Metropolis was included as an episode of
“The Toy That Grew Up” in
September 1970.
The Toy That Grew Up was a
local program on WTTW Channel 11 in
Chicago,
but it was offered to other stations and a handful licensed a handful of episodes.
It was a most irregular TV series.
It started with a bang, with monthly movies, regularly scheduled,
but a year later it consisted almost entirely of relentless repeats at often unpredictable times.
I can only assume that producer Robert Christian Seipp
was having more problems than he ever imagined with booking films.
He had some trouble clearing the rights,
and how (if?) he managed to clear the rights to The Kid and The Gold Rush remains a mystery.
My guess is that some of the private collectors who had promised to loan their prints got cold feet.
I would hazard a guess that one of the collectors who loaned prints was
Jacob
Krch, but that’s just a guess.
The end credits of the only episode available online reveal other sources, and this surprises me:
MoMA, the Library of Congress, Blackhawk Films,
the University of Oklahoma Press (presumably for permission to source their books),
and Kalton C. Lahue (of course!).
By the way, Irwin Drobny penned a recollection:
...Second was a PBS series, called I think The Toy That Grew Up,
which showed silent films with respect. music et cetera.
And it was run by Robert Seipp,
a former cinephile, a genuine eccentric, who loved opera, 78’s, the tv series Hazel,
the films of Bobbie Breen and extensive collections of just about everything —
including menus, but a very amusing companion and a nice guy,
whose political views were far to the right of Fox News!!
Each film was introduced by
Don Ferris (b. 1931),
who read from a script by Seipp.
The director was David Zeeko, b. 1942.
At first,
Mrs. Litta Frances Burlingame, a nickelodeon pianist in her
youth, accompanied the films on piano.
That was until about July 1965,
according to Mark Jeffries,
when WTTW/11 began to move its facilities from the Museum of Science and Industry to a new studio at
5400 N. St. Louis Ave.
Hal Pearl took over her duties,
accompanying on a small home-style organ that was set up at the WTTW studio.
But hey, hold your horses.
Take a look at the dates.
Mrs. Burlingame’s last gig was on 22 December 1964.
Then for the next 20 months there were only repeats.
Mr. Pearl didn’t get his first gig until 11 August 1966.
If I may be permitted to hazard a guess,
Mrs. Burlingame went on sick leave or possibly long-term disability,
and so Bob Seipp probably agreed not to produce any further episodes until she recovered.
After a 20-month hiatus, Bob hired Mr. Pearl in August 1966,
and Mrs. Burlingame would pass away just a few months later, on
4 March 1967.
As for Mr. Pearl, he had earned his chops playing the Barton at the
Midwest back in 1927.
Mrs. Litta Frances Burlingame, 1888–1967
Mr. Hal Pearl, 1908–2000
The implication is that the Metropolis print came from a private collection. Whose?
I suspect that it really came from Brandon Films or from whatever distributor took over that print.
Oh no, I’m wrong, I’m wrong, I’m wrong, I’m wrong, I’m wrong.
WTTW/11 booked some of its films from MoMA, and so that’s where Metropolis came from,
I’m willing to bet.
So, yet once again, it came over me, that obsession again.
Need to learn all I can about this series.
Two and a half days of my life were sacrificed to this project.
Here is the entire episode list.
Over that decade, 1962 through 1971, there were 83 episodes in total, containing something like 134 movies.
It seems that this series was created in 16mm rather than on videotape,
and the quality, if we are to judge from the only readily available
sample on YouTube,
was nearly unwatchable.
Nonetheless, I would love to collect copies of all the episodes.
Do they still exist?
THE TOY THAT GREW UP, WTTW 11, CHICAGO
#
TITLE
AIR DATES
1.
The Great Train Robbery
Introduction to early cinema, concluding with The Great Train Robbery
(piano accompaniment: Mrs. Litta Frances Burlingame)
To Be Continued Next Week —
Pearl White and the Serials, Part I:
The Perils of Pauline, chapter 9: The Floating Coffin
The Exploits of Elaine, chapter 8: The Hidden Voice
The Iron Claw, chapter 7: The Hooded Helper
(piano accompaniment: Mrs. Litta Frances Burlingame)
(syndicated:
KQED/9 San Francisco,
WENH/11 Durham NH,
all Maine ETV stations,
WGBH/2 Boston,
WQED/13 Pittsburgh,
WVIA/44 Scranton, and surely elsewhere, too)
24.
The Perils of Pauline, chapters 1 and 2
(organ accompaniment: Hal Pearl)
To Be Continued Next Week — The Serials, Part II:
The Adventures of Marguerite, chapter 4: The Veiled Princess
The Trail of the Octopus, chapter 2: The Purple Dagger
The Woman in Grey, chapter 7: At the Mercy of the Flames
(organ accompaniment: Hal Pearl)
Mickey
(organ accompaniment: Hal Pearl)
Ah! We learn something here! ETS (Educational Television Stations) Program Service. What was that?
