Our (First) Regularly Scheduled Programme

When was the first regular schedule of TV programming?

Would you believe 1928?

Yes, that was the year WGY, your friendly General Electric radio station in Schenectady, New York, decided the time was ripe to beam telecasts into homes on a regular basis. Only there really wasn’t much programming in those days.

On January 13, 1928, WGY made what it said was the first televised broadcast into people’s homes. Three of them to be precise. Newspapers raved about the picture that came through the 3 inch-by 3 inch screen, but it couldn’t have been that terrific. The New York Times reported the programming consisted of a man (Leslie Wilkins) smoking and another man (Louis Dean) playing a ukulele. The New York Herald Tribune said it was a woman smoking and a man playing a banjo. The Schenectady Gazette was silent on the genders of the performers and only stated that instruments were played.

Nevertheless, WGY continued with its experimental broadcasts, with the picture on 37.8 metres and the sound on 379.5 metres (790 kilocycles). Reported the Times on May 11, 1928:

WGY TODAY TO START TELEVISION PROGRAMS
General Electric Company Will Broadcast Pictures Three Times a Week

The General Electric Company will start this afternoon a regular schedule of television broadcasting for the benefit of experiments and amateurs who have constructed television sets. Between 1:30 and 2 P. M. Eastern Daylight Time, it will send pictures from its laboratories in Schenectady over WGY, according to Martin P. Rice, manager of broadcasting. Hereafter on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays at the same time WGY will broadcast for television sets.
Faces of men talking, laughing or smoking will be broadcast today. No elaborate effects will be attempted in the near future.
WGY broadcast television a few minutes last night so that listener[s] might recognize the peculiar sounds which accompany the transmission of pictures by radio. The signal is an intermittent, high-pitched whirr, the pitch varying with the action before the transmitter.
The regular schedule is designed primarily to assist engineers in the development of a reliable and complete system of television, but is expected that radio amateurs may contribute something to the new art.

Radio magazines keenly followed television with in-depth articles and ads from companies with the materials needed to build your very own set at home. This was the era of mechanical television. That meant a scanning wheel at a studio transmitted the images to peoples’ homes; at WGY, the wheel scanned 24 lines, 20 times a second. Not exactly high-def. But it was a miracle for 1928.

So how many amateurs with home-built sets caught the first, regularly scheduled TV programme? None. At least that WGY knew about. Here’s the Times again, part of a story from May 20th:

TELEVISION WAVES PASS UNNOTICED
No One Reports Seeing Images Broadcast by WGY—Sale of Aluminum and Neon Lamps Reveals Great Activity in Boston
THE first week of television broadcasts from WGY, Schenectady, N.Y., have traveled off into the infinite without the slightest notice, according to a representative of the station. No one has reported reception of the moving images that have been wafted into space from the Mohawk Valley during the past week.

“Our plans to broadcast television appear to have made a hit, but so far no one has reported picking up the signals,” said a representative of WGY. “Boston has been most active in television plans. We have learned that more than 2,000 pounds of sheet aluminum have been sold there in the past few weeks for revolving discs, and several thousand neon lamps have been sold. We, of course, have received many requests for information on the building of television sets.”
Experimenters Are Active.
Radio amateur experimenters are displaying astonishing interest in television, and the reception of pictures by radio, according to the mail being received by the General Electric Company, at Schenectady, N.Y. The pleas from amateurs that WGY broadcast moving images instead of still pictures led to the decision to adopt a regular schedule for radio motion picture broadcasts on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, between 1:30 and 2 P.M., Eastern Daylight Saving Time. The 380-meter wave is used.
To the few who have television receivers motion pictures will appear. To the millions using standard broadcast receivers tuned to the 380-meter channel the ether wave carrying moving images sounds like howls, squeals and a series of clicks.
“The interest on the part of amateurs in television is astonishing,” said the WGY representative. “We have received hundreds of letters asking for our television schedule, which up to the present time, has been irregular. The amateurs ask that we give them something to work with, so we selected a fixed schedule. It’s anybody’s opportunity now. We have also received many letters asking where a certain type of neon lamp could be purchased, because it is the heart of the television receiver. Now that we have adopted a regular time for television broadcasts it will help us continue our own work, because a stage of development has been reached where a fixed schedule will aid our research engineers.
“I want to make it clear that these early television pictures will not be masterpieces. But no matter what we put on the air, the television experimenters at this stage of the development will not be too critical. They must not expect a fine picture. They should be happy just to catch a glimpse of a moving image, whether it be a research engineer, a pretty girl, a horse or a camel. The nature of the picture should make no difference.” He said the television broadcasts were merely intended to give greater scope to the experimental field. He said no idea existed at Schenectady when television receivers would be placed on the market for the public.
WRNY Plans Tests.
Station WRNY, operating on the 326-meter channel, is scheduled to begin a series of television tests on June 10, based upon a system developed by T.H. Nakken, President of the Nakken Television Corporation of Brooklyn, N.Y.

