October 1, 1962...Tonight With Johnny Carson Debuts https://youtube/watch?v=HdVmWLn41y0 At the clip link above is the audio of the first 3 minutes of the debut show with Groucho Marx introducing Johnny. The video has been lost but below, we have the next best thing...pictures from that night! The guests that night in NBCs Studio 6B were Joan Crawford, Mel Brooks, Tony Bennett and Rudy Vallee. We are fortunate to have photos of all but Mel Brooks and Ill make some comments on the pictures that youll see when you click on them individually. Notice in the audio Carson mentions two intros...one for the east and one for the rest of the country. This is a bit confusing, but here is what he was referring to and why. Carson inherited from Paar a show that was 1 3/4 hours (105 minutes) long. The show actually had two openings, one starting at 11:15 p.m. and included the monologue, the other that listed the guests and re-announced the host, starting at 11:30. The two openings gave affiliates the option of airing either a fifteen minute or thirty minute local newscast preceding Tonight, but remember...even the network evening news was only fifteen minutes long till 1963. As I understand it, this actually started with Steve Allen. As we saw last week, The Steve Allen Show, sponsored by Knickerbocker Beer on WNBT in New York, was a big hit. This was the predecessor to Tonight and when the show moved to the NBC network and The Hudson Theater, they wanted the loyal local audience to follow the show to the network, so they give Allen fifteen minutes to do some bits that were more for the local NYC area audiences. The thinking was that most of the country may not get the local humor, so Gene Rayburn re introed Allen at 11:30 for stations to join in after that. At that mark, Allen continued with a broader but short monolog. Somewhere along the line, the local humor emphasis went away in that 11:15 segment and it became the broader monolog but national viewers saw the show without any monolog if stations joined at 11:30. This is all quite murky and there is very little written on this, but we do know that Carson never liked this. As more affiliates introduced thirty minutes of local news, Carsons monologue was being seen by fewer people. To rectify this situation, Ed McMahon and Skitch Henderson co-hosted the first fifteen minutes of the show between February 1965 and December 1966 without Carson, who then took over at 11:30. Finally, because he wanted the show to start when he came on, at the beginning of January 1967 Carson insisted the 11:15 segment be eliminated and it was. Enjoy and Share! - Bobby Ellerbee
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 09:05:58 +0000
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