As mentioned here earlier, NBC is going to rebroadcast Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol this year in prime time, even though it's been run zillions of times in syndication and is readily available on home video. The off-network airings have always been cut, sometimes savagely…but several folks have also asked me if the home video version is cut. They all seem to remember it being longer when it originally ran on NBC in 1962, and some recall scenes that they're sure were there once. These people are wrong. The other day, I was speaking with Paul Carlson, who worked on the show, and asked him. He checked with one of the editors and back came the answer: The original version was 53 minutes. The version available on VHS and DVD is precisely the same except that they had to trim the NBC peacock off the negative when the transfer was done.
This leads us to the question of what NBC will do since an hour of prime time programming now has more commercials and only allows for more like 45 minutes of programming. When the original, half-hour Charlie Brown Christmas was broadcast last December, a big promotional plus was that it would be run uncut for the first time in decades. This presented a problem since it didn't fit in what now constitutes a half-hour of network television. Producer Lee Mendelson solved the dilemma by convincing ABC to run it in an hour slot, and he produced a little documentary about the show's creation to fill out the 60 minutes. One doubts NBC will want to let Magoo run 90 minutes, so they'll probably trim and perhaps speed things up a bit.