The Cisco Kid: Medicine Flates

The Cisco Kid: Medicine Flats

Originally Broadcast: Tuesday, October 17, 1950 on first-run syndication.

Plot: The Cisco Kid and Pancho conspire with the town sheriff to uncover a group of thieves headquartered in the town hotel.

Analysis: The Cisco Kid is (say it with me now) a transplant, originally running on radio from1942 through to 1956. Two things make the television version of Cisco Kid unique however – first, this was one of the first Westerns broadcast on syndication, originally produced by Ziv Television, filling in programming holes on just about any station at any time outside of the prime time viewing hours. The second was Cisco Kid was originally shot and broadcast in color, but since color television was virtually nonexistent until the late 50s and not the standard until the early 1960s, very few people saw Cisco Kid in its original color form until much later.

As for the episode itself, well, the key plot doesn’t differ too much from Gene Autry, only in as much as Cisco Kid had more of the outlaw reputation where Autry was a “white hat” regardless of the circumstances. It does create for more dramatic and shaded gray situations for Cisco Kid though.

The Bottom Line: For starters, every episode of Cisco Kid we’re going to be discussing will be in color, so to approximate the original 1950s television experience, as with the One Hour in Wonderland broadcast, just turn down or turn off the color on your television. As for the show quality itself, well, it’s hit and miss, since MPI isn’t a big budget restoration company. The opening and closing credits are rather blurry and there’s an occasional audio muffle while watching the episode. That being said, it’s nothing more or less than you’d come to expect from a show that’s close to fifty years old, especially given that the show wasn’t exactly made for discriminating audiences.

If you are interested in seeing Medicine Flats, it’s included with 19 other episodes of Cisco Kid in The Cisco Kid: Collection 2 produced by MPI (http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-Kid-Collection-2/dp/B0001LJCX4/ref=sr_1_3?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1286758713&sr=1-3). You may want to shop around for lower prices, but between 15 and 19 dollars is pretty standard pricing.

Next time, more from The Cisco Kid.

A Special Comment: Raiders of the Lost Network

A Special Comment: Raiders of the Lost Network

In this age of over 500 channels and nothing to watch, it is fun to look back on the good ol’ days of the 1950s when you could tune into one of the four classic channels and enjoy…

Wait a second… four?

That’s right, folks, before ABC, CBS and NBC even tried to get on television, there was the famous “lost” network, the DuMont Network. DuMont actually was the trendsetter, being the first “official” network on television. So, why have most people never even heard of this? Therein lies the tale of how you could go from a television pioneer to out of business in under ten years.

The story starts in 1938 when DuMont Laboratories got into the television making business. In fact, DuMont actually created the first all-electric televison for the average consumer, a model every television since would follow. From making televisions, it only made sense to actually try and create something to put on television, since you’re creating a whole raison d’être for your product in the first place. Keep in mind this was a period where television was still very experimental, kind of a novelty item while radio was still the entertainment king. Anyway, Paramount Pictures was intrigued by what DuMont was up to and agreed to front DuMont the cash to further their experiments, which in turn lead to the launch of the network, ahead of all others, in 1946.

DuMont ran into problems though right from the start as it had one shortcoming that no other network had – DuMont didn’t have a radio network, base of programming or audience to draw from. Quite literally, they would have to cut their teeth and their path at the same time. On top of that, the bosses at DuMont didn’t like the idea of sponsored programming, a virtual necessity in the early days of television given sponsorship was basically the only lifeline a lot of network shows had, to say nothing of the fact that sponsors already were the main power behind shows on radio, much as they would be for television. So, DuMont basically had to survive on the power of their imagination and not much else. On the plus side of the equation, it lead to original programming, something unique given the other three networks were, as we’ve seen, basically porting all their core show ideas over from radio. This creative sandbox, if you will, would lead to such programming as The Honeymooners, originally a sketch segment on Cavalcade of Stars, and Captain Video, an early sci-fi kiddies show.

