TV and Me: A Million Year Journey to Johnny Jupiter

Television and I grew up together.  This is our story. First of a series.

Once upon a time, television began.  It was before wall-sized flat screens, streaming, HD, 3D, 4k, 5D...

 Actually, the story starts earlier.  Maybe a million years earlier.  Or at least several hundred thousand...

 Once upon a time, people talked.  Occasionally one person talked to a group of others.  They gathered in front of the fire in winter to hear a storyteller tell them the history of the world and their people, the adventures and fatal mistakes of their hunters. Or children gathered around an elder, or heard bedtime stories from their mother. They heard tales of animals and humans, and how they changed into each other.  They heard how the leopard got its spots and how the coyote lost its tail.  They heard stories about children lost in the forest, and people who were way too greedy. 

Listening to stories—and watching the storyteller-- around the fire must have been a part of life for a very long time.  When people were alone, they might stare into their own small fire, and think about the stories, and daydream their own...

 Eventually a number of people acted out such stories as moral tales and histories.  They might include music of the drums and flutes, and interludes of jugglers, tumblers and clowns, as well as painted masks and regalia.

 
Often these stories, told or acted out, were repeated.  Some were ceremonial, but others were teaching stories.  Some were scary, some made you laugh.  People might hear or see the same story told many times, and they might notice that one storyteller was better than another.  In this way, they distinguished between the teller and the tale.

 Other stories were told in pictures.  You might need special credentials to look at the ones on the walls deep in caves, but others were scratched into rocks for everyone to see.  Later other kinds of pictures told a story, in paint, in stone, and in stained glass.

 Eventually these elements combined in theatre.  They all had one thing in common: in order to experience the story, you had to be at the place and at the time they were told. 

There was one exception.  Somewhere in this history, years after writing developed and spread, years after books were copied out and stored in libraries, the invention of the printing press quickly made it possible for almost everyone who could read to acquire and read books.  Books told stories to you alone, anywhere you were, including your home. 

 Even before that, writing had changed things.  When the priest and the rabbi read from sacred texts, they clearly weren’t making up the stories.  Somebody else was the author, divine or otherwise.  There was another step between the story and you.  So in a way the story came from far away.

 Print led not only to books but to shorter packages of stories that were different every few months, or every month, week, or every day.  They were periodicals: chiefly magazines and newspapers.  Some were topical, some political. Some publications serialized the fictions known as novels. As more people became literate, especially from the early 19^th century well into the 20^th century, periodicals of various kinds gained almost universal readership, at least in cities and towns.   

 Daily newspapers carried stories (news, sports, weather) about a reader’s town or city, and stories that everybody in the country was following.  Immigrants learned English by following the stories told with crude drawings and brief words on “the funny pages.”  Some cartoon strips told a single story each day, usually humorous.  Others spread out a dramatic story over days or weeks or months: tales of adventure in exotic places, detective stories, science fiction, romance—every kind of story that books or periodicals told, and a few more.  Soon the comic strips spawned their own periodicals called comic books. 

People were learning all the ways stories could come to them.

 In the midst of this hubbub of storytelling, along came moving pictures.  Audiences by now knew about stories (maybe true, maybe not; not actually happening now, but on the other hand, actually happening now) and the conventions of theatre (with actors who weren’t really the characters but on the other hand, they were; and that the living room on the stage wasn’t really the living room of those people, but in a way, it was.) Now they had to learn how to see stories in motion: that the train coming at you is not actually coming at you, but then again, it is.  And that the music someone is playing on piano or organ over in the dark corner is related to what’s happening on the screen.

 Then moving pictures began to talk and sing, scream and explode.  The organ in the corner became a symphony you couldn’t see.  But what all these forms of storytelling had in common, together with other entertainment like the circus and the ballet, concerts and vaudeville, not to mention sporting events and public speeches, was one thing: you had to be there.  Even though, for the stories, you weren’t there: you didn’t have to be in Rome for a story about Rome, but you did have to be in the place the story is told, such as the theatre or the movie palace. 

No sooner had movies become the chief means of entertainment (with most Americans in 1930 going to the movies at least once a week) than there was something new, called radio.  Now voices told you stories from far away, when you were in your own living room.   They were like books that talked and sang and made funny noises to remind you of doors slamming, cars careening and guns firing.  They were the opposite of the old silent movies you could see but not hear; they were movies you could hear but not see: movies for the ear.

