![]() Walt Disney personally discovered her at a ballet performance. ![]() Upon her death in 2013, The New York Times wrote of Annette Funicello: “She was the last of the 24 original Mouseketeers chosen for The Mickey Mouse Club, the immensely popular children’s television show that began in 1955, when fewer than two-thirds of households had television sets. As Matthew Delmont wrote in his book The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ’n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia, “If American Bandstand helped push Philadelphia Schlock up the charts in this era, it also exposed viewers to a wider range of music than did Top 40 radio.” The sign in this auction, featuring the logo that debuted in the late 1960s and was used throughout the show’s most influential decade, bundles up all that history into a single iconic moment. The World’s Oldest Teenager didn’t sign on until July 1956, shortly after which the local show became a national sensation – “the coolest weekly American sock hop to ever air,” as the Los Angeles Times once put it, “where Clark exposed audiences to a nifty little thing called rock ’n’ roll.” The show brought to television the revolution that was beginning to take shape on the radio, featuring R&B acts like the Shirelles and James Brown and the Famous Flames country musicians including Johnny Cash and Conway Twitty and Motown artists such as Mary Wells and Smoky Robinson and the Miracles. Anything.ĭick Clark wasn’t there when American Bandstand struck up its first note on Philadelphia television in March 1952, when it debuted as replacement programming. As Time noted in its profile, Berle was just eight months into his run as host of Texaco Star Theater, the nascent medium’s top performer and “a jack-of-all-turns vaudeville comic who has gone into television and won a bright new feather for his very old hat.” There was some grousing about how he was loud, brash and “often tasteless.” But the stodgy Time had to acknowledge he was a genius, too – a man who “uses not only his brash, strongbow-shaped mouth to get off his loud, fast, uneven volley of one-line gags with expert timing and tireless bounce, he also hurls his whole 6 feet and 191 dieted pounds into every act of his show.” Uncle Miltie, as he called himself, was all-in on television. ![]() Time went a different route, using a lively gouache portrait by magazine illustrator Boris Artzybasheff. Newsweek ran a photo of Berle sporting a yellow dress, hundreds of colorful beads and a headdress with more fruit than a produce section. On May 16, 1949, 40-year-old Milton Berle appeared on the covers of two national magazines: Time and Newsweek, the first time a comedian had graced both titles in the same week.
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