The 9-minute origin story of how your grandma's stories became your Netflix binge.
Promotes television sets and the broadcast of New York's first regularly scheduled programs by providing a clinical look at the inner workings of television, including the manufacture of the tubes, lab experiments, and an actual telecast. Shows RCA's production studios in Rockefeller Center, television demonstrations at the 1939–40 New York World's Fair, RCA's Empire State Building transmitter, and remote mobile broadcast units. One of a variety of "Reelisms" shorts produced by Frederic Ullman Jr. and Frank Donovan for RKO in the late 1930s.
Production
Glorious 1939 World's Fair footage — the future looked SO Art Deco.
Practical Effects
Actual tube manufacturing shots that'll make you respect your 4K screen.
Director
Frederic Ullman Jr.
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
This short debuted the same year as The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, making its futuristic optimism feel almost aggressively quaint.
Frederic Ullman Jr.'s 'Reelisms' series was essentially 1930s content marketing — studios funded these 'educational' shorts to build hype for emerging technologies they'd profit from.
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