Mr. Nakken said that his plan is to introduce a system of television that can be used by any broadcasting station under present conditions; that is, when the waves are not more than ten kilocycle apart. If a wider ethereal band could be used, he said that the images might be more pleasant to look at, but today the air is so overcrowded with stations that a suitable wave band is not available for television. This presents one disadvantage in the fact that there is likely to be a slight flicker as one image leaves the screen and the next begins. This limitation can be eliminated as soon as a wider band is made available for television broadcasts, according to Mr. Nakken.
Federal Radio Commissioner O.H. Caldwell has sounded the warning that television will sooner or later face the inescapable fact that “our varied radio services tap and utilize only a single great common conductor, the ether, and that the places in this radio spectrum are numbered and rigidly limited. Thus television by radio—the supreme achievement of the science of communication—may, when generally made available, find itself stifled by the very number and tenacity of its predecessors in the radio field.

WGY continued with its thrice-a-week schedule, occasionally adding other TV broadcasts. In late August, the station was hailed for airing Al Smith’s acceptance speech for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Then on September 11th, it broadcast what was claimed to be the first televised drama, a two-person play called “The Queen's Messenger” with Izetta Jewel and the English-born Maurice Randall as the characters and Joyce Evans Rector and William J. Toniski as their hands. Meanwhile, WRNY finally got its TV casts on the air in August, broadcasting an extensive schedule of visual shows during the day.



Both carried on with their regular TV broadcasts until the end of March 1929. The stations were plagued mainly with regulatory problems. The F.R.C. first ordered WGY to sign off early to protect KGO’s signal from Oakland then demanded all television activity on radio frequencies cease on January 1, 1929 because of the interference it caused other stations. WGY got a judge to put the order on hold, as the new NBC red network took up more and more of its schedule. Meanwhile, WRNY sank deeper and deeper into debt and was finally auctioned (with other assets of its parent company) for $90,000.

WGY-TV left the radio band, but that didn’t end General Electric’s television experiments in Scheneectady. And when commercial broadcasting was allowed in 1941, the station, known as W2XB by then, received a commercial license as WRGB the following year. It’s still on the air today.

The Pancakes Are Panned

Betty Boop's pancakes fly around her diner and out through the chimney into the night air. Even the moon eats a couple. But there's one problem. They're not edible.

Everyone gets sick on them, including a customer that spins and turns into a knot, a stove and the diner itself. Customers jump out the window and moan in a circle outside.



The moon gets sick, too, and is taken away by two stars on a stretcher, while a third replaces it with an oil lamp.



Seymour Kneitel and Bernie Wolf are the credited animators in "Betty Boop's Busy Bee" (1932).

Rube Goldberg in Space

I've never been much on John Dunn's writing or Chuck Jones' Tom and Jerry cartoons, but I kind of like a Rube Goldberg-inspired gag in "O-Solar-Meow" (1966).

