Starter of this subject: JB
Last post in this subject: 3/15/2002
Messages in this subject: 15
| JB | 3/15/2002 15 replies |
| If I have my dates right, which is that network television really took off in the fall of 1948 with the arrival of Milton Berle on the small screen, then it took fourteen years for OTR to die off, as the last network dramas went off the air in 1962. That's a long, slow death. It also makes me wonder how wildly popular television really was and how much of its success was pushed by the networks, at the expense of radio. (I think of how films went from roughly half or more in black and white to virtually none in a matter of a couple of years, not because black and white movies were less popular but because the television networks demanded it for network airings, as they {NBC especially} were pushing color broadcasting,--some of the biggest box-office hits of the first half of the sixties were black and white.) I remember when television was shifting from black and white to color, and how the networks in effect forced movies to do the same. But I'm too young to remember network radio, and wonder what the ratings were. Were polls being done in the fifties on radio versus television? Was there a built-in doomsday scenario for radio shows when television arrived? How did the networks respond to television? Ah, questions, questions...Obviously, as the networks were both in the radio and television business they were determined to shift over to the new medium,--but did it have to be at the expense of the old? If anyone has the answers to these questions I'd love to hear them. An observation (perhaps untrue), the networks today, or the companies that bought them, have no interest in the OTR they produced many decades ago. They do not (as far as I know) package old shows or sell them, the way movie studios sell their old films on VCR and DVD. There's a "disconnect" (if you will) that I find somewhat disturbing. Are old radio shows today sold in packages put together by the networks that originally produced them? They don't SEEM to be. What I'm getting at is that it appears that the broadcasters have literally cast aside and forgotten about the fact that they were once in the OTR business, so to speak, forcing collectors and fans to gather up old shows like so many scraps from the table. What a contrast to the way classic movies are packaged! |
| Ken Smith | 3/15/2002 0 replies |
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I seem to remember reading that the television audience didn't overtake the radio audience until 1955. I do think television WAS wildly popular, but the price of a television in the 50's and the availability probably kept the viewership down.
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| Elizabeth McLeod | 3/15/2002 1 replies |
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Television didn't begin to dominate until after the lifting of the FCC freeze on new station licenses in 1952 -- prior to that, television was entirely an urban phenomenon. The Berle craze of 1948-51, in fact, was almost entirely an *East Coast* urban phenomenon -- at the program's peak, it had about five million viewers, and about 35 per cent were in New York City. By contrast, the top-rated radio programs of the same period had audiences of around thirty million people. Less than ten per cent of American homes had television sets in 1950.
Well into the early fifties, nearly half of all television sets in the US were in New York, with most of the rest in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles. It was well into the 1950s before most Americans got access to television, and it wasn't until 1965 that 90 per cent of American homes had television sets. This being so, there was still a place for radio into the early sixties. As far as packaging old radio for rebroadcast, the networks didn't do that because for the most part they had no legal right to do so. Most programs belonged to advertising agencies or independent production companies, and any recordings which existed could not legally be used for rebroadcasts due to strict contracts with the performers' and musicians' unions (contracts which modern rebroadcasters usually ignore.) The whole question of who controls the rights to these materials today is extremely murky -- but the basic fact is that radio was always an ephemeral medium: programs were intended to be broadcast once, and that was it. In this respect, radio had much more in common with the daily newspaper -- read it once and throw it away -- than it did with the movie business. |
| JB | 3/15/2002 0 replies |
| Wonderful background info. Thank you. Radio's beginning to remind me of the grand old ocean liners of the Titanic to Normandie period, the floating palaces, with their chandeliers, exquisitely carved starircases, plants, vases, silverware and china all fit for a king, now long gone, sent to the scrapheap ages ago, existing today only in fragments or old photographs. Radio wasn't nearly so regal, but it was, like those grand old ships, evocative, and it took people to places they'd never been before, and was, like them, a feast for the imagination, a window to other worlds, other centuries, in terms of style. Just as one could have very up to date bathrooms, kitchens and swimming pools on those ships, one could also have an eighteenth century drawing room, Louis IV furniture here, an Victorian dining room there; radio offered a little Shakespeare, some Toscannini conducting Brahms, Verdi on sunday afternoons, the avant garde Mercury Theatre, along with Ma Perkins, Capatin Midnight, Eddie Cantor and Bing Crosby. And for technological (and IMO barbaric) reasons, we shall never see their like again, as the evolution of travel and the mass media has moved on, leaving behind glorious remnants, offering in its place speed and efficiency but very little in the way of real beauty, and nothing in the way of art. |
| George Tirebiter | 3/15/2002 0 replies |
| I had no idea the television networks were directly responsible for the virtual end of black and white films. B & W film production did essentially come to an end in the second half of the 1960s, but I always assumed that was because the widespread availability of color TV in that period meant that people would no longer pay to see B & W movies in a theatre when they could see color programming at home for free. I think a lot of films today would be better in B & W. |
| Eric Cooper | 3/17/2002 4 replies |
| It seems to me that CBS, at least, should be thanked for having the most interest in radio as an entertainment medium. CBS was the LAST network to silence radio drama in 1962 and even after that, kept Arthur Godfrey on for another 10 years. CBS was the main home for the revival of radio in the 70s as well: CBS Radio Mystery Theater (1974-82 and again in 1998), Sears Radio Theater (1978-79) and General Mills Adventure Theater (1977-78). CBS owned station KNX , here in the Los Angeles area, promptly put on OTR to fill the vacated CBS MT time slot beginning Jan 3rd 1983 and the KNX Drama Hour is STILL going!! |
| JB | 3/17/2002 3 replies |
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Glad to hear it. In Boston it's hard to find OTR on local stations. Almost everything is local or syndicated talk on AM; rock or classical/jazz/NPR on FM, with scarcely anything in-between. There's almost no individuality to radio stations around here, as there was even twenty years ago, and little diversity for those who want something different (and I don't mean salsa).
