" Turn-On " What survives?

Apparently The Monkees (a trio at the time) appeared on an episode, but it never aired.

 

Literally where in the entire thread does anyone say that the show was fine for '69 or that it will be too much for today? You're raging about non-existent outrage.

 

uh huh...LOL....

 

Schlatter is a pack-rat and has saved everything from his career, at least everything he owned, controlled, or produced. I have been told that many (if not most) of the original Laugh-In master videotapes were destroyed or damaged when a fire sprinkler went off in a warehouse decades ago, but they had already been transferred to better video formats and preserved several years before. I don't know enough details to say how much this is true, or if Schlatter's other shows like Turn On were affected. I think the reality is that a lot of these shows are almost worthless because they just weren't any good and there's no audience for them. What was bad in 1969 is most likely still bad today.

BTW, there are tons and tons of good and successful TV shows that are also not available for viewing today. I think it's more of a tragedy that those aren't viewable than the real obscurities like this one.

 

I remember reading about the project in Post magazine many years ago, and about how difficult it was to transfer them because all the tapes had physical spices in them. 2-inch quadrature machines were so expensive that they would record the segments, then cut the tape with a razor blade, and assemble the master tape for the network to show, rather than dubbing to a second tape.

 

Yes, the great editor Art Schneider pioneered the techniques used on Laugh-In and actually wrote a whole book on it:

Jump Cut : Memoirs of a Pioneer Television Editor

It's a fascinating story, since they shot the show on tape but (because the equipment was primitive back then), they then transferred the show to film, Schneider cut the film, and then another guy used splices to match the videotape to the film numbers. Eventually, more sophisticated systems came in and they were able to do a lot of this with computers. When you consider the hundreds and hundreds of cuts in every episode of Laugh-In, the amount of work involved was absolutely ridiculous.

 

I think this has less to do with being PC and everything to do with a bunch of unfunny jokes being made in extremely poor taste in a feeble attempt to be outrageous and cutting edge, if the above synopsis is any indication. The whole thing sounds insipid.

 

fair enough...

 

"Turn on, tune in, drop out." - Timothy Leary

Name of the show, what viewers didn't do, what the sponsor did.

 

You hit the nail on the head.

 

Not to turn this into another Beatles thread, but a good analogy would be the current obsession with the unreleased Carnival of Light. That fact that it hasn't been heard or seen since it was first broadcast fifty years ago only serves to build a mystique around it that (no doubt) far outweighs any intrinsic artistic value it may possess.

 

Yeah, the excerpts released just show it was an interesting experiment, but not really of any commercial value. Just a lot of weird ****.

 

Or London after midnight, the lost silent movie from 1927.

But no-one said Turn-on was a misunderstood masterpiece. Anyway the best remedy to unreasonable ideas would be to see it.

 

I realize I have not mentioned the premise. Yes, it actually had a premise. In the opening, before the stuff you read in the synopsis, you had two technician guys in lab coats sitting down at a computer console. "I've never programmed a program before....." . The idea was that this show was put together by a computer. Make sense now? Kind of like the computers attempt at a love song in Electric Dreams.

 

So exactly true. Classic anthology shows, like Playhouse 90, US Steel Hour, Studio One, to name just a few. Great dramas, like Slattery's People, The Defenders, The Nurses. Great sitcoms, like He and She, Governor and JJ. Turn On is a curiosity as an abysmal failure, similar to other one and dones, like You're In The Picture. When I watched the episode a few years ago, I kept looking at my watch waiting for it to be over.

 

Some of those anthology shows ard available, although rarely entirely, streaming or on DVD. Studio One for example.

 

Those are all very fine shows I'd love to see again. I'm not sure why Playhouse 90 never got released, but I think part of the problem is that CBS either junked the videotapes (for the ones shot on tape) or can't get them to play back, so all they have left are pretty ugly-looking kinescopes. And the shows are badly dated. I think they could still be restored to a point, but Viacom/CBS are pretty cheap bastids and don't want to spend the money.

