Karson Kwestions

A reader who I'm not sure wanted his name used wrote and asked two questions about Johnny…

Since you were there at the taping, I'm wondering how Ed McMahon was able to exit his visit with Leno on Monday in time to be on Larry King's show. If I remember right, Tonight always starts taping at 5:30, which would've given Ed a scant 5 minutes between the end of his appearance with Leno and the start of Larry King's show at 6:00. Did Tonight alter its taping time, or is Larry King's CNN studio astonishingly close to Leno's?

I think Larry King does his show from a CNN building down on Sunset Boulevard, which at that time of day can be a 30-45 minute commute from Burbank, where Leno tapes. But Ed had plenty of time because The Tonight Show no longer tapes at 5:30. They moved to 5:00 and then to 4:00, in part because Mr. Leno sometimes likes to fly off to Vegas or some other city and do his act in the evening. So Ed walked out of the NBC studio around 4:30, and I believe he did a few other interviews there before heading down to see Larry.

I'm wondering if you have any industry insight as to why a few of the older Carson clips we've been seeing were apparently long ago transferred from their original video onto — of all things — film. (Examples: The late 1960s bit with George Gobel, Dean Martin, and Bob Hope, plus the circa 1972 Alpo commercial where Johnny had to stand in for the dog.)

Well, I can guess. As we all know, most of the tapes of Johnny's early shows were destroyed or erased years ago. Some of what remains of that era is because many shows were transferred to 16mm film via the old kinescope process. For those who don't know, back before video tape was perfected, the only way to preserve live TV shows was to have someone point a 16mm camera at a TV monitor and film the image. The procedure became obsolete when tape came in except that there were some foreign markets where the stations weren't equipped for tape, and if you wanted to sell your shows over there, you had to run kinescopes. So throughout the sixties and into the seventies, it was done with a number of live or taped TV shows, including Johnny's, so that they could be shown on U.S. military bases overseas. I suspect those filmed clips were taken from prints made for that purpose which someone found.