Elvis on Milton Berle Show in colour
 

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. Anyhow here's the links to the photos and YouTube video:

http://www.owensarchive.com/index.ph...ewCat&catId=91
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5JALwwaASg&feature=fvw

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:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcG0g...eature=related



http://www.owensarchive.com/images/u...ne_5,_1956.jpg

There were some color kinescopes recorded back in the day. Color kines from the 15 minute shows of Dinah Shore and Eddie Fisher still exist, each recorded early in 1954 prior to the introduction of the CT-100. Perhaps this was done for purely experimental purposes, but it did prove that highly acceptable results could be had from the technique. Seems a shame that such an occasion as the final Milton Berle Show telecast complete with an Elvis appearance couldn't have been saved in color. Well...it could have, but nobody at NBC had the foresight to do it.

Yeah, I remember hearing about those kinescopes, they were shown at the ETF convention in 2007. I wish I was there to see those, but living in Australia with a mediocre income made it impossible.

I have heard of a great colour recovery program someone in UK has developed which can recover colour from B&W 16mm kinescope film prints as on B&W monitor screen the colour pictures show the dots of variable intensity which represent each primary colour and the program can decode the pictures colour content restoring a lot of the colour (depending on quality of the kinescope film), this was made for PAL but the mind boggles on the possibilities of someone developing a similar program for NTSC kinescopes. Here are the links:
http://www.techmind.org/colrec/
http://colour-recovery.wikispaces.co...olour+recovery

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

Due to the technical nature of how color is encoded in PAL vs. NTSC, as well as differences in how the respective telerecordings for each format are created, Richard Russell's astounding program will not work with NTSC material. In order to develop a similar process for NTSC, it would be necessary (at a minimum) to re-create the original color burst signal of the kinescoped program, which is not feasible at this point in time.

- 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 )

"Laugh In" was all edited & recorded on Video tape. They used the Kine copies to put the edit list together before they "cut" the tape. The original master tapes still exist with over 100 splices per show.

That would make sense. How did they do those pioneering "jump cuts" ?

just finished reading "Jump Cut," the memoirs of Arthur Schneider, who developed the kine-copy based editing techniques and edited "Laugh-In" by the only means available, physically cutting and splicing the 2-inch quad tape.

http://www.amazon.com/Jump-Cut-Memoi...5744400&sr=8-5

And here is how you edit/splice the old quad. From England...BBC?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YtmwB9Ds5Y

I may start a separate thread on what I remember from my directing days in the early 70's if there is a demand for old war stories from local television.