My pal Stu Shostak is interested (some would say "obsessed") with preserving television history, both on networks and local stations. We share a special interest in KTLA, Channel 5 in Los Angeles. It's now a CW outlet but when Stu and I were growing up, it originated a lot of programming for the local market, including kids shows and game shows and sports and news and variety shows.
Last Wednesday on Stu's Show, Stu had on Joel Tator, a veteran director and producer who worked a lot at KTLA and knows every inch of its history. They did a show about it full of fascinating talk and some very rare, impossible-to-see-anywhere-else clips. The result was such a good, important program that Stu is making it available for free to all and I have a link to it embedded below.
WARNING: It's four-and-a-half hours long. I watched all of it over about four sittings because I have, as I say, a special interest in this history. You might get a lot out of it even if you didn't grow up in Los Angeles. The first hour is mostly discussing Joel's long, amazing career that earned him something like two dozen Emmy Awards. Stu could probably do another four-and-a-half hours just talking about and showing clips from Joel's work with Tom Snyder on The Tomorrow Show. The clips from KTLA start mostly about an hour in…
I'm not suggesting you watch the whole 4.5 hours but if you randomly pick a section and watch ten minutes, you just might go back to the beginning and commit to the show in full…