March 20: This Day in TV History

[Stanislav]

Just a few random TV related events that happened on March 20. Discuss or comment as you please……

1906: Bandleader/actor Ozzie Nelson (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet) is born in Jersey City, New Jersey.

1908: Broadcasting executive (CBS) Frank Stanton is born in Muskegon, Michigan.

1918: Game show host Jack Barry (Twenty One, Tic Tac Dough, The Joker’s Wild) is born in Lindenhurst, New York.

1922: Actor/director/producer/writer/comedian Carl Reiner is born in Bronx, New York.

1928: Minister/educator/TV host Fred Rogers (Mister Roger’s Neighborhood) is born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

1931: Actor Hal Linden (Barney Miller) is born (as Harold Lipshitz) in New York City.

1935: Actor/director Ted Bessell (That Girl, Me and the Chimp, Hail to the Chief) is born in Flushing, New York. DYK: Bessell chose acting over a possible classical music career; as a 12-year-old child prodigy, he once performed a piano recital at Carnegie Hall.

1948: Renowned Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini makes his television debut, conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra in an all-Wagner program.

1974: Journalist Chet Huntley (The Huntley-Brinkley Report) dies in Big Sky, Montana of lung cancer, aged 62.

1983: The TV-Movie Special Bulletin, starring Ed Flanders (St. Elsewhere) as a network news anchor, airs on NBC. The movie is shot on videotape and mimics a live breaking network newscast covering a hostage crisis in which terrorists threaten to set off a homemade nuclear bomb in Charleston, South Carolina. (The terrorists are all eventually either killed or arrested, but the bomb explodes during attempts to defuse it.) While not having anywhere near the impact of the infamous 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, some isolated mild panic and a handful of nervous phone calls to authorities are reported in Charleston, despite the broadcast being festooned with on-screen disclaimers during every break.

1987: The CBS daytime soap Capitol sirs its final episode (#1,270).

(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…..)

 

[bpatrick]

1972: The game show "Split Second," with Tom Kennedy,
debuts on ABC and lasts three years. The same day, at
least in Tampa, Merv Griffin returns to syndication following
his less-than-successful attempt to compete with Johnny
Carson.

Re "Special Bulletin": the idea, as you say, was similar to
what Orson Welles did on radio: depict a fictional event as
a breaking news story. But "War Of The Worlds" couldn't
have worked anywhere except radio (not as Welles did it)
because the imagination could run wild, which it couldn't do in
the literal world of movies or television.

 

[Stanislav]

Re "Special Bulletin": the idea, as you say, was similar to
what Orson Welles did on radio: depict a fictional event as
a breaking news story. But "War Of The Worlds" couldn't
have worked anywhere except radio (not as Welles did it)
because the imagination could run wild, which it couldn't do in
the literal world of movies or television.

Special Bulletin was, though, pretty realistic for the most part, with verbal stumbles and technical glitches adding to the effect of an actual live, breaking news story. Someone tuning in between disclaimers, even if they didn't recognize the anchors, might be momentarily alarmed, although if they had the presence of mind to flip the dial and find that this huge, scary story was nowhere to be found on the other channels, their fears should have been quickly assuaged.

What puzzles me is that, although I haven't confirmed this, the Charleston NBC outlet (then WCIV) is said to have gone a step further, adding a constant bug that read "Dramatization" or something similar throughout the broadcast. (They were especially concerned because the fictional local affiliate mentioned several times in the "newscast" had the call letters WPIV -- awfully close phonetically, especially when said quickly.) Anyway, if that is true, I can't imagine anyone panicking for more than a second or two unless they were so bereft as regards vocabulary that "Dramatization" meant nothing to them. :

 

[ixnay]

I don't think I panicked for as much as a second while watching "Special Bulletin". Maybe because I'd already seen the listing and the hype for it and was mentally prepared for the experience. I watched it in its entirety (on Philly's KYW-3) in my off-campus room (I was attending what is now Kutztown [PA] University). During station ID's coming out of station breaks, KYW's announcer would reiterate that the presentation we were seeing was fiction.

IIRC Brandon Tartikoff was the head of NBC Entertainment at the time. He had some really adventurous programming during that era.

ixnay

 

[RicoGregg]

1918: Game show host Jack Barry (Twenty One, Tic Tac Dough, The Joker’s Wild) is born in Lindenhurst, New York.

