disappeared from Nickelodeon: one with this kind of tone, with a mix of human and puppet characters, and with a setting reminiscent of "Sesame Street".

The show mainly took place in a large, Victorian-style boarding house called Pinwheel House in which the human and puppet characters interacted with one another. The program actually pre-dates Nickelodeon altogether, as it premiered in 1977 on one of the channels on Warner cable's QUBE interactive cable TV experiment. This channel, which took the name Pinwheel for awhile in honor of its flagship program, would become Nickelodeon in 1979; "Pinwheel" went along in the transition and continued to air on Nick with original episodes until 1984 and in repeats all the way until 1990.

TFTP On This Day: 1987 World Series, Game 7, Twins vs. Cardinals from ABC (Oct. 25, 1987)

Posted to YouTube by user 'MLBClassics'
Length - 2:43:24

It Was 30 Years Ago Today: Going into the 1987 season, the Minnesota Twins had never won a World Series. They'd gotten close in the mid-1960s, making it to the Series just a few years after moving to the Twin Cities from Washington, D.C., only to get defeated by the Sandy Koufax-era LA Dodgers. By this day in 1987, thirty years ago today, they were on the cusp of their first ever World Series title, having battled the St. Louis Cardinals to a deciding game 7.

Luckily for the Twins, the final game was scheduled for their home field, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. The Metrodome (only five years old in 1987) was still a relative novelty as a domed multi-purpose stadium and had gained a reputation as offering the ultimate home-field advantage. Because of the acoustics of the fabric-roofed, air-pressure inflated dome, the crowd noise was deafening, and as a result the stadium had gained the nickname "the Thunderdome". In addition, during the '87 postseason, Twins fans had become known for waving their white "Homer Hankies", creating a fluttering white sea in the Metrodome stands.

The Twins fielded a team that included Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek, and pitching ace Frank Viola, while the Cards countered with Willie McGee, Vince Coleman, and the legendary Ozzie Smith. St. Louis took an early 2-0 lead before the Twins tied it up by the 5th inning. Minnesota took a one-run lead in the 6th, expanding to a two-run lead in the 8th, before finishing as World Series champions for the first time.

The full game broadcast, embedded above, is from ABC with Al Michaels and former ballplayer Tim McCarver doing play-by-play duties. Looking at on-screen graphics from televised sporting events is always fascinating, especially in an era such as the 1980s (or earlier) when the score was not always displayed on screen. There are other interesting touches here, such as the "Inside Pitch" segments in which a current or former player offers some insights into various aspects of the proceedings (including one by current Twins manager Paul Molitor, then a player for the Milwaukee Brewers).

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: "Disneyland" from ABC (Apr. 9, 1958)

Posted to YouTube by user 'EPLtv'
Length - 47:33

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

The Walt Disney Company empire as we know it today was basically launched with the "Disneyland" television series that started airing on ABC in 1954. ABC (at this time not yet owned by Disney) kicked in some of the funding for the building of the Disneyland theme park in exchange for securing the highly-sought rights to broadcast a weekly series by Disney. The TV show launched a year or so before the theme park did, and both before and after the theme park's July 1955 opening (and clear through each and every version of Disney's network TV show), Disney never passed up an opportunity to promote the park.

This 1958 episode of "Disneyland" is a perfect example of this somewhat shameless practice. Basically an hour-long commercial for Disneyland the park, this episode of "Disneyland" the TV show, entitled "An Adventure in the Magic Kingdom", takes us through the theme park section by section, showing many of the attractions while a kindly narrator explains how much fun everyone is having on them. For Disneyland aficionados, it's a fantastic up-close look that gives a glimpse into a late-1950s Disneyland that still had many now-closed attractions.

TFTP Signs-Off for the Week: Station Sign-Off from KLAX/Alexandria, LA (1988)

Posted to YouTube by user 'jacky9br'
Length - 4:34

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

This late-1980s sign-off sequence from Alexandria, Louisiana, station KLAX begins with a few program promos, for "Mama's Family", the local early-morning news program "Sun Up", and "The Greatest American Hero". A "Hooperman" bumper precedes the national anthem film (which has a pretty spiffy a cappella vocal arrangement). The sequence concludes with the ownership/technical voiceover on a "Good Night" slide (followed in the clip by about a minute's worth of black).

TFTP Drama: "Gunsmoke" from CBS (Sep. 10, 1955)

Posted to YouTube by user 'balsamwoods'
Length - 26:52

"Gunsmoke" was one of the most venerable dramas in television history. With its twenty-years on CBS (from 1955 to 1975), it set a record for prime-time TV longevity for a drama. For this TFTP Drama post, we present the pilot episode for this pioneering TV western, from the fall of 1955.

"Gunsmoke" premiered right at the beginning of the trend of TV westerns that by the end of the 1950s would take over television. "Gunsmoke" would sit atop the pile as TV's #1 show for four seasons between 1957 and 1961. Over the course of its run, it would expand from half-hour to an hour in length (in 1961) and switch from black and white to color (in 1966). Its cast of supporting characters would evolve, but at the core of it was always James Arness as Marshall Matt Dillon, flanked by Amanda Blake as Miss Kitty and Milburn Stone as Doc Adams.

In this pilot episode (building on a radio version of the program that had been airing since 1952), Marshall Dillon encounters an outlaw who has the fastest draw known in Texas, and who has killed a number of people (including lawmen) with impunity as a result. Dillon, although he first gets seriously wounded by the outlaw, finally manages to overcome this menace to Dodge City, the frontier town that Dillon is sworn to protect.

TFTP Flow: "ABC Sunday Night Movie" opening credits w/ commercial break from WLS/Chicago (1980)

Posted to YouTube by user 'The Museum of Classic Chicago Television'
Length - 5:57

Television "flow"  -  an unbroken sequence of various on-air elements such as program segments, news breaks, commercials, program promos, PSAs, station IDs, bumpers, and other interstitials, which can be analyzed to understand what viewers of the past experienced when watching TV.

This flow sequence is from a 1980 broadcast of the 1973 film "The Sting" starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford; the film was aired on ABC, with this particular flow coming from ABC Chicago affiliate WLS. It begins with a WLS "Eyewitness News" bumper before launching into the "ABC Sunday Night Movie" intro. This is followed by a commercial break featuring ads for Kellogg's Graham Crackos cereal, Dr. Pepper (one of the David Naughton "Be a Pepper" spots from this era), Johnson's disposable diapers, and Allstate Insurance. It closes with the opening credits and first minute or so of "The Sting".

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.