 At first it was called “the wireless” because it carried sound like a telephone but without telephone wires.  It had its technical problems, and remained a novelty through the 1920s. But the broadcasting of news, music, sporting events and a growing number of other kinds of stories began to fill the day in the 1930s.  Radio exploded.  Only two out of five American homes had a radio in 1931.  A year later, the proportion was one out of three.  By 1938 the conquest was nearly complete, as four out of five homes had a radio, usually in a prominent place in the living room.

 Radio presented actual stage plays or more often, plays meant to sound like stage plays, beginning with an announcer whispering that the curtain is going up, followed by applause. 

It told all the stories that movies told, and sometimes featured the same actors. You could go to the movies and see Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, and come home to listen to Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes. Radio presented the entertainers of vaudeville and Broadway musicals, as the movies did.  Somehow radio even transcended its own limitations: for awhile its biggest star was a ventriloquist and his dummies (Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.)  A man whose gimmick was that he could make dummies talk without moving his lips was a sensation with audiences who couldn’t see him.

 And radio soon learned to tailor its storytelling to its main advantage: it was in the home, every minute of the day.  It took the kind of stories that appeared in romance novels and especially romance comic strips (sometimes with the same characters), crossed them with the movie serial, and told them incrementally in fifteen-minute segments, sometimes at a pace that would make a snail impatient.  These were the daytime dramas, the daytime serials, otherwise known as soap operas.

 Pepper Young’s Family, Hilltop House, Stella Dallas, Mary Noble, Backstage Wife...Soap operas were designed for women who were at home during the day and could listen with less than full attention while doing their domestic chores.  They became very popular.  The ten of them on the air in 1934 more than tripled to 31 by 1936, and then nearly doubled again to 61 by 1939.  Radio had invented a storytelling form.

 The next step seemed inevitable: a storytelling device in the home like radio but that told stories with the moving pictures and sounds so far available only in movie theatres.  America was introduced to television with a broadcast and on-site demonstrations at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, called The World of Tomorrow.

 That broadcast was of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s opening remarks, but almost no one had the equipment within range to see it.  For most people, television remained the world of tomorrow through World War II, though TV sets began appearing in bars and other public places, especially in New York, which was to be the early center of television broadcasting.

Some television stations started broadcasting in 1947, but really it was 1948 before there was anything like a menu of regularly scheduled programs for at least part of the day. 

 By 1949, television was becoming part of everyday life.  People had once again gathered around the hearth to listen to stories on the radio.  Now they were again looking into flickering light, but not into the hearth fire: they gathered in front of the flickering images telling them stories on the TV set. 

 The first programs included boxing and wrestling matches: motion that a single fixed camera could capture in a confined space with good lighting.  Religious services and other ceremonies were also broadcast, partly for the same reasons.

 But soon television was producing versions of every kind of story told in every previous form.  Tales of heroes and heroines from books and comic strips and movie serials were told in 15 and 30 minute chunks. Stage plays or stories pretending to be plays got the same sort of treatment as radio, with the whispering announcer and the shot of the audience applauding. (One of these reached back beyond radio to the beginning of storytelling with its title, Fireside Theatre.)  

Soon the full panoply was on view: musicals, vaudeville, song and dance, detectives, cowboys, space ships, cops and robbers, classic drama, melodrama and soap opera, movie cartoons, news broadcasts, interviews and documentaries.

The arrival of movies, radio and television as storytelling media came so close together in time that there were many performers who had begun on stage but then proceeded through all three.  Jimmy Durante went from vaudeville to Broadway musicals and New York nightclubs to movies and radio before becoming an early television star—and he was far from the exception. 

 Almost all the television program forms began elsewhere, often coming directly from radio or the movies, and this became part of the story of early television as I experienced it, beginning in the late 40s and mostly the early 1950s.   

 But before I begin at the beginning of that part of the story, I want to remember Johnny Jupiter. 

I lived more than thirty miles from the nearest television stations, though the primary one at this time  happened to be located in an unlikely pioneer city for both radio and television: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Other stations were broadcasting from farther away.

 In those circumstances, television in the late 40s and early 50s was a sometime thing.  At first it wasn’t on at all most of the time, as new stations tested their equipment. I recall being restless while accompanying my mother on a visit to the home of a family friend, and persuaded to calm down because a program was scheduled to start on their television set.  Although we were “early adopters,” we didn’t have a set yet; almost no one did.  So I was excited.  I waited, with decreasing patience.  And finally the little television set came to life-- with a program on how to freeze ice cubes in a new refrigerator.  It was likely a filmed segment of a late 1940s program, “In the Kelvinator Kitchen.”  Pre-Betty Furness. 