It takes place on a space station. Jerry, in some kind of mechanical mouse-mobile, drives over a fuse which sets off a rocket and, well, you can see the rest. The girl cat calendar is pure Jones. The face on the punching bag that feels the pain is a nice touch, too.



Ken Harris, Ben Washam, Tom Ray, Don Towsley and Dick Thompson animated this with Abe Levitow directing.

He Interviewed an Idol

Jack Benny’s Second Farewell Special proved, though no one knew it at the time, to be the last. A Third Farewell Special was scripted but never shot—Jack’s pancreatic cancer became too much and he died before it could be made.

It’s a little amazing to think that in 1974, Jack was turning 80, his fatal cancer was secretly spreading, but he maintained a schedule that should have worn out anyone. He made the newspaper rounds plugging his special, in addition to performing concerts and appearing on stage (which also required media publicity via interviews with reporters).

By 1974, Jack was in a position where there were now reporters—perhaps a majority of them—who had grown up with him on radio; his show began in 1932. One of them worked for the King Features Syndicate and cobbled together this feature story published in subscribing papers on January 23, 1974. It has a nice, personal feeling. If you’re wondering, John Goudas was also an actor on stage and television in New York. He died in 2008.

Jack Benny Maintains There's No Formula for Comedy
BY JOHN N. GOUDAS
TV Key, Inc.
NEW YORK (KFS)- Jack Benny was recently in town to drumbeat his latest TV outing, "Jack Benny's Second Farewell Special," airing on NBC tomorrow night.
When I started to talk with him, I must admit I reacted like an autograph-seeking fan who had been granted an audience with his idol. My reaction surprised me at first, but I soon realized how natural it was. After all, one of my earliest recollections is my father asking us to cut down on the noise on many a Sunday night so that he could listen to Mr. Benny on radio (that's TV without the pictures). The Sunday radio lineup included Fred Allen and Eddie Cantor, but it's Jack Benny's unmistakable delivery that echoes in my head.
As I grew a little older, I joined my father in listening to Mr. Benny trade one-liners with his gallery of radio regulars— innocent Dennis Day, rasping Rochester, pompous Don Wilson, sweet Mary Livingston, and wise-cracking Phil Harris.
Then as I was graduating from grammar school, we got our first TV set and there was Jack Benny, in living black and white, holding court as usual — playing the inevitable straight man for everything from a squad of baton twirlers to a group of roller-skating chimps.

So, you can see how it took all the sophistication I could muster when I arrived at his hotel and was introduced to Jack Benny, in person. The first thing he did was offer me a cigar and excuse himself to go into the bedroom to call his wife Mary in California (the Bennys have been married 47 years). He returned a few minutes later and as he walked across the room, I couldn't help thinking to myself, "He really does walk that way. Rich Little isn't exaggerating."
I asked him what he and his old pal, George Burns, would be doing on his special (Redd Foxx, Johnny Carson, Dinah Shore and the De Franco Family join him, too).
"George and I do something a little different. We play statues in a Roman fountain. I think we've got a good show, but you don't always know what's going to work and what isn't. Even after all the years I've been in show business, there's no formula for comedy."
Since Benny's career ranges from vaudeville to video, I asked him what he thought of today's comics. He thought for a second and answered, "I like Woody Allen very much. He's not only a wonderful comedy actor, but he writes and directs his movies. That takes a lot of talent."
I took this opportunity to ask him about one of my favorite films, "To Be Or Not to Be," which starred Benny and Carole Lombard. I detected a gleam in his eye when I informed him that "To Be Or Not to Be" was currently playing on a double bill in a movie house in Greenwich Village.
"Ernst Lubitsch, who directed "To Be Or Not to Be," was one of the best directors in Hollywood," said Benny. "When he called to ask me to appear in the film, I said yes. He said, 'But you haven't even seen the script,' and I told him I didn't have to if he was going to direct it. In those days, comics seldom, if ever, got to work with great movie directors."
When I asked Benny what he had lined up for the immediate future, he said Frank Sinatra was throwing him a big birthday party on Feb. 14 — when he will turn 80 — believe it or not. As for retiring, it's the farthest thing from his mind... he has plans for a concert tour in Australia and more TV appearances.
After all, institutions like Jack Benny are as much a part of the American scene as the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.