After the quiz show scandals of the 50s, Jack Barry's career took a major nosedive. He pitter-pattered along with shows like Winky Dink and You, then was able to make a comeback in 1975 with The Joker's Wild, which became very popular, and Barry was able to produce other game shows, and was able to redeem his good name.

I'm totally convinced that Barry took a bum rap with the scandals. If you ask me, the real villains in that mess were David Sarnoff and the then-makers of Geritol, who applied pressure to make sure that certain contestants won and lost.

 

[Ultimajock]

1918: Game show host Jack Barry (Twenty One, Tic Tac Dough, The Joker’s Wild) is born in Lindenhurst, New York.

After the quiz show scandals of the 50s, Jack Barry's career took a major nosedive. He pitter-pattered along with shows like Winky Dink and You, then was able to make a comeback in 1975 with The Joker's Wild, which became very popular, and Barry was able to produce other game shows, and was able to redeem his good name.

I'm totally convinced that Barry took a bum rap with the scandals. If you ask me, the real villains in that mess were David Sarnoff and the then-makers of Geritol, who applied pressure to make sure that certain contestants won and lost.

...actually, Barry popped up on ABC a handful of times between Twenty-One and The Joker's Wild -- as a bit actor on The Addams Family and Batman, and enceeing the prime time game shows The Generation Gap and The Reel Game. I seem to recall he and business partner Dan Enright also owned KFOX Radio in Long Beach, California, during the period...

...and I don't think Sarnoff would be the NBC villain in the scandal, that would be Marvin Kitman, the TV network president...

 

[wbhist]

...and I don't think Sarnoff would be the NBC villain in the scandal, that would be Marvin Kitman, the TV network president...

Marvin Kitman - the one who later became TV critic for Newsday? Or might that be Robert Kintner, who actually was NBC president for some years?

 

[Ultimajock]

...and I don't think Sarnoff would be the NBC villain in the scandal, that would be Marvin Kitman, the TV network president...

Marvin Kitman - the one who later became TV critic for Newsday? Or might that be Robert Kintner, who actually was NBC president for some years?

...you're right, Kintner was who I had in mind. Kitman is a villain of a different type ;-) ...

 

[Tim from Springfield IL]

1943: Film and TV producer Paul Junger Witt is born. His works include The Partridge Family, Soap, Benson, Empty Nest, Golden Girls, and Blossom.

 

[Tim from Springfield IL]

1918: Game show host Jack Barry (Twenty One, Tic Tac Dough, The Joker’s Wild) is born in Lindenhurst, New York.

After the quiz show scandals of the 50s, Jack Barry's career took a major nosedive. He pitter-pattered along with shows like Winky Dink and You, then was able to make a comeback in 1975 with The Joker's Wild, which became very popular, and Barry was able to produce other game shows, and was able to redeem his good name.

Barry's comeback actually came 3 years earlier in 1972, as the CBS version of TJW premiered that Sept. 4 (the same day as Bob Barker's The [New] Price is Right and Gambit), although the CBS TJW lasted until June 13, 1975.

 

[bk77]

Re "Special Bulletin": the idea, as you say, was similar to
what Orson Welles did on radio: depict a fictional event as
a breaking news story. But "War Of The Worlds" couldn't
have worked anywhere except radio (not as Welles did it)
because the imagination could run wild, which it couldn't do in
the literal world of movies or television.

On Halloween 1968, Buffalo's WKBW radio did their own War of the Worlds" which caused at least some panic in Buffalo.
Its been a very long time since I had heard WKBW's version but I seem to remember at one point during the broadcast real-life WKBW-TV anchor Irv Weinstein was killed by martians !!!! Irv's "death" made a lot people noticed and some had pressed the panic button.

I wonder how much money Orson Wells had recieved ( if any ) from WKBW?

 

[Ultimajock]

I wonder how much money Orson Wells had recieved ( if any ) from WKBW?

...none. Howard E. Koch wrote the script for the Welles broadcast and held the copyright for the rest of his life, renewing it in 1968; according to http://jeff560.tripod.com/wotw.html his widow retains the copyright today. Welles complained for years that he never got a penny off any of the record albums and tapes that were sold of the broadcast, either...