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Hi! My name is Bruce Simon and I've been collecting
Vintage TV programming and TV related material since the 1960's.
I hope you find this collection of videos a little different than most
as it reflects my long-standing interest in not only the great stars and
classic shows of the early years of television, but the history of commercial
television itself, the primitive beginnings of the major networks, the
efforts of the early independent stations to compete, the many, many program
formats that have come and gone and the various means used to promote
those programs.
Over 40 years ago, in July of 1969, I viewed three 16mm kinescopes (Kinescopes
were made by a 16mm camera trained on a monitor during a live broadcast)
that were fished out of a dumpster by a dedicated film collector. They
were an AMOS 'N ANDY with the original Blatz Beer commercials, one of
only two live appearances on television by Humphrey Bogart on THE JACK
BENNY PROGRAM and the one-hour unaired pilot to the television version
of YOU BET YOUR LIFE starring Groucho Marx! In the dumpster!
Film collectors and preservationists have been working for decades to
save our motion picture heritage, long before the studios had a clue
about what they were actively destroying and letting decay through benign
neglect. It's just as important to preserve out television programming
from the last 50-plus years now. Not just the shows the studios can
release again and again on video cassette and on cable, they'll be just
fine as long as they can turn a buck, but the thousands and thousands
of hours of live programming from TV's earliest days, shown once and
discarded, residing in dark corners of network warehouses, the closets,
attics and garages of the stars and production staff who worked on them
and in dumpsters, landfills and the bottom of the East River (thats
where you'll find most of DuMont's kinescopes, they were dumped there
to save storage fees).
Luckily, large collections of surviving programs reside in the collections
of The Museum of Television and Radio in New York City and Los Angeles,
The Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago and the UCLA Film
and Television Archive in Los Angeles. Scholars and other interested
parties can view them onsite, but to watch them on your own electronic
hearth, that's where I come in!
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