Max Fleischer Tells His Story

The production of the feature-length cartoon Gulliver's Travels by the Fleischer studio was accompanied by a huge raft of publicity. Some focused on the cartoon itself, some focused on the studio.

Here's a feature story on Max Fleischer published by This Week, a newspaper magazine supplement, on December 10, 1939. The stock photos accompanied the article.

Out of the Inkwell
Max Fleischer upset an inkwell on the rug 20 years ago, and out poured a host of movie stars: Betty Boop, Popeye and, now, the famous globe-trotting Gulliver
by Frederick James Smith
Max Fleischer is the unknown man of the movies.
Out of an inkwell he manufactures fantasy—turns out an exact amount of that elusive thing of dreams each week. And he is as fantastic as anything he creates.
Fleischer was one of the first men to make drawings move, to give life to pen-and-ink characters. For twenty-two years he has been amusing the public with animated cartoons. Today he is head of a $1,250,000 motion-picture studio, a colossus of cartoons. Yet when he steps outside of the studio, that fantasy built he is just a gray-haired little man of five feet, five, whom nobody knows.
It was Fleischer who produced the Out of the Inkwell comedies and Ko-Ko the Clown. It was Fleischer who did Betty Boop and Popeye, who produced those animated lures to mass-audience—singing the melodies with the bouncing ball. And it is Fleischer who has made the newest feature-length picture of ink, color and celluloid, Gulliver's Travels. By all contemporary standards he is entitled to a whole corps of yes men to follow him around his studio—but he goes alone. Nobody opens doors for him. His employees just say hello and Max nods politely.
Fleischer's pictures have made many box-office millions. But he always does his personal shopping on the installment plan—says he can't save money, even though he never bets on the horses. He spends it all working out eccentric ideas, such as a mechanical ash tray or a trick inkwell. And any scheme to improve cartoon comedies interests him vitally.
Fleischer has twenty-eight patents for cartoon devices. He heads one of the two biggest animated-cartoon "plants" in the world. The other belongs to Walt Disney. Fleischer's studio occupies a complete city square in Miami, Florida, and employs 650 people. And it all started in a Brooklyn apartment.
That was twenty-two years ago. Two or three years before that Winsor McCay had made the first animated cartoon ever created, presenting "Gertie, the Dinosaur." McCay used it as part of a vaudeville act—and aroused a lot of skeptical laughter when he predicted that animated cartoons would someday take their place with human films in the movie houses of the country. It was Gertie who inspired Max Fleischer to follow his ink-and-celluloid career.

Born in Austria, Max had been brought to this country at the age of four. He had studied art at the Art Students League and mechanics at the Mechanics and Tradesmen High School in New York, while working as copy boy at two dollars a week on "The Brooklyn Eagle." He had advanced quickly to the art department of the "Eagle," and moved on to the post of cartoonist. In the same department was J. R. Bray, another pioneer in making cartoon films. The two talked over their ideas, worked together nights trying to perfect them. Finally, after a year, a 150-foot cartoon comedy was turned out Fleischer took it around to a movie distributor, who looked it over with interest.
"I'll buy one a week," he announced. Sadly, Max told him how long it had taken to make the 150-footer. The distributor lost interest. But Fleischer went back to work and devised a way to produce a hundred feet every fourth week.
Two of his brothers, Dave, then a photo-engraver, and Joe, a mechanic, were his helpers, and their workroom was the parlor of the six-room apartment in Brooklyn where Max and his wife lived. One night the boys spilled a bottle of ink on the rug. Mrs. Fleischer had gone to bed, so the movie-makers quietly shifted the rug around until the ink-spot was hidden under the piano. Mrs. Fleischer discovered it eventually, but, anyway, it gave the boys a name for their movie: "Out of the Inkwell."
The Fleischer boys kept their jobs, but they also kept working in the parlor at night, perfecting speedy methods of animating drawings. The World War interfered for a time. But even while he was in the Army at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Max worked out a cartoon that showed recruits what happened when they pulled the trigger of their rifles. It was most effective when run off in slow motion.
After the Armistice the brothers went to work in earnest Fleischer produced two feature-length animated-drawing films—some years before Walt Disney's Snow White. One, called Relativity, explained the Einstein theory by way of drawings. The other, based on Darwin's theory of evolution, was made at the time of the William Jennings Bryan-Clarence Darrow battle in the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee.

