G'day all.

I might of posted this a long time back but thought I'd post it again. In my transferring of beta tapes I came across an old B&W movie from 1947 entitled "Something In The Wind" and at the end of the film there was a mock television studio setup with completely abstract design TV cameras and control room monitors. Seeing this movie can now be viewed on YouTube, here is a link to the final segment of the film featuring the studio setup:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruJ83Y6hglA

I like how the fake cameras were designed, they certainly have been made with style!!! In a sense they kind of look like medical vidicon cameras that would be mounted from the ceiling to film operations like in this image http://uv201.com/Photo%20Pages/Photo%20Images/rca_lab_3.jpg . And the monitors look pretty cool too even though they are props with pictures superimposed or keyed onto them. Whoever designed the set had a pretty cool imagination!!!

Whoever designed it must have seen Metropolis! Cool indeed.

The set at 1:15 is real, looks like an RCA console with a 630 chassis but I can't pin down the model.

Large rectangular screens in 1947??? Television was so new then that no one knew what a camera would look like so they tried to make them into a Buck Rogers looking scene as that was exciting then. Too bad that prop doesn't exist today as I would like to examine that camera and the dentist's chair. It's easy to see why that style never became a norm in the TV industry! You had to hold onto any angle you made and dollying the camera? Who came up with that idea??

Those cameras were stylish but very impractical - the camera operator had no view of what might be entering the picture from outside the frame.