NBC Burbank Drive-By 1958

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NBC Burbank Drive-By 1958

Рет қаралды 36,574

Күн бұрын

This is a 1958 videotape of NBC Burbank as recorded on 2" Quad in a mobile unit. The show opens as the camera travels down California Street, takes a right turn onto Olive and then settles down near the intersection of Alameda and Olive. The final shot is the front of the administration building.
This multigenerational videotape is of poor quality.

Пікірлер: 93

@joeblow8593 6 жыл бұрын

This looks great for a video tape that is 60 years old. This is golden, thumbs up

@mgoldman60 3 жыл бұрын

We’ve lived in LA since 2002 - and Dad said he always wished he lived here around 1960. He says it just seemed like more fun then.

@lawrenceharris8919 Жыл бұрын

Thank you for the videotape. It is amazing how "rural" Beautiful Downtown Burbank was in the late 1950's, especially around Studio 2 and Studio 4. There was hardly any traffic and just a handful of cars parked at NBC's Color City. This is what it looked like when "The Dinah Shore Chevy Show" was broadcast from 1957 to 1961, "An Evening with Fred Astaire" was taped in 1958, "Pontiac Star Parade" with Gene Kelly was taped in 1959, and the "Steve Allen Plymouth Show" was taped in 1959-1960,. Luckily, some color segments of all of these programs have been saved. "The Dean Martin Show" started just a few years later in 1965. I would also like to own the Corvette.

@scottstrang4738 9 жыл бұрын

I L O V E that music. It's sound represents what looks like a happier time.

@toddwacha5108 4 жыл бұрын

RIP NBC Burbank. I was there four times in my life. In 1976, 1978, 1980, and 1985. Mainly to go on the NBC Studio Tour, which I loved!

@jehobden 4 жыл бұрын

I got to visit there in 1998, 2000, and 2005 (for a Tonight Show taping that time).

@kathiec1333 3 жыл бұрын

I was there in 1980 as well. There was a taping of a new game show, sadly the name escapes me. I think it ran maybe a week of episodes.. Elaine Joyce was one of the participants, we forgot about the tour by the time it was over. But I had a tour at Rockefeller Center in 1966 so no biggie.

@redskins5926 5 жыл бұрын

Very nice video! I used to work at the Disney lot just down the street and took gas frequently at the Shell station across the street from NBC (which is shown here at the end as the Mobil). Wow, how things have changed.

@RFBurns-dh2pk 10 жыл бұрын

Love that NBC sign!!!

@ApartmentKing66 9 жыл бұрын

R.F. Burns It's an eye-grabber, all right.

@jehobden 6 жыл бұрын

I wonder how it looked in color. I'm guessing by the shades of gray that it was left to right red/green/blue, but I'd love to see a color shot of this building to see if I'm right.

@tsntana 5 жыл бұрын

@@jehobden You're in luck. www.google.com/search?biw=1717&bih=857&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=orGRXOuxD8vIsQXm756oDg&q=nbc+studio+burbank+1960&oq=nbc+studio+burbank+1960&gs_l=img.3...26832.33505..34412...5.0..0.83.1709.26....2..0....1..gws-wiz-img.......0i67j0j0i8i30.yTlVfd4l_f0#imgrc=D3oJYfR8zm49CM:

@jehobden 5 жыл бұрын

@@tsntana Thank you for posting that. I've also recently seen the same sign in color featured in THE MONKEES Season 1 episode, "Find the Monkees", which has them in front of that same sign in 1966, w/ "KNBC-TV 4" beneath it. The colors are officially in order, red/green/blue, as I suspected.

@LaptopLarry330 Жыл бұрын

The sign depicted the “NBC Color Xylophone Logo”, which was used from 1954 to 1959, when it was replaced with the “NBC Snake Logo”. The NBC “Peacock” began its use by the network in 1957.

