Uploaded May 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
Tramping around the flea markets near Hollywood California, you sometimes come across some interesting show biz stuff. In this video today, I'm going to show you something I found that I had never seen before. And yet I had seen it hundreds of times. Whaaat?
Yes, it's kind of like that old riddle, "What's black & white and red all over?" You know that one, right? I'm talking about something really really rare, yet it is a thing seen by millions. Well, here: At station breaks on the Tonight Show all through the 1970s, TV watchers would see this graphic. Johnny would say "We'll return right after this word from our sponsor" and then there would be SEVERAL words from their sponsor. A LOT of words, then they'd show this graphic again and you would think the show was about to come back on. And sometimes it did. But sometimes it would devolve into a lot MORE words from sponsors before getting back to Rodney Dangerfield--and Doc and Ed and Johnny.
So imagine my surprise one day looking through some paper goods at the flea market--old magazines, stuff like that--and here's this. Now, being an old school graphics guy myself, I recognize the protective cover sheet. Back before graphics were done on computers, it's what an artist would put over every piece of commercial production art he or she produced. So it's some kind of original commercial art. So I lift up the cover on this thing I had never seen before--and there is something I HAD seen before. Hundreds of times. And if you stayed up later than 11:30 in the 1970s, so did you. Holy moley! It's the Tonight Show... station break thingy. The seller at the flea market didn't think it was much so I got it cheap. I don't remember the price, just a few bucks, I guess. I ALWAYS remember when it's a lot. This wasn't. So I bought it. I still don't know what to call it, really. I think "title card" is a fair enough name for it. As I was walking out of the place I remembered that I had more such "title cards" at home. Older ones, that I had found at another flea market years earlier. I'll show you those in a minute. But first, how do I KNOW this is an authentic NBC title card? Well, I don't. I can't prove it. I got it at a flea market less than ten miles from where the Tonight Show was taped, but there aren't any markings on it that I can see or show to prove it to be genuine. But the thing that convinces me is this. The letters you see here are not IN the picture. This isn't just --what we would call today--a "screenshot." No, this is a photo print of Johnny Carson and the white letters are hand applied ON TOP of the print. And very well done I might add. Would you expect less from the graphics people at NBC? You can see when you get close how a bit of the "J" has rubbed off. These letters were applied by hand but they are not "hand-lettered" in the sense of being applied with a pen or brush the way a sign painter would do it. No, these letters would have been applied from a sheet of something called "transfer lettering," sometimes also called "press type" or "rub on letters." Some of you may remember these sheets. They were used to make headlines or small signs or anything like that in the graphic arts. These are some of those sheets. The ones we're looking at here are from the 1980s. They came in all kinds of styles. The type is almost always in black--but they did make white in some lettering styles--as was used on the Tonight Show graphic. You would rub each letter down, carefully pressing not too hard, not too soft, and trying not to accidentally rub off any adjacent letters or have them rub off from your hand or fingers that were holding the transfer sheet in place. This was very fussy business and took a lot of practice to do well. Oh, and here's a white one. Not the same style of course, but just exactly the sort of sheet that would have been used to apply the lettering to the Tonight Show title card.
Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but TV these days is jittery all the time. For younger people, it's always been this way. So it might be hard for some to believe that there were things on TV in the '90s and earlier that HELD STILL for a few moments. But there were... and they did. Title cards.
And now here are these other ones I mentioned. They are pretty old--I'd guess them to be from the mid- to late-1950s. One of them is dated 1956.
As the World Turns, Walter Cronkite with the News, rehearsal in progress, Art Linkletter's House Party, oh my mother liked that one. The Late Show, Big Hit Movies, The Edge of Night, a generic sort of one. Operational Difficulties--please stand by, a Seal of Good Practice, the CBS logo. It's Arthur Godfrey Time--oh yeah my mother liked him too. When I want to get a guitar and be a Beatle like every other kid in 1965, my mother said absolutely not. There was to be no rock 'n' roll in our house. Etc., etc., etc.
