First Color Shows "PASSWORD"

[W.B.]

Originally Posted by SDA SRS 1.2

Dark Shadows ('66-'71) taped at ABC Studio 16 at 433 W. 53rd St. in NYC. Behind the scenes photos show Norelco cameras.

Those were PC-60's all right. The small Norelco logo in black on the (possibly stainless steel) belt on the right and left sides of the camera body tell the tale. Early PC-70's also had what Chuck Pharis called the "round applied edges," but the "belt" was darker and had a larger Norelco logo plate, as later production model PC-70's with the "square molded edges" had. ABC's 66th Street studios used PC-70's (as I saw from behind-the-scenes pictures of WABC's Eyewitness News in the '70's).

The 58th Street TV-15 studio, for many years, had General Electric PE-350's, used throughout Dick Cavett's run, as well as on The $10,000 / $20,000 Pyramid. Apparently the picture from the PE-350's wasn't half bad, as this model was used throughout Pyramid's ABC run.

In Hollywood, the only studio I could tell to use PE-250's was 1313 North Vine Street (to quote Ed Reitan, the PE-250's at that studio "never worked properly"), while the ABC Television Center at Prospect and Talmadge had Norelco PC-60's and -70's. It was on Vine Street that Joey Bishop's ill-fated talk show was based.

Now, would anyone know which of their studios and facilities used which film chains? I read somewhere that Prospect & Talmadge had RCA TK-26 film chains, dating back to the early '60's, while New York studios would have had GE PE-24's. Or is that part of the story?

Meanwhile, CBS did use GE's - in their telecine suites, on both coasts. 4-V PE-24's, and possibly some PE-240's (if purchased after 1966).

The only other color camera CBS used in the latter half of the '60's, besides Norelco PC-60's and -70's, was the Marconi Mark VII - and there, on a very limited basis, evidently for a short time. Pictures of this camera as used by CBS can be found here, and here.

(In some instances in the mid-to-late 1960's, what cameras local CBS O&O's used varied wildly. KNXT, now KCBS, in Los Angeles used Mark VII's while WCAU in Philadelphia used the "hated" RCA TK-42's - hated not only in terms of longtime rival RCA, but also the cameras themselves.)