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They've found "Turn On" (1969)!

I tried to reconstruct what my viewing would have been at the time (I was 11 then) in southern Iowa. I really can't. At 7:30, NBC was in the middle of "Hallmark Hall of Fame", a made-for-TV play called "Teacher, Teacher" about a father's efforts to teach a developmentally disabled youth to read and write. ("Developmentally disabled" was not the term used in the Des Moines Register's weekly TV magazine on the preceding Sunday.) CBS had a sitcom called "The Good Guys" which apparently never even made it to reruns, which followed the Glen Campbell show, which I'm pretty sure we would have been watching. I don't see our household watching the NBC show, since my mother, a teacher, hated TV shows about teaching. I have no memories at all of "The Good Guys". We didn't have IEBN (now Iowa PBS) yet. Our local station was ABC (KTVO), which was scheduled to air "Turn On" and probably just let it go on. Maybe I had to do homework starting at 7:30. Which would have been just as well; it sounded like a pretty awful menu of programming that Wednesday night in 1969.

All times Central, by the way.
 
In his opening for the first episode Schlatter said they had enough material for 8 episodes and pointed at some boxes. I don't know if that was tapes of material but it looks like there may be more episodes that weren't released before.
 
anotherguyTN said:
In his opening for the first episode Schlatter said they had enough material for 8 episodes and pointed at some boxes. I don't know if that was tapes of material but it looks like there may be more episodes that weren't released before.
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If there were three completed when the first aired, I’m betting the rest is raw footage not edited into show form.
 
I skipped around on the first episode (on Clown Jewels) and can't see how it was terribly controversial, at least not by today's standards. Basically a low-rent version of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.

Tim Conway here in his younger days kind of reminds me of Jason Alexander.
 
michael hagerty said:
George is 90. We're lucky we can see this stuff at all.
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Schlatter will turn 94 this coming New Year’s Eve. He apparently has admitted to fibbing about his age early in his career, so wrong birth years are attributed.

He is also still married to former actress Jolene Brand after 67 years. Brand, whose acting career was in the 1950s and 60s, is perhaps best remembered as one of the female players on the various Ernie Kovacs TV specials, as well as a recurring role on Zorro.
 
anotherguyTN said:
There was a new video of Turn On on Clown Jewels today that said it was the "Lost episode", possibly the third one? :
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Just skipping around, there's nothing whatsoever controversial about this, just kind of stupid.

The pilot at around 11:25 reminds me of Vladimir Putin (boo hiss!).
 
Nathan Obral said:
To be honest, Tim Conway had reason to overexaggerate the claim; after all, he was from Cleveland. Plus it ironically** tracked with his string of failed pilots and TV shows until joining Carol Burnett’s ensemble.

So let’s go through the existing citations in the Wikipedia article. Here’s the Akron Beacon Journal on Friday, February 4, 1969, with a mention of WAKR-TV, the market’s other ABC affiliate:
View attachment 5549

The Dayton Daily News said WEWS called ABC 10 minutes into the show and said they would be cancelling it, which might have been misinterpreted as them pulling the show off-air midway:
View attachment 5550

The Associated Press confirms that KBTV (today’s KUSA) never carried the program to begin with, a decision they arrived to on their own accord.
View attachment 5551

The Cleveland Plain Dealer also helps to triple-confirm the “angry telegram” sent to ABC actually did happen. But because no off-air video recorders existed, there’s no way to actually verify what they did… but after seeing this first episode, a black screen might have been just as memorable.

** This is the correct usage of the word.
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As a kind of side note, got to wonder why the radio stations in the Dayton Daily News are listed in no particular order, whether by call letters or by frequency.
 
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