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Originally Posted by Carmine
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I take some minor issues with your link's conclusion.
When Walt Disney conceived Disneyland, his studio was funded by the profits of the last feature funding the next feature. When he decided to build Disneyland, Walt suddenly realized that he needed a reliable source of additional funding. He went to both NBC and CBS and both of them were not interested. Du Mont was distributing primarily on film and was losing money and was not open to new deals.
In desperation Walt finally went to ABC, which at the moment had low cost shows that were turning a small profit, but the network had the least number of stations of the four networks. ABC invested and partially funded Disneyland to get the Disney hour program, to use that as a hook to draw more stations into their network and it worked very well.
ABC's network had been developed to be compatible with color and the expense of a color film chain on the East coast would not have been prohibitive. Still Disney wanted the larger audience and despite the fact that they had helped to start his theme park business, ABC was completely shut out by Disney and not even given a chance to bid on the new color series.
Another example, happened in 1960 (from memory, I may be off a year or so), when Jack Parr walked off his NBC B&W show, and his replacement tanked. Jack came back a short while later, but by then WSB the NBC affiliate in Atlanta had replaced his show with an expensive new feature film package. WSB could not afford to put that expensive package on the shelf and let it expire, so they chose to not pickup Jack Parr, so Crosley station WLW-A, the ABC affiliate, whose movie packages were rather long in the tooth, grabbed Jack Parr. Several weeks before the show was set to start, WLW-A ran "10 second teaser shared ID promos that said "Jack's Back and in color, too!" The promos were in B&W (they had no local color film chain), and the public started screaming. WLW-A had already purchased the necessary equipment to transmit remotely-originated color, and this reaction was completely unexpected.
The solution was for WLW-A to buy some production time at WSB and produce a few video tape promos for the show in color from the NBC source material, which they could run in color without problems, and do a voice over for the latest updates. This quickly shut down the critics.
James