Tramping around the flea markets near Hollywood California, you sometimes come across some interesting show biz stuff. In this video today, I'm going to show you something I found that I had never seen before. And yet I had seen it hundreds of times. Whaaat?
Yes, it's kind of like that old riddle, "What's black & white and red all over?" You know that one, right? I'm talking about something really really rare, yet it is a thing seen by millions. Well, here: At station breaks on the Tonight Show all through the 1970s, TV watchers would see this graphic. Johnny would say "We'll return right after this word from our sponsor" and then there would be SEVERAL words from their sponsor. A LOT of words, then they'd show this graphic again and you would think the show was about to come back on. And sometimes it did. But sometimes it would devolve into a lot MORE words from sponsors before getting back to Rodney Dangerfield--and Doc and Ed and Johnny.
So imagine my surprise one day looking through some paper goods at the flea market--old magazines, stuff like that--and here's this. Now, being an old school graphics guy myself, I recognize the protective cover sheet. Back before graphics were done on computers, it's what an artist would put over every piece of commercial production art he or she produced. So it's some kind of original commercial art. So I lift up the cover on this thing I had never seen before--and there is something I HAD seen before. Hundreds of times. And if you stayed up later than 11:30 in the 1970s, so did you. Holy moley! It's the Tonight Show... station break thingy. The seller at the flea market didn't think it was much so I got it cheap. I don't remember the price, just a few bucks, I guess. I ALWAYS remember when it's a lot. This wasn't. So I bought it. I still don't know what to call it, really. I think "title card" is a fair enough name for it. As I was walking out of the place I remembered that I had more such "title cards" at home. Older ones, that I had found at another flea market years earlier. I'll show you those in a minute. But first, how do I KNOW this is an authentic NBC title card? Well, I don't. I can't prove it. I got it at a flea market less than ten miles from where the Tonight Show was taped, but there aren't any markings on it that I can see or show to prove it to be genuine. But the thing that convinces me is this. The letters you see here are not IN the picture. This isn't just --what we would call today--a "screenshot." No, this is a photo print of Johnny Carson and the white letters are hand applied ON TOP of the print. And very well done I might add. Would you expect less from the graphics people at NBC? You can see when you get close how a bit of the "J" has rubbed off. These letters were applied by hand but they are not "hand-lettered" in the sense of being applied with a pen or brush the way a sign painter would do it. No, these letters would have been applied from a sheet of something called "transfer lettering," sometimes also called "press type" or "rub on letters." Some of you may remember these sheets. They were used to make headlines or small signs or anything like that in the graphic arts. These are some of those sheets. The ones we're looking at here are from the 1980s. They came in all kinds of styles. The type is almost always in black--but they did make white in some lettering styles--as was used on the Tonight Show graphic. You would rub each letter down, carefully pressing not too hard, not too soft, and trying not to accidentally rub off any adjacent letters or have them rub off from your hand or fingers that were holding the transfer sheet in place. This was very fussy business and took a lot of practice to do well. Oh, and here's a white one. Not the same style of course, but just exactly the sort of sheet that would have been used to apply the lettering to the Tonight Show title card.
Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but TV these days is jittery all the time. For younger people, it's always been this way. So it might be hard for some to believe that there were things on TV in the '90s and earlier that HELD STILL for a few moments. But there were... and they did. Title cards.
And now here are these other ones I mentioned. They are pretty old--I'd guess them to be from the mid- to late-1950s. One of them is dated 1956.
As the World Turns, Walter Cronkite with the News, rehearsal in progress, Art Linkletter's House Party, oh my mother liked that one. The Late Show, Big Hit Movies, The Edge of Night, a generic sort of one. Operational Difficulties--please stand by, a Seal of Good Practice, the CBS logo. It's Arthur Godfrey Time--oh yeah my mother liked him too. When I want to get a guitar and be a Beatle like every other kid in 1965, my mother said absolutely not. There was to be no rock 'n' roll in our house. Etc., etc., etc.
