Two bits of game show treasure to share for this week's update:
In our last update, we discussed attending a screening of a color videotape of Kraft Music Hall from October 8, 1958. Happily, the UCLA FIlm & Television Archive has made the video available for public viewing on YouTube.
The significance: The tape isn't really "a master tape." It's a recording made off-air, and because somebody hit the record button that night, the tape includes the final minute or so of the show that aired before it on NBC that night: The Price is Right starring Bill Cullen. It's extremely unlikely that any other color footage exists, but we desperately want to be proven wrong.
The other find of this month: soap opera actress/writer Meg Bennett died in April, and in seeking out information about her life and career, game show fans found a "hiding in plain sight" gem on YouTube that most of us in this circle of fandom simply never noticed until now: Eight years ago, a highlight reel of Bennett's career was uploaded on YouTube. The first 12 minutes of it are an episode of Three on a Match, in which Bennett is the champion!
A few fans did the research and have determined that the episodes either taped in, or aired in, December 1971. That makes the show only about five months old. We've noted on our page that the accidentally amusing thing about all the surviving episodes we knew about up to this point is that they come from later in the run of the show, when Bill had pretty much stopped explaining the rules of the game. So the existing episodes have the potential to make a first-time viewer's eyes glaze over from trying to figure out WHAT the game is. So what's interesting to us about the Meg Bennett tape is that Bill is actually still bothering to explain some details of the game at this point.
We decided to celebrate all of this stuff by updating the site...
Over at Place the Face, we got some exciting new information from the aforementioned UCLA Film & Television Archive. It turns out there's a LOT more of that show that survived than we realized!
In Syndicated Radio, we uploaded another week of Looking Inside Sports.
In Photos, we have more snapshots from the May 1959 vacation.