But even when real programs were on for some part of the day, reception was dicey at best.  I'm guessing we got our first television set by 1949 (maybe a year later or earlier.) We had one when we lived in the “foundation,” the basement of our house not yet built. By 1953, we had a television set in the living room of that house, hooked up to an antenna that lay across the top of the chimney.  On most channels what I saw was the sight and sound we knew as “snow,” a cacophony of dots in shades of gray and black accompanied by a brash hissing noise.  Or if not snow, then a picture jumping up and down, appearing and disappearing among bouncing and waving lines (which the “horizontal” and “vertical” controls on the set were supposed to fix, but seldom did.)

 Eventually we got two or three channels clearly enough to watch, at least at the TV’s less temperamental moments.  One of them was more reliably clear: WDTV Channel 3 in Pittsburgh (channel 2 after 1952), the Dumont network channel.  The Dumont network, begun by an early television technology pioneer and maker of TV sets like the one pictured, was one of the major networks (though it didn't make it beyond the 1950s), along with NBC and CBS, both powerhouses in radio. ABC soon got in the game. 

In those earliest days, relationships of individual stations to networks were more fluid.  WDTV was Pittsburgh's only station for a long while, and it broadcast shows from basically everybody.  But it was primarily a Dumont station, so among my earliest TV memories are Dumont programs.   The most poignant for me now is Johnny Jupiter. 

The premise of Johnny Jupiter was that an earnest old janitor at a television station (played by Vaughn Taylor) turns the dials on a television looking for something to watch, and accidentally tunes into the planet Jupiter, and two of its inhabitants, Johnny Jupiter and the robot B-12.  But he doesn’t just see and hear them.  He talks to them, and they talk to him.

 Johnny Jupiter and B-12 were hand puppets with the voices of the program’s writers, Jerome Coopersmith and Carl Harms.  They were two figures with the proscenium of a television screen around them, with the janitor, Ernest P. Duckweather, standing beside them on the other side of the screen.  But they were all inside my television proscenium screen.

 As far as I recall, mostly what they did for a half hour was talk.  Duckweather described Earth customs and behavior, which sounded ridiculous even to Earthlings, and Johnny Jupiter described the alternatives on Jupiter.  This for me was a very early initiation into societal satire.  Most of it was beyond me at age 6 going on 7, but not all of it. It wasn’t long before I was engaging in it myself. 

But the reason I start this series with Johnny Jupiter, which is not the first television show I remember, is the strange magic of it, and its premise.  Here was this barely believable medium of stories come to life in my living room, though my access to them was always a bit uncertain, according to the moods of weather and whatever else affected television signals. When it worked, it was like magic.

 And here was Ernest P. Duckweather, like me hoping for something to watch he’s never seen before, tuning into not just another city or state, but another planet. Not only that, but he interacts with the beings there.  If television was possible, it seemed to me, something like that might also be possible. Who knows what this magic box could really do? After all, you could talk to people on some radios.  And wouldn’t it be wonderful if someday I turned the TV on and found Jupiter myself? 

Johnny Jupiter was broadcast weekly on the Dumont network for only four months in 1953.  The next year it was on ABC, with a different, younger Ernest P. Duckweather (played by Wright King), and the program was transformed into more of a situation comedy. (A few episodes of the ABC series which ran from September 1953 to May 1954 have survived (mislabeled) on You Tube and elsewhere. As far as I know, nothing of the first series is available to see.)

 But WDTV in Pittsburgh didn’t broadcast it after it went to ABC.  It wasn’t on the only other station we got reliably in 1953 and 1954, Channel 6 in Johnstown.

 Still, clacking through the stations one day I discovered it was broadcast on one of the fainter and more distant stations, possibly channel 7 (Wheeling, West Virginia) or channel 9 (Steubenville, Ohio), both of which broadcast ABC shows, among others.  But try as I might, every week at that hour, I couldn’t bring it in for more than a few minutes at a time.  Occasionally the snow would slightly clear, the horizontal and vertical stop jumping long enough for me to see the outlines of the new Duckweather and Johnny Jupiter, and to hear some distorted lines of dialogue.  But soon it would fade away.

  And that became part of television, too: the elusive promise unkept, and the potential unfulfilled. But there were also more wonders along the way.