Originally published at: Watch: 32 opening themes from forgotten 1950s TV shows | Boing Boing
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Worth watching to the end. My day is better after seeing Ray Milland in a swanky apartment, snobbishly pouring a bottle of Schlitz into a fancy glass.
I wish a lot of the “Hour” shows were preserved. They were often carryovers from Radio, and had great skit and musical performances from very famous folks. I have lazily collected old radio shows, there is some awesome stuff on those sponsored hours.
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I thought I knew a thing or two about TV history, but I hadn’t heard of ANY of these shows (even the Lucy/Desi show threw me for a loop – it must have been an iteration of I Love Lucy). The wonder is that any of these intros still exist, since a lot of shows in the '50s were live, and kinescopes survive only spottily.
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Gulp. I remember several of these. A couple of things struck me. First, that in most of the earlier shows all on screen titles were also read by an announcer. Second, in the early sitcoms the show’s creator got top or near-the-top billing, before the stars. Third, the protagonist of quite a few comedies bore the first name of the actor playing him/her (this gimmick lingered on for years). Finally, I’d forgotten how many shows used to be sponsored by a single product, providing the opportunity for things like Ray Milland pouring his Schlitz.
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What rabbit hole have I fallen into… There are a lot of these:
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There was a “throw it up on the wall and see what sticks” approach to the early days of mass television in the 1950s. It wasn’t always the “Golden Age of TV” we now talk about by a longshot.
They’d often recycle popular radio shows, shoehorn popular comedians into generic premises, or buy the rights to a play or a “book of month club” bestseller as the basis for the show. TV production costs were much cheaper than they were for movies so they could do this for about a decade until they figured out what worked.
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(linked to time) Holy crap, I want a complete set of the Playhouse 90s. Wikipedia says it was on for four years and 133 episodes. I bet there was some awesome stuff. This one is amazingly star-studded and adapted by Rod Serling!
There seems to be quite a few on youtube.
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The Lucy/Desi show may have been the test show to see how audiences would react to a mixed couple on tv. Yeah… Lucy and Desi as a mixed couple. TV execs though this would scandalous to put on tv at the time. However TV audiences were way ahead of the execs.
Is it just me… or is that “Norby” opening super creepy… Seems like it should be a horror show. 
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No, it was after I Love Lucy. A slightly different format, hour long episodes which ran a few months apart. As I recall, Desi was not in the best health and needed a lighter workload.
“the network’s intention to present something unusual” is doing a lot of work…
If anyone interested in more of this, “Please Stand By: a prehistory of television” might scratch that itch. There was a divergence between TV as a force for culture (as we think of the BBC or CBC, accurate or not) and as a sales tool. Turns out a subscription/license model yields different results than a “free” (ad-supported) model. A UK TV license is £157/year at present.
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