I know Mutual left the air in 1998, but did they keep with radio drama longer than most or shorter? In my lifetime I can't recall any Mutual radio that wasn't news or talk. They were very much a player in the OTR days, if a specialized one. |
| Elizabeth McLeod | 3/17/2002 2 replies |
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Mutual discontinued its entire "old-school" program service on June 2, 1957. The network ceased to exist in its original cooperative-program-service form after it was taken over by General Teleradio, which was interested only the WOR television properties in New York. General promptly merged with RKO Pictures, forming RKO-General, which unloaded the remains of the Mutual network on Hal Roach Productions (which was, itself, in its death throes at the time.)
After the General Teleradio takeover, Mutual existed in name only -- the network which operated under that name from that point forward had nothing in common structurally or organizationally with the WOR-WGN Mutual of the OTR era. |
| JB | 3/18/2002 1 replies |
| Too bad General Tire didn't keep Mutual and RKO together. Would've given "radio" pictures a whole new meaning. It's kind of ironic that the old RKO ended up that way, as it had been founded with a radio "link", and ended on a similar note. Thanks for the info. You are a cornucopeia of OTR knowledge. The "Mutual" of television was, I guess, DuMont, but they didn't last long, and were of course organized quite differently. I gather that Allen DuMont wanted to be the next David Sarnoff. (It seems odd to me that between the end of DuMont in the middle fifties till the rise of CNN and cable after around 1980, there was a quarter of a century where there were only three commercial TV networks. Odd perhaps isn't the right word, but there were other "powers" out there than the big three, and I remember reading from time to time in the seventies that either RKO General or Westinghouse was going to launch a full-fledged alternate network. Indeed, Westinghouse was a quite successful either mini-network or syndicator (I'm not sure what to call it), but never got much beyond news and talk shows. RKO General, if it generated any original programming, I don't know of it. Since each had a mammoth parent corporation quite capable of putting up the cash for such a project it seems peculiar that neither went all-out, as the the "big three" had become quite predictable and complacent by the early sixties, and it got more difficult to air offbeat programming. I guess the network grid, such as it was, was too strong, and challenging it too intimidating, in those pre-cable days.) |
| Elizabeth McLeod | 3/18/2002 0 replies |
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In a way, DuMont is still very much alive -- in the form of the Fox network. Before getting out of broadcasting, the DuMont company formed a partnership with Paramount, and spun its TV stations off into a new company called Metromedia. While Metromedia wasn't a network as such, it owned a number of TV stations which had formed the core of the DuMont network, including WNEW-TV in New York (formerly WABD-TV) and WTTG-TV in Washington.
