I may be guilty of some sloppy phrasing in the previous message so let me run through this again. The Amos and Andy radio show actually overlapped the TV show. The Amos 'n' Andy Music Hall left the airwaves on November 25, 1960 (date courtesy of Anthony Tollin, who knows old radio better than anyone I know except Frank Buxton). The TV show was on from 1951-1953 in first-run. Reruns followed and they were very popular at first but ratings decreased and protests increased around the end of the fifties. CBS, which owned the program, formally withdrew it from syndication in 1966 but by that time, very few stations were airing it.
I have a story about this. Elsewhere on this site, there's a story about how I used to sneak in to watch Red Skelton rehearse his show over at Television City in Hollywood. This was made possible by a friend of mine named Mike who had a friend who worked there. One day, Mike's friend tipped him off to be at a certain trash dumpster outside at 3:00 in the afternoon and to bring a car. Neither Mike nor I drove so we got a friend who did and we went over there…and waited and waited. Sure enough, around 5:00, some people began dumping old 16mm prints of TV shows into that dumpster. They threw out maybe 500 cans of film and once they were gone, we began scooping them up and loading them in the car. I think we grabbed about a hundred before a security guard came by and chased us off.
Some of the films turned out to be unwatchable because the film had decayed or curdled, but most were perfect. There were about thirty episodes of Amos and Andy, a lot of G.E. Theaters hosted by Ronald Reagan, some kinescopes of soap operas and a couple of Groucho Marx treasures. In 1962, Groucho followed his long-running You Bet Your Life show for NBC with the similar-but-not-successful Tell it to Groucho for CBS. There were a number of those, plus a film — and we could never figure out why CBS had this — that had served as the pilot for the TV version of You Bet Your Life. It was a film of a recording session for the radio version intended, I guess, to see how the show looked so they could determine what they'd have to do to dress it up for television.
Mike and I showed some of these films at schools and a few public exhibitions, and then he got an offer and sold them all to some film dealer. The You Bet Your Life film has made the rounds of collectors and has been aired on the PBS series, I Remember Television. I suspect that all the copies of it that are around are copies, of varying generations, from that print we fished out of the trash. So, probably, are a lot of the Amos and Andy episodes that are now available on tape.
The TV show hadn't been withdrawn in '61 when Gosden and Correll went to work on Calvin and the Colonel, but the reruns were drawing protests by then, and everyone knew they had a problem. They also were out of work since, as noted above, the radio show had ended. Actually though — and I knew this but I wrote it wrong — they didn't create the show. It was created with them in mind by Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly, who had written the Amos and Andy TV show, and later went on to create Leave it to Beaver and The Munsters.
As some of you noted in e-mail to me, there were a couple of Amos and Andy cartoons done in the thirties. What none of you know is that there was talk of one in the eighties. Around '82, someone at CBS either discovered they had the rights to Amos and Andy, or thought they had the rights, and they pressured the Ruby-Spears animation studio to develop it as a possible Saturday morning series. Ruby-Spears, in turn, pressured me into writing the pilot…which I did, knowing full well the thing would never get on the air. As I recall, the day I handed in the script, the CBS exec called up and said, "We're not sure we have the rights…we have the lawyers working on it." And that was the last time the show was ever mentioned in my presence. I don't recall if it dawned on me at the time but what I wrote was basically an episode of Calvin and the Colonel, but with the characters turned back into human beings.