Blog Post Jerry Mathers— "Beaver Cleaver" of "Leave it to Beaver" is Now Online With the release of Leave it to Beaver : The Complete Series this week, the Archive is posting Jerry Mathers' entire Archive interview. Jerry Mathers was interviewed by the Archive of American Television on June 20, 2006; click here to watch his entire four hour interview. Interview description:...
Blog Post Director Walter Grauman gets creative on "Peter Gunn" In his Archive interview, director Walter Grauman vividly recalls a story about one of the episodes he directed for the 1950s-60s detective series Peter Gunn . Despite TV’s short production schedules, Grauman, still in the early part of his career, wanted to experiment with the lighting of a...
Blog Post Mitch Miller, TV's "Sing Along" Host, Has Died— Archive Interview Online Mitch Miller, who, through his TV show Sing Along with Mitch and a series of LPs, taught the public the lyrics to popular music in the '50s and '60s, has died at the age of 99. With his trademark mustache and goatee, and expressive conducting, Mitch Miller became an unlikely TV star when a one-shot...
Blog Post 60th Anniversary of "Crusader Rabbit"— TV's First Animated Series TV historians will tell you that "Felix the Cat" was one of the first images ever broadcast on television (when RCA broadcast a Felix doll in 1928 on experimental station W2XBS)— but it wasn't until the late '40s that the first animated character was created expressly for TV. In the late 1940s,...
Blog Post 50 Years Ago America Watched "The Great Debates" with candidates Kennedy and Nixon "The Great Debates"— a series of discussions with then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy— aired network-wide on September 26, October 7, October 13, and October 21, 1960. Variety called the first debate a "dud," but history has said otherwise, labeling it...
Blog Post New to DVD: The Archive of American Television Interview with TIm Conway and Harvey Korman TV legends Tim Conway and Harvey Korman get serious in their interviews for the TV Academy Foundation's Archive of American Television. In this 3-disc set, each is interviewed separately about their solo careers, and then the two are brought together to discuss their longtime partnership, including...
Blog Post "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" At 40 On September 19, 1970, The Mary Tyler Moore Show debuted and ran for seven perfect seasons. As part of a Saturday night line-up considered among the best ever in TV (in the 1973-74 season, the other shows were: All in the Family , M*A*S*H , The Bob Newhart Show , and The Carol Burnett Show ), the...
Blog Post Silver Anniversaries of "The Golden Girls" and "227" When The Golden Girls debuted on September 14, 1985, Variety called it "a funny, fast-paced, well-written sitcom with all the earmarks of a potential hit." They called it. The series was a top ten hit for nearly its entire run and won Emmy Awards for each of its four leading players— Beatrice...
Blog Post 60 Years Ago Today, "The Hank McCune Show" Debuted on NBC-- Ushering in the Laugh Track on Network TV Hank McCune is a forgotten name in TV comedy. His TV series, The Hank McCune Show , however, has found its way into the history books. This filmed series was the very first to use a laugh track. The series aired locally in 1949 and may or may not have already incorporated the use of a laugh track...
Blog Post "Bonanza" Producer David Dortort Has Died-- Archive Interview Online David Dortort , executive producer of the classic TV westerns Bonanza and The High Chaparral , has died at the age of 93. When asked in his Archive of American Television interview how he'd like to be remembered, he said: "as a man who brought the message of love, peace, and harmony to television...