@carlupthegrove262 3 жыл бұрын

Interesting to see The Carriage House restaurant was there in 1958... I've eat many meals and enjoyed many cocktails there in the 1970s before it became Chadney's As I recall the manager and perhaps owner was Jack Blue.

@selkirk57 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks. I worked there for seven years. I could even see my office window. The memories :)

@steveomusicman6645 6 жыл бұрын

so amazing to see empty fields and land with no buildings on it!

@BigSCTVfan 4 жыл бұрын

Steveo Musicman Back in the days before the world had too many people.

@torgman Жыл бұрын

Beautiful downtown Burbank!

@ApartmentKing66 9 жыл бұрын

Once the home (one of them, anyway) of Warner Bros., 3000 W. Alameda had just become the West Coast headquarters of NBC a few years earlier. In the 30s, NBC was at 5515 Melrose. When NBC Radio City at Sunset and Vine was completed in 1938, NBC vacated the Melrose address, and Don Lee Broadcasting, owners of KHJ radio, moved KHJ in. Sunset and Vine was NBC's home through the 40s and into the 50s. On October 4, 1952, NBC began broadcasting from what they called their "Color City Studios" in Burbank, and the 1st show was "All Star Revue" sponsored by Del Monte, Kellogg's, and Pet Milk, and starring, among others, Milton Berle, Dinah Shore, and George Jessel. That facility is what you're seeing in this videotape. NBC would be totally vacated from Radio City on Sunset by 1964. Eventually, the facility was demolished, and the office building that was featured as Charlton Heston and Lorne Greene's architecture office in the movie "Earthquake" (and was the home of KIIS AM & FM in the 80s) was eventually built at Sunset and Argyle, along with Chase Bank next door.

@RobertWPaine 2 жыл бұрын

The responsible parties for the demo of Radio City should have been given a fair trial, found guilty, shot and sent to the Russian Front. IN THAT ORDER. 😤😠😡

@ApartmentKing66 Жыл бұрын

@@RobertWPaine Your comment made no sense until I figured out that "demo" meant "demolition." Yeah, it would've been nice to have that part of radio history preserved. After all, NBC's first West Coast home, which I mentioned above (5515 Melrose) still stands, as does 1313 N. Vine, completed in 1948 and served as home to KNXT after Don Lee's family sold KTSL Channel 2 to CBS, as well as the first home of KHJ-TV when RKO bought KFI-TV from Earle C. Anthony in 1951. Incidentally, NBC's Radio City was also where KNBH (now KNBC Channel 4) began life in January 1949. I agree: a lot of good could've come from preserving that facility. I don't know whose decision it was to tear the place down, NBC's or the City of LA. CORRECTION: I misspoke (mistyped?) above by saying that 5515 Melrose was NBC's first West Coast home. It wasn't. That distinction belongs to the Hunter-Dulin Building at 111 Sutter Street in San Francisco. THAT was NBC's first West Coast headquarters. I believe NBC moved into 111 Sutter sometime in 1927, whereas 5515 Melrose in Hollywood wasn't occupied by NBC until December 1935. The phone line's western terminus was San Francisco, with NBC programming being sent to the other 6 West Coast affiliates via a separate north/south phone hookup. I don't think KPO was at 111 Sutter. I think it was still at 5th and Market in the Hale Bros. Dept. Store where it started in 1922.

@jefferyscism2276 Жыл бұрын

My mother was working at studio drugstore across the street right after NBC opened there. 1952-3.

@jefferyscism2276 Жыл бұрын

My father was working at the gas station on November 14th, 1956, the night I was born in Glendale. A customer came in and spilled gasoline all over him, and set him on fire. He was in the hospital getting treated for that, at the same time I was getting born in another room.

