The Era -- Day By Day

[LizzieMaine]

Speaking of Tex and Jinx, if we skip ahead in our time line by a year or so we will find them hosting the first sponsored daytime television program. There are no complete recordings of this venture, but we do have a short clip. Take that, Kilgallen...

 

[Fading Fast]

Speaking of Tex and Jinx, if we skip ahead in our time line by a year or so we will find them hosting the first sponsored daytime television program. There are no complete recordings of this venture, but we do have a short clip. Take that, Kilgallen...

Darn, I wanted to see how the spot came out.

It's not fair, but neither Jinx nor Tex seemed comfortable on air the way hosts are today, but we've learned a lot of how to do that over the past 80 years. Plus, you can tell they just ran the tape as verbal stumbles were left in (or was this live?).

Fun clip, thank you for posting it, Lizzie.

 

[LizzieMaine]

100 percent live, except for the filmed opening with the swirling meat. Videotape is ten years in the future.

This is some of the earliest existing footage of 1940s television, and you can really see how seat of the pants it is. I think they must be reading off cue cards, but they clearly didn't rehearse. Jinx settles back in her chair there after doing her spiel like she doesn't realize she's still on camera. And the dress model is floundering around there waiting for her cue.

Dorothy Kilgallen's voice on "Breakfast With Dorothy and D ick" sounds exactly like Jinx's. They were bitter rivals on the air, but who wouldn't be?

 

[Fading Fast]

100 percent live, except for the filmed opening with the swirling meat. Videotape is ten years in the future.
...

So did they film the swirling meat like a movie and run that obnoxious overkill of a promo first like from a movie projector?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Pretty much. Eventually they developed a machine called a "telecine," which projected the film onto the plate of what's called a "flying spot scanner," but at NBC in 1946-47 they have a room with floor-mounted theatre-type projectors beaming the image thru a porthole directly into the lens of an iconoscope camera. Cu mbersome, but it works. Here's a photo from when they first set it up for experiments in 1936...

A lot of early television came from film -- title sequences, scene-transition inserts, special effects that couldn't be done live. And a lot of time on the schedule was filled by ten-year-old feature films, either Grade Z stuff from defunct studios or British features that could be picked up cheap.

There's a reason most early TV sets were sold to bars. Other than ball games there wasn't much worth watching.