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December 27: This Day in TV History

S

Stanislav

Just a few random TV related events that happened on December 27. Discuss or comment as you please……

1939: Actor John Amos (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Good Times, Roots, The West Wing) is born in Newark, New Jersey.

1943: Journalist Cokie Roberts is born (as Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs) in New Orleans, Louisiana.

1947: Howdy Doody debuts on NBC.

1955: Commentator Barbara Olson is born in Houston, Texas. On September 11, 2001, she would be killed in the crash of hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 into The Pentagon. She was en route to a taping of Politically Incorrect, and host Bill Maher would subsequently leave a seat on his panel vacant for a week in tribute to Olson.

1971: Nanny and the Professor airs its final network broadcast on ABC.

1979: Knots Landing premieres on CBS.

1988: Producer/writer Jess Oppenheimer (I Love Lucy) dies in Los Angeles, aged 75.

(Just a little featurette I hope to do as time permits. It’s an entirely random selection based on a quick Net search, and is not meant to be comprehensive. So, don’t post nasty messages about “you forgot THIS” or “how could you not mention THAT?” Do so, and I’ll just take my keyboard and go home…..) ;)
 
Here are some additional bits of information on Howdy Doody. When it began in 1947, the show was called "Puppet Playhouse". It's debut, on December 27, 1947, was on a Saturday. On that day, New York City (the major city inwhich the show could be seen) and the immediate area was in the midst of a heavy snowfall. Being on a weekend, two days after Christmas with many at home due to the weather, the viewing audience was quite large. This might have also increased because many families may have purchased their first TV set for Christmas.
 
There was some touch-and-go as to whether Buffalo
Bob Smith and the rest of the cast would even make
it to the NBC studios on account of the weather, but
they did, and the rest is history.

Incidentally, that snowstorm must have really affected
the East Coast. One of our weathercasters here in North
Carolina mentioned that the Greensboro/Winston-Salem/
High Point area got nearly three inches on Christmas Day
1947...a real rarity in these parts...and there would not be
another measurable Christmas snowfall here until 1969, about an inch
and a half.
 
This historical event on Dec. 27 did not help matters much for the then-downtrodden NBC, as it resulted in the American boycott of a Summer Olympiad that they were slated to air:

1979: The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. In response, within a few weeks, President Jimmy Carter calls for an American boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic games in Moscow.
 
1968: ABC's experiment with an outdoor-based game show,
"Treasure Isle," comes to an end. Despite all the advance
publicity about the setting in a man-made lagoon at the
Colonnades Beach Hotel in Palm Beach Shores, FL, most
people found it to be a bore; the racing around the water
picking up the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had to be solved
before a couple could go on the "treasure hunt," and the hunt
itself, proved repetitious and, ultimately, boring (host John
Bartholomew Tucker even acted at times as if he'd like to be
anywhere but there). (Chuck Barris did it better with his '70s
version of Jan Murray's "Treasure Hunt," sadistic as it could
sometimes be.)

On Monday, December 30, "Let's Make A Deal" would move
from NBC to ABC, and--except for "Three On A Match" from
1971-74--NBC would have tremendous difficulty keeping anything
in the 1:30 (ET) slot until "Days Of Our Lives" went to an hour
in April 1975.
 
Why did the show move to ABC? Wikipedia doesn't say. But it does mention that
Hall once offered a woman $20 for every dime she had in her purse........she had a roll
of dimes and got $1000 dollars!
 
In the summer of 1967 NBC had aired a primetime version
of "Let's Make A Deal" Sundays at 8:30 (ET), and it had
beaten both Ed Sullivan and "The FBI". When it came time
for NBC to renew "Let's Make A Deal," NBC told Hall and Stefan
Hatos it wasn't interested in any primetime game shows (never
mind that "Hollywood Squares" was airing on Friday nights), but
a primetime version was a condition that Hall and Hatos wanted
and considered non-negotiable. When NBC continued to refuse,
and ABC heard that negotiations had broken down, they offered
"Deal" in both daytime and primetime versions. Daytime "Deal"
moved ABC to number two in daytime; the primetime show never
did all that great but did last from 1969 to 1971.
 
Other than the sets, the original version is 10 times better than the latest
version. The latest version is like skim milk.

Hey now LET'S has been on all three networks............I feel a new thread coming on.
 
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