@mewhor 3 жыл бұрын

I can’t explain why it is but video tape even in black and white has a more intimate feel than film like it happened just a moment ago

@troysvisualarts 10 жыл бұрын

Wow thanks for sharing this, it's a wow factor to see 50s television on B&W video but an even bigger wow factor if it's remote outdoor footage and this one is a real gem next to the famous B&W/colour video recording of Eisenhower dedication to WRC-TV done the same year! Excellent to watch this!!! :D

@christopherthorkon3997 7 жыл бұрын

Looks so amazing and "live" -- I just love these 2" Quad videos. Superb quality and makes you feel as if you are right there.

@rty1955 3 жыл бұрын

You should see the playback right off the machine! I worked in every quad machine AMPEX made beginning with the VR-1000 thru to the ACR-25

@Rudolf_Edward 2 жыл бұрын

That ‘live’ feeling is because of the 60 interlaced fields (soap opera effect). I wish more uploaders with old footage took the effort to maintain the refresh rate of the original video… Beautiful job!

@scottstrang1583 9 жыл бұрын

Wait a minute; who the hell gave this a thumbs down? The scenery was great and the music even better.

@thomasbower7727 3 жыл бұрын

Probably some millenial.

@julienielsen3746 2 жыл бұрын

One year before I was born. Very cool.

@gnormhurst 10 жыл бұрын

My first reaction was "what's the big deal" and then I remembered you needed a truck to hold the camera and recorder. Amazing how that now we can get better video on our cell phones. We've come a long way..

@jsat5609 4 жыл бұрын

According to a 1961 RCA equipment catalog, the RCA TRT-1B videotape recorder which would probably have been similar to the one used to make this recording occupied 9.5 square feet of floor space, and weighed 2440 pounds. However, videotape recorded shrank rapidly during the 1960s with the advent of transistors and integrated circuits.

@LaptopLarry330 Жыл бұрын

Could the TV signal be sent from the moving van/truck to the studio with a microwave dish, and the video and audio recorded from inside the studio?

@andersonmartins2459 Жыл бұрын

amazing video!!!!

@niudou 2 жыл бұрын

It's a great record. Looking at Street View, as of 2021, the guard rail (0:59) and gas station (1:45) of the power receiving equipment are in the same place.

@lukenheimer5025 4 жыл бұрын

What clear, soothing music! This is the music that “soothes the savage breast!”

@HotRod12667 10 жыл бұрын

I think this is good quality for that era, and still looks good today. Or maybe my eyesight is going. XD Is there any more video of Burbank like this?

@shootfirst2097 3 ай бұрын

1:20 If you followed the cars and turned right on Olive, about 1/4 mile up the road next to the studios is Johnny Carson Park. It has a little stream running through it that feeds into the L.A. River at the south end of the park. Whenever it rained, the stream got respectably bigger and I used to take the dog I was babysitting down there and sit with an umbrella and watch the water.

@RFBurns-dh2pk 10 жыл бұрын

Such a nice looking complex!

@tomfrantz Жыл бұрын

Amazing. Love the music too!

@tjcassidy2694 6 жыл бұрын

I want that Corvette!

@kwahaus 6 жыл бұрын

Corvette? I must have missed that. I did see a 1958 Austin Healey 3000 at the 1:00 mark, a couple of Thunderbirds, a VW Beetle, a 1956 Studebaker Starlight, and a Nash Metropolitan amongst the the number of Fords and Chevys.

@bruce92106 4 жыл бұрын

Cool clip. But woulda been cooler without your whole "Courtesy of Retro Video' posted up throughout the whole clip, which makes an already old grainy (yet interesting) clip more of an annoyance to view. Maybe 6 secs in the beginning and ending would be appropriate.

@jimlaforte1755 3 жыл бұрын

It is probably so no one steals it without paying a royalty...