Rupert Murdoch bought Metromedia in 1986 with the specific purpose of turning it back into a network -- and Fox was the result. So rather than going out of business, you could say that DuMont just took a thirty-year nap. |
| Stewart Wright | 3/17/2002 2 replies |
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There is a book that is due to be released in May, 2002 that will cover the last years of network radio. Here is the information from the publisher's, McFarland & Company, Inc., web site:
"Say Goodnight, Gracie The Last Years of Network Radio" By Jim Cox ISBN: 0-7864-1168-6 [208]pp. photographs, notes, appendix, bibliography, index $35 softcover 2002 Until the late 1940s, most Americans relied heavily upon radio, the only means of mass communication they knew, for information and entertainment. But with the 1950s came television sets and prosperity enabled more people to afford them. Radio began a decline. This work examines what could be called the final decade of AM network radio and the many factors that contributed to its decline. The first chapter is an overview of AM radio in the 1950s. The second chapter covers 1950 through 1953, when radio was still a popular medium but faced a need to make changes in its programing. Bill Paley and David Sarnoff strongly promoted radio in those years and the networks attempted to increase the ratings of their programs. Chapter three covers 1954 through 1956, three years in which radio experienced losses of its primary audience and some of its most popular shows (because of the pullout of advertisers), and an effort was made by the networks to keep their programs going and to convince audiences the medium was not on its way out. Chapter four, 1957 through 1960, chronicles the “end” of AM radio in homes, the cancellation of almost all remaining programs, network affiliates’ going independent, and the rise in popularity of “drive time” radio. Chapter five covers 1961 to the present and summarizes the major changes that have taken place.
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| Scott T | 3/19/2002 1 replies |
| Wasn't Theatre Five on ABC radio during the mid-60's? |
| Jim Widner | 3/23/2002 0 replies |
| There certainly was. It ran from August 3, 1964 through July 30th, 1965 nearly every day! Two of the producers were Lee Bowman and Ed Byron. |
| Charles Sexton | 3/19/2002 2 replies |
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Just another reflection on the impact TV had on the country and OTR in the late 40s. I still recall the image of otherwise sane adults and children standing in front of a department store window gazing at the television sets for sale and which were showing nothing but the test pattern! In the early days of television, especially in the medium sized cities, there was very limited programming available - often just a few hours a day - but the station's test pattern might be shown for several hours before or after the normal programming day. I'm not sure if the test pattern really served a purpose for the station other than advertising, but you can bet TV had made serious inroads into radio when people would stand outside, often in nasty weather, just to watch a blank screen. Even those families who could afford to actually own a television set in those days would leave the set on when there was no show playing and show off their new toy to admiring neighbors who marveled at the test pattern. Crazy. Another indicator of the impact TV had on OTR listening was what would happen when a family became the first to own a TV in the neighborhood. And you could tell when that happened even if you didn't hear about it personally. The antennas always gave the secret away. I can recall quite vividly showing up at a neighbor's house, along with other assorted friends, asking to watch just a little bit of one show and then staying all evening. And, it was not like we had never seen moving pictures before. To have the capability to see as well as hear programs in one's own home was quite spectacular.
Charles Sexton |
| JB | 3/19/2002 0 replies |
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We didn't have a television for some time when I was growing up, so my sister and I had to go next door to watch Superman at the house of neighbors who didn't have children! Those were the days!My aunt and uncle had a set, and we watched there when we visited.
There was a magic to television in those years. Sets were expensive, and apparently the prices didn't come down till well into the sixties. Most sets were consoles, and even the portables were heavy as lead. Test patterns often ran for an hour or so in the morning, before shows began. I can remember watching them, transfixed, as a small child. We often forget how different television was in its early years from the medium it later became. Up till around 1960 a lot of programming was heavily dramatic, often live, with anthologies predominating. And children's and syndicated action-adventure series were ubiquitous: The Lone Ranger, Robin Hood, Highway Patrol, Lassie, et al. It really became a different medium in the sixties, and changed again, less radically, in the seventies. Then cable came, and it changed once more. Radio, in contrast, changed very little, it seems, once the major networks took over and developed their programming styles. Many shows that started in the early thirties ran till well into the fifties, essentially defining OTR, from early on to nearly the end. Television had gone through a few phases even before cable. |
| jim isham | 3/19/2002 0 replies |
| I think the main purpose of the test pattern was for the benefit of installers and repairmen. In the smaller markets most programming didn't start until 5 or 6 p.m. The test pattern was broadcast so that installers could pinpoint the direction of the antenna and adjust the tv set as some in home adjustment had to be done also. Repairmen needed the test pattern also as "snow" didn't help much in the repair and alignment of sets. Has anyone ever complied a list of the radio shows that made a successful transition to TV? I have a TV Guide like magazine called "TV Forecast" dated April 29, 1950. It was for the Chicago, Milwaukee and Grand Rapids areas. There's a column in it by Jack Mabley talking about Bob Hope's first TV show. He felt that when the 'varsity' came over from radio that 'Mr. Television, Milton Berle would fade'. He predicted Bob would be a sucess making the transition from radio to TV. Jack Benny was an 'unknown quantity' because he'd been using the same jokes and same situations on radio for 20 years. He also felt that Red Skelton would be a sucess and couldn't wait to see |