Elvis on Milton Berle Show in colour

[Joel Cairo]

Originally Posted by Aussie Bloke

G'day all.

A few years ago I posted a thread which I questioned who was the first rock'n'roller to appear on colour television and I mentioned Elvis Presley on the Milton Berle Show in 1956.

Anyhow as an update out of curiosity I did some research as The Milton Berle Show was in colour during 1956 and I found some photos of Elvis on the 5th June 1956 episode with a TK-41 in the background, so he definitely appeared in colour on that show performing "Hound Dog" with his (at the time) controversial gyrating hip movements.

Also I imagine his 3rd April 1956 appearance on the show on the USS Hancock ship must of been in colour too due to lack of haloing on the highlights:

I don't believe there's been a question about whether or not the shows were originally broadcast in color... the question has always been whether the Milton Berle kinescopes were somehow color encoded, and the answer appears to be "No". NBC didn't introduce their lenticular color kinescope process until September of 1956, and there is no indication from the prints I've seen of the June 1956 show that they are anything other than a standard B&W film transcription of the color broadcast, which NBC had (by that time) been doing for a couple of years.

As you pointed out, there were a few color kinescopes made by NBC through the use of another process, but they are indeed quite rare, and probably only made through special request of the producers of the respective programs.

- Kevin

[NewVista]

Originally Posted by Joel Cairo

, there were a few color kinescopes made by NBC .

- Kevin

Maybe some color Kine's of Rowan & Martin's 'Laugh In' where they used Kine copies for some difficult editing or something ? Of course master VT copies also still exist.

I think they used kine copies of 'Laugh In' for broadcast in Australia as a convenient standards conversion (there was a resultant beat pattern on the screen from 525 lines vs 625 lines )