NBC colour series: Shirley Temple Show 1960-61
 

G'day all. I guess many of you might already be aware of this but thought I'd mention it anyways.

I have stumbled upon another excellent early NBC living colour television series called "The Shirley Temple Show" which ran from 1960 to 1961 and there's a DVD release of the series:
http://store.nexternal.com/shared/St...unt2=103965401
A trailer of this release can be seen here on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3s6_A09rUk
along with a bunch of other clips from the series users have uploaded.

I have to say that sea creature from the Little Mermaid episode played by Ray Walston looks a bit like a band member of KISS with the black and white makeup and that black costume hehehe.

I am absolutely in WOW of the rich colour pictures from this show, it is so GOOD!!!!! :D The technicians must of been highly paid to really tweak those TK-41s to the utmost optimum quality!!! I am most certainly gonna be ordering myself a copy of the series!!! :D

Wow thanks for posting I'll definitely be ordering a copy. So, can someone please explain to me again how digital is so much better than analog?? I mean to say that we have been brainwashed into believing that we need to settle for over corrected monotone color scenes. I hope50 years from now someone will see recordings from today and say wow. But I am not holding my berath on that one.... I love analog tube gear.

I somehow remember this series as being produced on color film and not color videotape. I certainly could be wrong. If on color video I would order the box set. Color film doesn't interest me. Aussie Bloke could you or any other VK member verify the medium used?

-Steve D.

From the clips I saw on You Tube, definitely early color videotape. It looks great! I wonder if they included the NBC Peacock at the beginning of each episode? Seeing these early NBC color shows without the Peacock isn't the same.

Gilbert

Definitely colour videotape. As you'll see in this YouTube clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXoHru5Hedo where Shirley ends the show she is chromakeyed on the background of the NBC studio and two RCA TK-41s can be seen up the far back, plus the halos around her dress sequins when reflecting the spotlights is a dead giveaway, and also there's that dark vertical band on the left side of the picture seen in the animal head trophy bit which is a typical characteristic of a TK-41 picture.

Steve, I'm going to line up with you; when I first viewed the clip in question I thought film and not video. No reason really, just a gut reaction.

Pete

Ah, just saw AUSSIE BLOKE's post. Steve, we must be getting old...?

Folks it's video. Even some nice quad video tape issues on top of tk-41 setup problems. I wonder how old the masters were before they were transfered to a modern format.

Yes, the peacock was used before each of the shows of Shirley Temple's Storybook, remember the show well.

thanks for posting - the color really is gorgeous - just ordered a copy.

Thanks for pointing this out - I had never heard of the show before.

It looks ideal for my wife & stepdaughter - miles better than the flip little brats shown on the Disney Channel. I'm ordering a copy next week.

Isn't that Agnes Moorehead as the Wicked Witch?

The color is nice but definitely Videotape.

Perhaps it could serve as one of our NTSC/CT-100/15GP22 showpieces. Might there be a way to determine how close the DVD is to what was actually broadcast in 1960-61? I'm wondering specifically about the composite output of a 'quality' DVD player versus... well, what?, the color RF signal that would have been broadcast back then, or maybe the colorplexer output? Can anyone say pipedream...:scratch2:

Pete

Speaking of early color, someone has posted clips from two 1959 "Kraft Music Hall" episodes with Milton Berle on YouTube:

January 21st, 1959:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF-BwHjJyKU

March 18, 1959:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmEYl...eature=related

Great stuff!

Jeff Martin
Chicago, IL

This stuff looks amazing-haven't been this excited since I saw Mary Martin's 1960 "Peter Pan" shown with great ceremony on NBC in 1989. I was 27 then, so of course never saw it when new. I was stunned at the quality of that 1960 color videotape. And I commiteed the program to a high grade TDK VHS tape that night. Never got around to buying the Laserdisc, which I regret now. I'd read about the Shirley Temple Storybook show, but never saw anything of it until tonight. Great story choices, the production design resembles the original books in the ones that I recognized-especially "Madelleine". The credits omitted Cathleen Nesbitt, whom I instantly recognized. Was that Bea Lillie in the "Pippi Longstocking" clip? What a great-looking series! Definitely on the want list now.

I think it's Renie Riano.

Is that Jonathon Winters at 1:02 in this clip? Kinda looks like him but not sure if it is.

Yes, it is.

This is good info... Thanks...

I remember that show as a kid but I also wasn't aware that it was produced on video and not on film, the colors are stunning.

I watched it on Our B & W 27 inch Kaye Halbert... So did not know it was in Color... I was thinking about this the other Day but foprgot it was Her Show... Thought She was a Guest on a Show...

Just ordered this set on Amazon for 29 bucks and free shipping

Closest thing to a time machine I've ever seen!

G'day all.