@newcoppiceman 10 жыл бұрын

Brilliant! But ask yourself why this has a magic that the same footage shot on 35mm just wouldn't have. It's all down to temporal resolution or the fidelity of the movement. We're supposed to prefer "the film look" of motion captured 24 times a second (with each frame shown twice on projection). The TV world, on the other hand, is naturally a high temporal resolution medium with 50/60 images a second (never mind that, due to interlace, they are "half-images"). Even as a schoolboy I could tell the difference and it always jars when, these days, the two are intercut willy-nilly. An example in the UK is a nature series called Springwatch where, when discussing a particular bird or whatever, they run a package (VT wallpaper) made up of clips from the archive.

@laurenharris4591 10 жыл бұрын

Very easy on the eye!

@mca1218 10 жыл бұрын

Excellent question. The simplest answer I can give is that a videotape image looks live, in a way that motion picture film, while beautiful, does not. And because so many video images were erased forever (for the economical purpose of re-using the tape), finding and archiving any video more than, say, 50 years old, is something special. I still get excited when I see the taped images of Astaire, Dinah Shore, Steve Allen, seasons 3-4 of Playhouse 90, or Peter Pan. Any pre-1960 videotape is golden.

@jsat5609 7 жыл бұрын

A lot BBC series in the 70s, such as Dr. Who, and others, intercut film for outdoor scenes, with tape for studio shots, and the effect is jarring and inconsistent.

@jehobden 6 жыл бұрын

I noticed the same when I watched The Goodies on PBS in the late 70s. It came from UK and had tape intercut w/ film.

@goodiesguy 6 жыл бұрын

The commonwealth way (at least in UK, Australia and New Zealand) was to have VT for indoor studio scenes and 16mm film for outdoor or on-location shots. This can be seen on the likes of The Goodies, The Benny Hill Show, Dad's Army etc...

@thomasbower7727 3 жыл бұрын

I drove past that so many times in the early 90's. So different. Completely built up all around and NBC Studios are nowhere near the tallest building, iirr.

@altfactor 7 жыл бұрын

Could this have been taped as an opening for Jack Paar's "Tonight Show" when it went out to Burbank?? It's my understanding that before "Tonight" moved West in 1972 that two or three times a year, the show would go to Burbank for a week or two at a time to have guests on who normally wouldn't be able to go to New York to do the show.

@ApartmentKing66 5 жыл бұрын

Don't know about Paar, but Johnny Carson did that quite a bit.

@mrmister8039 2 жыл бұрын

Sacred footage of the golden days. ❤️

@richardpeterson1398 2 жыл бұрын

If this was filmed in 1958, how come I spotted a 1960 Chevrolet in this video? This couldn’t be filmed before the fall of 1959.

@UNOwen1 Жыл бұрын

Jeez, I can compare this with today - wild! It works be really neat to have a ‘ghost’ layer of this very area layered into a copy of this, so a person watching could ‘flip’ back-and-forth. Aside drum the obvious shock/sadness/etc at the radical difference in a very short period of time, I’m also reminded that nothing - on this planet, or anywhere - is static for long. It is the changes which are wrought that most sick living beings of that period. I’m also amazed at the video quality, but even more-so, I can remember sitting with my Apple PowerBook (180c) - which was THE states of the art in the very last years of the 20th century, in Santa Monica, And I was fascinated watching QuickTime videos - they were all of perhaps 1-2” Sq, AMA I was just amazed that I was able to watch what I wanted to (in fact, I was watching Lucy in London, which was a Lucille Ball TV special that I’d found and was watching - not for Ms Ball, but for the opening music, which was produced by an acquaintance of mine, Mr Phil Spector, And was doing some research on some rarities of his). Now - a little over 2-decades later, the whole area shown in this gorgeously restored video Is built up. There’s no wooden houses. No open spaces - not of grass fields, anyways.

@Lafayette320 Жыл бұрын

I visited NBC's O&O Los Angelas facility in the early '70's. It had been renovated. The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson was filmed there. It's such a shame that Universal sidelined it when it bought NBC. I can't think of the name it bore later.

