The other day I told you about the DVD sets I picked up. I've had time to start going through some of them a little bit, and thought I'd share a few interesting items from one set.
The
Studio One set is very interesting. You get a pretty good cross-section of the program's life, from its somewhat primitive beginnings to the later years when it seemed relatively polished. According to the booklet in the box set, many of these episodes were presumed lost. However, when a Westinghouse facility was being torn down about a decade ago, somebody found a stash of film reels with CBS stickers on them. They turned out to be kinescoped
Studio One episodes. One thing led to another, and the film reels were saved. Others were found in odd places ("Twelve Angry Men" was found in the personal papers of a distinguished lawyer). While I'm glad so much has been found and saved, and while I hope there are many more treasures still awaiting discovery, my heart nevertheless breaks at knowing what
was destroyed, either accidentally or intentionally.
At any rate, the earliest episode of
Studio One in the set is the December 12, 1948 production of "The Medium," adapted from the opera by Gian-Carlo Menotti. It's the third episode in the series, and an interesting look at the early, early days of CBS television.

Here's the title card for the episode. It's up for perhaps two or three minutes with music and a voice-over behind. The series at this point is billed as
CBS Television's Studio One. It's sustaining, with no commercials, probably because the program was still new and sponsorship hadn't been worked out by that point. (The next episode in the set, the June 22, 1949 presentation of "June Moon," does have the program's signature Westinghouse sponsorship.)
The title card goes directly to the opening credits. You see the circle with all the Zodiac symbols, and then the picture dims a bit as a second camera's picture is superimposed. The opening credits are done on playing cards that are thrown down, one on top of another; at the end of the credits, the cards disappear and the circle is revealed as a tablecloth on the set.
The opening credits take a long time, too. But, this was a different time, and part of the fun of watching these episodes is seeing how things were done then. For instance, you can always tell when there's going to be a superimposed title or image on the screen because the picture turns darker. (White lettering for titles was done on a black piece of art board and shot with a separate camera, and the two pictures were combined in the control room. This was long before character generators.)
Since there's no commercials, the program breaks after the first act for station identification. After the title card, you see this, the logo that CBS Television used before the 1951 advent of William Golden's famous "eye" logo. It's just three spotlit letters and a dignified "This is CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System" voice-under by the announcer.
And here's the station identification card. In this case, it's the CBS owned-and-operated outlet in New York. The WCBS call was relatively new for channel 2; not long before, it had been WCBW. "This is WCBS-TV, New York, channel two on your dial."
That's how it looked at the beginning, not only for Studio One but also for CBS Television. Though I have a handful of episodes of The Ed Wynn Show in my collection, this episode of Studio One is the earliest example of CBS television programming in my collection, and it's the best look I have at how it was done back then. I'm eager to look through other episodes and to see how things changed as the program, and the network, grew.
And I also hope to do more of these kinds of posts from my video archive, too. They're very labor-intensive, but I have so much fun doing them.