Thought I'd reply to this old thread of mine to say I finally bought a copy of the Shirley Temple Show set and I am totally impressed!!! :D

I have watched the Little Mermaid episode and have skim previewed the others so far and am watching The Land Of Oz as I type, what can I say about the colour but totally WOW that is what I call colour!!! :D The colour is absolutely amazing and looks just like technicolour but created electronically and at a fluid motion rate of 60fps. Also the video effects used is absolutely amazing and cutting edge for the time, the blue screen chroma keying, the kaleidoscope effects, the funky screen wipes, picture ripping effects etc.

And the shows themselves are so enjoyable to watch and I look forward to viewing them all. :D During the watching and previewing a few funny things stand out, the witch's barrister on the Little Mermaid episode looks like he could easily be a band member of KISS, the world's strongest man on the Pippi Longstocking episode resembles WWE/WWF wrestler George Steele dressed in an 80s glam rocker hair band outfit hehehe, and on the Winnie The Pooh episode I was bawling with laughter when Shirley says "Winnie The Pooh always went poohing" for obvious reasons best not mentioned hahahahaha lol . Watching the Land Of Oz episode right now, just gotta love that wooden log horse he is cool and quite a character! It's amazing how many familiar stars appeared on her excellent show too, Jonathan Winters, Jonathan Harris, a younger Angela Cartwright, and many more.

Anyways the DVD set was well worth the money and as stated previously I highly anyone into early colour or who are Shirley Temple fans to buy this DVD box set, it is GOOD!!! :D

As with the postings of the January 1960 edition of The Steve Allen Plymouth Show, this underscores how well-kept and -maintained the RCA TK-41 I/O color cameras at their Burbank studios were (if compared with the same cameras at their New York Rockefeller Center studios) - and how (and why) they remained in service even with the introduction of the disastrous TK-42 camera (and subsequent TK-43), with NBC not even bothering to replace these workhorses until after RCA's three-tube Plumbicon TK-44A's were first introduced at decade's end.

Didn't NBC, at the time of Ms. Temple's show, still use their proprietary method of recording color onto videotape (as evidenced on the 1958 dedication of WRC-TV's Nebraska Avenue studios and Fred Astaire's first NBC-TV special) that was considered an improvement over the low-band color videotaping of other machines, whether RCA or Ampex? If so, that might be the other equation of why this still looks good for a show that's about 50 years old or so.

Another example of the TK-41.
 

To see how good the TK-41 could look, check out "The Best of The Andy Williams Show" DVD from Image Entertainment. By this time, the TK-41 (the C model, I think, had dichroic prism-blocks instead of front-surface mirrors.

When I was attending Cal Poly, Pomona, in the mid-sixties, someone said you could just walk into NBC Burbank without guards or anyone checking you. Sure enough, I went in one afternoon and found my way into one of the studio camera control areas.

I was able to watch them "shade up" the 41s in preparation for taping "Truth or Consequences" with Bob Barker. The color on the RCA monitors looked beautiful. Of course I wasn't as critical a viewer then, but they did look good.

Later I worked summer relief at NBC Burbank in 1970, developing newsfilm in the basement. During that time I was told that when Shirley Temple taped her shows, she insisted they do it on Ampex equipment. Presumably this was on low-band VR-1000s at the time.

When I got there, the tape area was mostly high-band TR-70s and VR-2000s. I recall there was only one VR-1000 left that was used to dub shows for Hawaii.

Security was beefed up when, the story I heard goes, someone drove away with a just-delivered studio audio recorder from the shipping dock in the back one day.

We were NABET local 53, so the wages were excellent.

Great info. I liked seeing the TK-41 at ETF, spacious component layout, swing out electronics sub assemblies, better than heavier? solid state TK-43.

The Shirley Temple clip in question is definitely film. You can see the burn marks near the end of the clip.

What clip are you referring to exactly (repeat the link, please) and what burn marks? - I only see video on the ones I looked at.

The IMDB says it was 35mm Film, clearly what's seen on Youtube is video not film.

Perhaps the B&W episodes were film and they changed to video when they went to color?

Well as I have the series, I can easily say the show is DEFINITELY done on videotape shot from RCA TK-41 cameras in the NBC studios because the motion is very fluid like how our eyes see motion, at the end of this clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXoHr...eature=related at 2:00 you'll see Shirley chroma keyed over the NBC studio 2 which the TK-41 cameras are seen in the background. With the burn marks, if you are referring to the dark vertical burn line at the left end of the picture, that is actually a common artifact with image orthicon cameras (colour and B&W) and can often be seen on any program shot with them, here's an example from a B&W IO used at the Sunbury '73 music festival in Australia http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_xRfaGK4DI the vertical burn lines at the left side can be seen at the start and at 1:52 and 2:19. I actually wonder why IO tubes have that artifact myself?

Anyways the series is definitely a RCA TK-41 colour camera to 2 inch quad videotape production!