Fleischer's greatest success, however, has been by way of short comedies. Successful cartoon characters frequently are accidents. A minor figure steals the picture, much as a bit player often walks off with a screen drama. That is how Donald Duck emerged from a Mickey Mouse background. Betty Boop was just such an accident. She appeared as an incidental figure in the background of a cartoon cabaret scene, and stole the show. That was in the boop-a-doop era, and the public demanded more of Betty. She became a star, and lasted as long as the boop-a-doop era. Fleischer became interested in Popeye because one of the elevator boys at the New York hotel where he lived waited each night for a comic sheet presenting the spinach specialist. Fleischer says he came to like Popeye because "he'd fight for peace, go to jail to uphold uphold the law."
The Fleischer plant now turns out thirty-eight one- and two-reel animated comedies a year. Besides Popeye, there is the Hunky and Spunky series about two mules. And for the last year and a half they have been working on Gulliver on the side.
Fleischer likes to explain why he made Gulliver's Travels. "Every adult is still a child at heart," he says. "They are sorry they have been told there is no Santa Claus and they would like to say, 'You're wrong, there is a Santa Claus—and there are elves and witches and fairies.' People want to believe in fantasy because it is an escape from the hard realism of the world."
When Fleischer started work on Gulliver's Travels some 7,000 sketches were prepared. Before the studio got through over a million drawings had been made, of which some 200,000 show in the final print. When Fleischer moved his studio to Florida from New York last October, two hundred specialists in the making of cartoon comedies went with him. Some had been twenty years in his employ, at least twenty-five had been with him twelve years, and forty for better than seven years. There are eighty animators alone, besides specialists who supply the voices and music, inkers, colorists, technicians, mechanics, cameramen and minor workers.
A five-day week is the rule, with a minimum pay of eighteen dollars for beginners. Fleischer never will give a raise to anyone on request. He's stubborn that way but he will do it frequently of his own accord. The chief animators and their assistants are almost all men. They earn between $65 and $350 a week. In all America there are less than five hundred qualified, able animators.
Top artists at the plant are Louis Jambor, Shane Miller and Robert Little. It was Jambor who hit upon the fantastic background that is used for Gulliver's Travels. It is actually made up of coral formations that he discovered about Biscayne Bay.
One of Fleischer's younger brothers, Dave, is really his partner in making comedies. Dave sees things in terms of laughter, Max in terms of fantasy. Max is shy and retiring, avoiding publicity. Dave, on the other hand, will enter a restaurant and start clowning with the orchestra leader. As production head of the studio, Dave supplies a lot of the comedy ideas.
Besides Dave, Max is surrounded by three other brothers. Louis is head of the music department, Joe directs the machine shop, Charles supervises the repair staff.
Fleischer moved his studio to Florida because he believed his workers would be more creative, as well as happier and healthier in tropical surroundings. He thinks they need, as he puts it, "loose clothing so your imagination can work." We walked into the patio of his studio and saw a lot of his girl employees sitting about in tropic pajamas and shorts. It was noon hour. Max obviously was pleased. "So!" he chuckled. "Healthy and happy. You see, all a matter of clothes." But he himself comes to his Miami studio as formally dressed as if he were on his way to a Wall Street directors' meeting.
Fleischer worked out every detail of the studio himself. The whole plant is air-conditioned and there is indirect lighting throughout. Fleischer's own office looks like a drugstore. That's because he is eternally experimenting with the effect of various chemicals on celluloid, ink and film. "In my spare time," as he puts it.
His only concession to Hollywood ideas in his studio is a system of loudspeakers. An announcer calls the name of anyone wanted for anything important. "I had to do it," he apologized. "Efficiency." As he was talking, the loud-speaker began calling his own name. We called his attention to it. "Yes," he sighed, with a shrug, paying no further attention whatever to the voice of efficiency.
Away from his studio and his inventions. Max Fleischer seems a little lost. You suddenly notice his gray hair and his graying mustache. "I was born with the mustache," he says, a bit vaguely.
Fleischer dislikes riding in a car unless he drives himself. He considers himself the perfect driver. "Nobody thinks of the gas or the oil or the gears." he explains, "except me."
He admits one general enemy—doctors; and he loves to put things over on them. Recently physicians have been demanding that he rest. He says yes, and gets to the studio next day at eight, staying on to five in the afternoon.
The doctors insist that he put something into his stomach every three hours. He has a habit of forgetting to eat, when he gets started working on an idea. So his secretary pursues him about the studio with a watch and glasses of buttermilk.
The fantastic Fleischer touch is as apparent in his home as in his studio. Located on Meridian Avenue in Miami Beach, his house is a seven-room Spanish-type air-conditioned bungalow. The place is illuminated at night by blue floodlights. Maybe that is his touch of whimsey. Fleischer's own study, small and cozy, is crowded with books of fairy tales.
Fleischer is very fond of music. On social evenings at home he gets together with several old friends who play the piano and violin, shyly plays the mandolin or guitar himself, and makes records of the result. Later he sits by himself for hours, listening to the records.
Max has been married for some thirty years. "Happily married?" we asked. He seemed puzzled. "Isn't that what marriage is—for happiness?" he asked. He has a son, Richard, at college, and a daughter, Ruth, who married his chief artist, Seymour Kneitel.
The Fleischers are all proud of their little, soft-spoken, pioneering Max. They understand his reticence and his dislike for publicity. Through the years they have pulled for his success. And they are happy in his skill with this vast, magic business which started with a spot on a Brooklyn parlor rug.
"That spot," sighs Fleischer. "I suppose you must mention it, what? My wife almost has forgotten it."