Katie Morrison did some research and
told us,
quoting from “The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967”:
“The ETS Program Service was established in 1965 at Bloomington, Indiana.
It is operated by Indiana University Foundation under contract to Educational Television Stations, NAEB.
This service provides an exchange of a variety of programs selected from the best productions originating at local stations.
There is a small per-program use charge to offset distribution costs.
This nation-wide program distribution facility was made possible through grants
for the National Home Library Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.”
Where did this print come from?
Had this been from a private collection, it would most likely have been a Griggs Moviedrome print,
but had that been the case, this episode would likely have been put into syndication.
Instead, this was a unique broadcast, never repeated anywhere, as far as I can tell.
So, it must have been licensed.
Perhaps this was the exact same 16mm print that was shown at the 55th Street Playhouse in 1955.
Did Brandon Films still have this in its catalogue in 1970?
A clue would be the running time.
The Brandon Films edition of 1954/1955 would have been 119 minutes at 24fps,
but, alas, the TV listings keep the running time a secret.
This program was the last one in the broadcast day, and so it ended whenever it happened to end.
A better guess is that the print was from MoMA, and I’m nearly certain it was.
TV Week magazine, supplement to the Chicago Tribune.
Irony: The series gets its first big promo just a week and a half before it is canceled.
Outrageous claim: “Toy is cranking on with no signs of winding down.”
According to Samuel K. Rubin in
Classic Images no. 215, May 1993,
The Toy That Grew Up also included
Orchids and Ermine
but I see no evidence of that at all.
I wish I knew his source of information.
Bob Seipp had hoped to devote an episode to the Edison studio’s
sound films from
1904–1905 but he could not locate the synchronized discs,
and, as a matter of fact, NOBODY has ever found those discs.
Curiously, we have this recollection from
Rob Kozlowski:
...I may have been 8 when I saw “The Phantom of The Opera”
and Larry Semon’s “The Wizard of Oz” on WTTW Channel 11 in Chicago on a Saturday
morning running back-back without any musical accompaniment at all! Every ten
minutes a subtitle would come up at the bottom of the screen advising viewers that
“This is a silent movie,” presumably to keep anyone from believing they had
suddenly gone deaf. It was not a very effective introduction to silent film. I
was wondering at the time why there was no music.
That would have been between about 1976 and 1980.
I searched the online newspapers but was unable to find such listings.
It appears that the transmission of Metropolis on 24 September 1970
with Hal Pearl’s organ accompaniment was never repeated anywhere.
Why?
My guess is that the license stipulated that it be broadcast only once.
If it was shown only once, there is a chance that it was never recorded
and that Hal Pearl played live.
If so, his performance is lost forever.
Mini-investigation:
When we do some more Albuquerquefying,
we discover that KNME Channel 5 licensed only 36 episodes, not the whole series.
As we scout about on the online newspapers, it seems that WTTW made only certain episodes available to other stations.
WNET Channel 13 in NYC broadcast a somewhat different selection, seemingly only 30 episodes,
which included two episodes not shown in Albuquerque:
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Lost World.
The reason for the differences I do not know.
I would hazard a guess that different rights owners stipulated different terms.
Certain films were licensed exclusively for Chicago.
Some were licensed for only a single transmission.
Other contracts included options for sublicensing.
WTTW or its broker, I assume, offered several packages,
some with only 30 or 36 episodes,
as well as premium packages with more episodes.
The series was canceled before the episodes from 1970 and 1971 could be sublicensed.
The last transmissions of any episodes from this series were from September 1975,
so far as I can tell.
I assume that’s when the last of the contracts expired.
The last stations to air the series were WILL/12 Urbana and KETC/9 St. Louis,
so far as I can tell.
Actually 36, not 35. The other 47? They were not included in the package.
When you plough through the old online newspapers to check the above against what was shown in other markets,
you discover that any market that licensed this series ran the episodes in almost exactly the same order.
Oh, yes, there were inevitable scramblings, but this was pretty much the established sequence.
Thanks to this established sequence, I was able to fill in the four gaps, which I indicate with brackets.
You also realize that Albuquerque was lucky.
Most other markets, it seems, canceled the series after ten or so episodes and probably got a partial refund.
Albuquerque seems to be one of the very few markets that broadcast every episode it originally paid for.
Unfortunately, the series finished just as we first arrived in the city, and so I never got to see it.
Must have been from the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung,
and it must have been the 1965 edition with the Konrad Elfers score.
Was it Transit Films that supplied it directly, or did it go through a third party?
This was surely a French-language edition supplied by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung and Transit Films,
the 1965 version with the Konrad Elfers score.
Who was the Canadian distributor?