@catholicpriest1 9 жыл бұрын

The RCA 2" Video Tape Recorder was rather large... not to mention supplying power for the camera and VTR.

@rty1955 3 жыл бұрын

The machine was about 2,000 lns and required an air compressor for the video headwheel bearings and it created its own vacuum for the female guide as well. RCA was incapable of developing thier own video tape machine so in exchange for the RCA design of color circuitry, AMPEX let RCA use the design of thier 2" machine. Ampex shortly after developed a far superior color circuitry that made RCAs worthless. In 1967 Ampex developed a lightweight, portable 2' machine for field use it could not erase tapes and had only a demod o/p it had no playback circuitry

@LaptopLarry330 Жыл бұрын

Perhaps that 1967 portable color VTR was in use by ABC for the NCAA “Championship Game” between UCLA and USC. It was the very first “all-color” ( no black-and-white portable cameras and no black-and-white replays) college football broadcast. I believe that the game is available for viewing here on KZfaq.

@justinellison4214 2 жыл бұрын

Its really a rare tape !

@dunebasher1971 6 жыл бұрын

A fantastic piece of video, but it's a massive shame that KZfaq has filmised it. If it could be converted to 720p60 before uploading, it would retain its original "video--look" motion. That's what I do with all my old SD stuff.

@mca1218 5 жыл бұрын

I thought it looked pretty live right here, in the 480p mode.

@dunebasher1971 4 жыл бұрын

Nope, you're missing half the temporal resolution.

@LvninLA 2 жыл бұрын

I never got the chance to thread a 2"Quad machine... but I've seen them run. I only go back to 1" C format Sony machines and the Ampex VPR5 portable. Those were a handful.

@jehobden 9 жыл бұрын

Great segment! It looks so real. I'd love to know what the price of a gallon of gas at that Mobil station was then. :)

@thomasbower7727 3 жыл бұрын

millennial. 1958? Probably a dime, maybe less.

@LaptopLarry330 Жыл бұрын

The videotape was edited before the camera reached the price signs. According to the “USA TODAY” website, the average price of gasoline per gallon was 30 cents per gallon ($1.99 per gallon adjusted for inflation). Because of California’s high taxes, it was probably closer to 40 cents per gallon in 1958.

@phillipmorales8886 2 жыл бұрын

Great video, I took a tour of the NBC headquarters in 1980 with my parents. I wonder what 's there now at 3000 W Alameda? NBC is not there anymore I know.

@markschildberg1667 Жыл бұрын

It’s a video production facility called The Burbank Studios. Warner Bros. is supposed to take over ownership of the building this year.

@JJJBRICE 7 жыл бұрын

I want to know how much a gallon of regular was at that Mobil station across the street in 1958 !

@jehobden 6 жыл бұрын

So do I. I'd guess it was maybe 29.9 cents/gallon, maybe less.

@doloreshuntoon7698 7 жыл бұрын

Oh, wow!

@jeffreywilliams9971 7 жыл бұрын

Poor?!? In what way,exactly?!?

@tomfrantz Жыл бұрын

James Dean's backup car must have 30 PRKG tickets.

@warlaker 2 жыл бұрын

Route 134 was a surface street, long before it was the Ventura Fwy

@kennethsouthard6042 3 жыл бұрын

When was the more modern facade put on the front of the building? By the looks of it , I'm guessing sometime in the mid to late 1980s?

@RobertWPaine 2 жыл бұрын

Is any video of NBC Radio City at Sunset and Vine known to exist?

@ScoopNemeth 6 жыл бұрын

from the 0:50 mark, to the 1:01 mark, those are the same notes Ray Ellis used for the Today Show Theme (1978-1985) the 1978 Version (with Tom Brokaw) - kzfaq.info/get/bejne/jcpzjLx41bS-iWg.html the 1981 Version (with Bryant Gumbel) - kzfaq.info/get/bejne/hN6IoMaYt7amlKc.html