The problem DuMont kept facing is what a lot of early pioneers face: money, specifically lack thereof. Add to that a technicality that kept DuMont from growing: the Paramount deal technically made DuMont part of Paramount and therefore under FCC restrictions prohibiting growth beyond a certain size. If DuMont stuck with Paramount, they couldn’t grow and couldn’t have access to more money and markets. If they left, they’d take a huge financial hit since it was, after all, a struggling network with very little support or backing behind it. Indeed, very few stations, even if they carried DuMont programming, carried every single program. This was an era when an affiliate could opt to carry just one or two shows without prescribing to the entire block. Innovative as it was, DuMont just lacked the support needed to survive, especially with powerhouses NBC and CBS in the race and ABC a rising threat.

In the end, time and money ran out on DuMont. Struggling on into the 50s and starving for cash to keep going, DuMont sold one of its flagship stations to Westinghouse for some much needed cash. The tradeoff was with one of its tent pole stations now gone, DuMont was in a weakened negotiating position for getting broadcasts outside of its core base of operations. It struggled on rather bravely into 1955, hemorrhaging money and a shrinking audience share, until Paramount made what was probably at that point a mercy kill, taking control of DuMont Laboratories and shutting down the network.

The ultimate tragedy of the DuMont Network is what happened next: DuMont made kinescopes of most, if not all their shows, primarily so the shows could be seen in other affiliated in other markets. When DuMont went under, that library of tape remained intact until the 1970s when the library was deemed “useless” and, without ceremony or warning, the entire tape archive was dumped in the Upper New York Bay, a loss of roughly 10 years of early television programming. That’s the bad news for classic television fans.

Here’s the good news: at least three large sources of DuMont programming still exist. The first belong to the Jackie Gleason estate, consisting mainly of the early Honeymooners skits. They have been released on DVD by MPI as “Lost” episodes of the Honeymooners, but sales of the DVDs were stopped about four years ago. Currently, the DVDs are out of print and very expensive to track down, but they are out there.

The second library belongs to the Archbishop Fulton Sheen Foundation since his show Life Is Worth Living got its start on DuMont before flipping over to ABC to finish its run. It’s unclear exactly how much is intact since the Sheen Foundation hasn’t released much, to say nothing of the fact that dating what material has been released is, to say the least, challenging. Since it’s impossible for me to date and simply because I would prefer to stay away from religious programming to avoid any potential issues, I’m currently not going to look into Life Is Worth Living, but I am willing to be persuaded if convincing arguments can be made.

The third and final source of DuMont material is the Capitol Wrestling Corporation library. DuMont was the first network to really show professional wrestling on the network, most of it coming from Capitol since it was the local wrestling “territory” near where DuMont was based. The Capitol library the passed into its successor, the World Wide Wrestling Federation which eventually become today’s World Wrestling Entertainment or WWE. That’s the good news – WWE has the tapes. Of course, here’s the bad news – there’s really no market for them, according to the WWE. In the time since DVD has been launched as a standard from the WWE, they’ve released a grand total of two matches from the period and only one came from the Capitol library and it’s not even dated beyond a year.

Other shows, such as Captain Video, do also have a small number of episodes surviving, but those three sources are basically the bulk of all that survives from the DuMont Network. It is, sad to say, not only an inglorious end to a television pioneer, but, as we’ll see, a fate that was all too common for a lot of classic television libraries that were lost simply because they were deemed “useless.” Pardon the bitterness, but it’s hard for a history geek like myself to accept such a sad state of affairs by people who live in the now without remembering the past. Who are we as a people if we forget where we were? Do we not then lose sight of where we have yet to go? Consider that as an epitaph for the DuMont Network and its programming.

Next time, a back track into 1950 and our first syndicated Western.

Special Comment: Syndicated, Inc.

A Special Comment: Syndicated, Inc.

First off, credit to ‘Weird Al’ for the idea for an article title.

Now, to be serious, we’re all familiar in one form or another of syndication, be it repeats of favorite television shows on other channels or “stripped” shows like the courtroom shows or game shows that are on in the afternoons these days. But what I want to focus on for this article is something that has almost virtually gone extinct in today’s cable and dish era and that’s original programming on first-run syndication.