Gimme That Wool

A pretty ugly wolf robs a sheep of his wool in the Walter Lantz Red Riding Hood spoof "Grandma's Pet" (1931).

I love the pathetic sheep who gets kicked in the butt and out of the scene. The wolf then struts around like a fancy dude, only to find a roach or beetle or something he flicks off the coat (it then scoots off in perspective toward the camera and out of the cartoon). The drawing is crude-looking, like something out of a 1920s Aesop's Fable, but the scene is still funny.



Early sound Lantz cartoons mean fun cartoons. There's a great scene with a baby tree spanking the wolf. Just compare that to the humourless, almost unwatchable junk the studio was making in 1971.

Manny Moreno along with Tex Avery, Ray Abrams, Les Kline and old-timer Vet Anderson animated this cartoon.

The Turn-Tale Wolf Backgrounds

Dick Thomas was responsible for the background art in the Bob McKimson unit for the first number of years it was in operation at Warner Bros. (He had been in the Bob Clampett “Katz” unit in the late 1930s).

Here’s some of his work in The Turn-Tale Wolf (released in 1951). I love the pin-ups and the pillow stuffed through the broken window in the wolf’s run-down home.



Here’s part of an interior of the home the sissified version of the wolf lived in with his mother.



The layouts in this cartoon were supplied by Pete Alvarado.