The single-season shows are really tough. There are still minimum payments that have to be made to all the craft unions, like SAG-AFTRA, WGA, DGA, and so on, plus music payments, so you'd be surprised how much it costs to clear the rights to these things. It could potentially cost (say) $10,000 per episode even before the mastering, so if they have to spend $250,000 on rights even before He & She gets mastered, it could be nearly half a million bucks by the time the discs hit the street or the shows were available on stream. And that's a lotta dough for a show where there's probably fewer than 10,000 people who remember it or want to see it.

 

There is a 4 DVD set - selected highlights only - of Playhouse 90.

 

Not true at all. From around somewhere in the second season, the show was videotaped and those 2-inches were all transferred over years ago and are well preserved. Prior to that, they all exist on kinescope. The reason nothing has been done is rights issues. All of the performers were contracted for a one time appearance and in order to do anything with the shows, CBS would have to track down the heirs to get clearances, which would be a nightmare.

 

I don't think this is correct, and I'll put in an email to Ron Furmanek, who is one of the resident experts on Hullaballoo. He will confirm or deny the existence of the videotapes. What's for sure is that whenever I see a Hullaballoo clip used anywhere on any show, it's always a kinescope. Well, except for the recreation of Hullaballoo in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywoo.

 

What are talking about? We were discussing Playhouse 90. Who said anything about Hullabaloo?

 

Sorry, I didn't see Playhouse 90 in your message. I would be extremely surprised if any of the 1956 videotapes survive. After that... it's possible, but the restoration would be an absolute nightmare. They did 134 episodes of varying lengths, and again, the commercial potential is pretty much zero. There are a handful of Playhouse 90 shows I'd like to see, but I think the number of people who'd join me are maybe a few hundred (mainly on this group).

There are a ton of late-1950s/early 1960s shows that are effectively gone, partly because of the lack of availability of master recordings, partly because they've fallen apart, partly because nobody wants to spend the money for restoration, and partly because the commercial potential is zilch. Playhouse 90 is pretty much "all of the above." And again, the legal clearance problems are off-the-charts complicated and expensive: I once saw the clearance papers for a Motown special I worked on, and it was a notebook of over a hundred pages, detailing correspondence with lawyers, guilds, unions, and other organizations. And I think that took something like 4 months to compile.

Hullaballoo is another videotape show (48 episodes from 1965-1966) that's also hard to see. You can get segments of the show here and there, but complete episodes are nearly impossible to find... and what's out there is just kinescopes. The problem of "tape wiping" and TV episode destruction has been debated and discussed many, many times on this forum in the past 15 years. Shows that are this "dated," very much of their time, are really hard to get re-released. I'm a big fan of That Was the Way It Was, which was a great show back in the day, but the same problems apply. Like the lyrics of the theme song say, "it's over, let it go."

 

I don't have the Playhouse 90 DVD set, but I would not be surprised if it had used mostly kinescopes.

It's the downside of ever extending copyrights longer and longer. It's great to prevent people from copying Steamboat Willie, or whatever that mouse's oldest picture is, but in these cases it prevents companies from doing anything with their physical copies.
Assuming that they'd want to, anyway.

 

Agree on what you say about Playhouse 90 having limited appeal and too many clearance issues. But like I said earlier, from around mid-2nd season on, they are all preserved and transferred from the quad tapes to a modern format. CBS did a far better job of tape preservation than either of the other 2 networks did. Of course there are exceptions. I don't think the 2-inches on Way Out survived, only poor kinescopes. But a couple of years ago, when Decades was showing Studio One, I was surprised that episodes from towards the end of the run were showing up from 2-inch tape copies.

Only 4 Hullabaloo shows exist on color tape, and those were ones done in LA. All of the rest survive on b/w kines. Almost all of these are around and can be found in collector's circles, as can Shindig.

TW3, the tapes were offered by NBC to the producer and he declined. Paley has a few and I believe on the last show exists on tape. I doubt any more than that was saved even as kines.

 

Or you can look at the other way, as Fred Silverman said: half of the country hated Archie, and the other half loved him.