Syndication, like so many other concepts, got its start on radio – the idea being since radio signals for certain stations were limited, why not just make a record of a single broadcast and send it out to any radio station that wanted to run it? The first radio show to really try this was Amos ‘n’ Andy before NBC picked up the show, but the art form was really perfected by shows like The Lone Ranger, Sgt. Preston and The Green Hornet, all radio shows that started small off station WXYZ in Detroit before building their audience through syndication.

The format was a natural transition for television for a few reasons: first, even big networks like NBC, CBS and ABC had a hard time filling every single hour of programming they had available during their on-air hours, so syndicated programming was a cheap, easy answer to fill the slots. Second, not every station fell under the umbrella of the big networks or the DuMont network, so syndication was the answer for these independent or non-affiliated stations to establish a presence without going broke right out of the chute. Finally, for the producers of the syndicated programming, this was a logical step since the handwriting was on the wall that their original source of revenue – the movie serial – was slowly dying off, partially thanks to television. Plus, serials were already divided into “chapters” or episodes anyway, so they were ready made for fast return on little investment, so going over to television was about the only way any amount of money could be salvaged.

For the purposes of where we are and where we’re going in television, it’s enough to know that first-run syndication is where we’ll get a lot of Westerns before the Western television boom of the late 50s, plus a variety of other programming, mostly crime-drama and mysteries. That’s the good news, in as much as it means a wider breadth and variety of programming. The bad news is it makes it very difficult to determine when what show aired, since it varied from station to station and place-to-place. So, if someone has more information on a syndicated show that I’m going to be talking about than I have, please share. This is, after all, going on the best information or guesses that I have. Doesn’t make me right, just going by what I know. So, more often than not, if I know a date of broadcast, I’ll just run with that and discuss it before primetime programming since I suspect most syndicated programming was on in the mornings and afternoons, especially with the big primetime blocks that the main networks were putting together. But, like I said, if anyone else knows something I don’t, don’t be afraid to share.

Next time, the story of the lost network.

1950 in television: A Year in Review

Well, the first year of the 1950s is in the books and television is slowly gaining traction, despite some challenges. On the plus side, over six million television sets were sold in 1950, which is good, given the average cost of a television in 1950 was $499 for a 12 inch console model by Philco. Small wonder then that only 9% of US households even had a television. An additional challenge was the continued perception, especially by Hollywood and radio, that television was a “fad” trend, good for advertising and little else. It didn’t help television’s case that, with the exception of one network, almost nothing being produced on television was original: as we’ve seen, Gene Autry was really imported from the Western serials in movie theaters while Westinghouse Studio One and You Bet Your Life came over from radio. As good as the programming may have been, aside from the picture, it wasn’t any different than what was on the radio.

I mentioned a single exception and I’ll actually be doing a special comment on it in the next day or so and that’s the fourth network, the DuMont network. I won’t spoil what I want to address there here, but suffice to say, they were forced to come up with unique, original programming every day of every week with varying degrees of success. For good or ill, it was the first steps toward making television unique from radio and serials. The other contributing factor to change in television, which will get another special comment, is the rise in first-run syndication television: cheap, unique programming that was basically made to make money and plug holes in the lineup, but you couldn’t find it anywhere else but on the television. Combine the two and you have a spark and a starting point for television to grow from.

Looking ahead, 1951 would be revolutionary, especially in the realm of the situation comedy with the arrival of one of television’s most popular and influential shows. In roads would also be made in the realm of science fiction on television and, as you might guess, the Western would continue to gain in popularity. In addition, television would start to develop a “season” format, much like radio had before, running approximately from mid- or late August until May or June. Plus, the famed Nielsen ratings system arrived on television in 1950, which would begin to measure what America was watching. In light of those changes, instead of just doing an annual recap like I’ve been doing, I’ll be doing bi-annual recaps – one in the end of the television season (roughly) where I’ll cover the numbers, what survives and what doesn’t and the annual recap of the year in television and the world at large.

Next time, a special comment on the rise of first-run syndication on television.