The vertical bars on the left edge are yoke ringing in the horizontal deflection. If you look carefully at the music festival clip, you will see horizontal non-linearity (alternate stretching and compression) in that area as the camera pans. The scan velocity is being modulated, which affects the sensitivity and produces the darker/lighter bars on bright scene material.

According to Brooks, Tim and Earle Marsh, "The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows," 1946-Present 5th Edition. New York, Ballantine Books, 1992, there was a break in-between the initial series of specials, "Shirley Temple's Storybook," on and the Shirley Temple series, both on NBC, in which Shirley switched to ABC-TV for a season.

These shows had to be in black-and-white of course, because ABC didn't have color at all, and probably were done on film as that network was much more film oriented (witness all the Warner Bros. westerns and their Disney shows (Disneyland, Zorro, Mickey Mouse Club). Perhaps this is why some of you believe that the color clips were on film. I don't know this for sure as I don't remember seeing the ABC shows, but it's my best guess.

Sir, succesful video chromakey was not developed until the early 1970s, with the BBC's "Colour Separation Overlay" being the first to be widely used. The technical necessity of maintaining three colour channels throughout the production process and having a trigger based upon change of vector was too technically involved in these all-composite days. Chromakey started in earnest with Dr. Who, including one late Troughton episode which actually used a colour camera to utilize the effect, though the show was mastered in black and white. Jon Pertwee's doctor took full advantage of the technique and of course it took off for weather forecasts etc.

The process in the Shirley Temple shows is diode key, exactly the same as used for monochrome. Shirley is standing in front of a BLACK background, and the green channel (or fourth all-colour vidicon if present) is used to trigger the switch when the scan moves from black to lit subject. Shirley must have her hair well-lit and sparkling to avoid black spots, and she wears nothing dark. That registration is iffy on the TK41 is the reason the image doesn't fit well at the border, plus there's the unpredictability of a trigger depending entirely upon change of level rather than a more precise swing of colour vector.

And yes this is unmistakably colour video, with the shift in registration and linearity, yoke ringing, and mask edge bleeding as the scene switches from camera to camera. Film is only scanned with ONE camera throughout, after all.

Beautiful footage that I never knew existed. I'll be ordering this DVD, thanks.

It's hard to see in the Youtube clip, so I took a look at the DVD in stop-frame, and it appears that the background was blue, not black. I don't know what signal was used for keying at the time, but I suspect it was simply the blue channel - color vector selection would have been too complex at the time, I believe.

Also, the Howdy Doody episode "Clarabell Speaks" (1960) was shot with TK-41s, and used blue screen for the opening scene, in which it failed pretty miserably, showing a big area of blue background to the right of the performer for a number of seconds, plus continually in the corners where a roundie monitor wouldn't show it.

I also recall the local NBC station in Chicago (I think that's who) doing a blue-screen novelty number with TK-41s in which they deliberately dressed the female singer in blue and keyed in some film and artwork. They showed the blue dress at the beginning and end with the art effects appearing at some appropriate place mid-number.

My guess is that blue screen, not black, was the regular practice at early color studios.

I also recall seeing keyed effects with TK-41s where the optical orbiters were kept running, so the foreground and background slowly swam in small circles with respect to each other.

Yes it was, the blue screen was common using the blue channel before the encoder. From that point it worked just like a monochrome key. It was almost as simple as taking the RGB from the camera.

Everything I've ever learned during my tenure as a broadcast tech was that there was no vector chromakeying until 1969. HOWEVER I can see one channel from the camera being used for a diode key. Blue is both the best and worst colour to use, worst because it's the softest, lowest gain channel, best because it has the narrowest range of potential mixing into a resulting final shade. - That's a messy explanation but look at an NTSC chromacity diagram. The blue background would have to be close to the actual chromacity of the blue (or not-yellow) camera filter. GREEN on the other hand is the highest resolution, hignest gain channel. But it is also used in the widest range of matrix shades; thus, for instance, a green diode key would trigger even on flesh tones. a VECTOR key however would only trigger on that precise shade of green, not as part of a mix including green.. ... A channel diode key would trigger on any shade that includes a certain degree of blue, a vector key would only trigger on that PRECISE tint. This is why these early blue screen keys have such awful keyed edges, it's a low-res imprecise keying reference. .... A vector chromakey is fed RGB from the camera so as to avoid edge artifacts from the encoding, even though a vector key COULD use a baseband composite signal.

Shirley Temple Show ad

Thank you for posting the ad.

Hi to All,

Seeking to purchase the Shirley Temple NBC show DVD(s), i looked up the original site indicated by Aussie Bloke: the discs are not present anymore.

http://store.nexternal.com/shared/St...unt2=103965401

I then tried Amazon and found this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listi...&condition=all

US $500.00 for 4 episodes! what's wrong here, i never knew a DVD could reach 500 Bucks! - totally crazy!

Best Regards

jhalphen
Paris/France

Jerome, they are the first thing on the upper left, $29.99

http://www.nexternal.com/shirley/the...1-dvd-p25.aspx