With the help of a few readers of this site, we're doing vital detective work to figure out the precise airdates of Johnny Carson's early TV venture Carson's Cellar and of the episode we embedded here the other day. Stu Shostak, who owns a kinescope of said episode, told me it said 11/22/52 on the leader. Turns out he misread it. It actually says 11/23/52, which was a Sunday.
Bill Mullins researched old listings in the TV section of the L.A. Times and found dates listed for Carson's Cellar. It seems to have debuted on Saturday, October 4, 1952 at 7:00 PM. It then skipped a week, aired October 18 in that slot, then moved to Sunday at 5:30 as of October 26. It then skipped another week, aired again on Sunday the 9th, then was seen every week in that slot until its telecast of 1/18/53. It then moved to Friday nights at 8:30 as of 1/23/53 and ran there for five weeks. So it started on 10/4/52, ended on 2/20/53 and there were 19 episodes in all. Don M. Yowp (who runs a great Hanna-Barbera blog, by the way) dug into the online archives of the Long Beach Independent and found confirmation of the 10/4/52 date plus this clipping about it…
Mr. Mullins further notes that starting in April of '53, Johnny had a show called simply Johnny Carson at 10:00 pm on KNXT which ran on Fridays through June 29. Beginning on April 20, 1954 he hosted a morning show (also listed as just Johnny Carson) at 9 AM. The infamous episode of Red Skelton's show where Johnny filled in for Red was on August 18, 1954. I believe the official story was that during rehearsal, a breakaway door didn't break away and Red was injured. I seem to recall reading somewhere that while that was what was told to the press, Skelton was having some sort of emotional problem fueled by alcohol that day. Red was a very funny man but he did tend to keep his staff in a constant state of worry as to whether he'd show up, whether he'd looked at the script, whether he would follow that script…
The online library listings for the collection at the Paley Center for Media (formerly known as the Museum of Television & Radio) show two hits for Carson's Cellar. One is the episode that was embedded here…and they give no date for it but say the series aired "1951-1953," which is obviously off by a year. There's no description given on the other listing and I'm wondering if it isn't just the same episode listed twice. Next time I'm over there, I'll try to take a peek. Does anyone know for sure if a second episode exists?