A Brief History On June 5, 1956, the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley, introduced what would become his top selling hit, “Hound Dog,” on The Milton Berle Show, an early television favorite. Digging Deeper Elvis’s performance included exaggerated gyrations that drove the girls in the audience wild, and enraged parents and prudes across the country. By this time Elvis had a number 1 hit with “Heartbreak Hotel” and was touring, continuing to draw animosity from the conservative media and prompting the Catholic Church (La Crosse, Wisconsin diocese) to contact J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI about Elvis being a threat…
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A Brief History The once wildly popular Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert airing at 11 PM and 11:30 PM (Eastern Time) on weeknights on Comedy Central have flopped miserably with the replacement hosts. Digging Deeper Trevor Noah took over the Daily Show from Jon Stewart on September 28, 2015 and Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show replaced The Colbert Report on January 19, 2015. Since losing Stephen Colbert to network television as the host of CBS’s The Late Show, Wilmore has seen ratings in that time frame drop by a whopping 55% (as of…
A Brief History On May 9, 1961, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Newton Minow, shocked Americans by declaring commercial television programming to be a “vast wasteland.” And you thought TV today was lousy! Digging Deeper Appointed as Chairman of the FCC by President Kennedy, Newton was giving his first speech in office to the National Association of Broadcasters, not exactly the audience likely to agree with him. Minow went on to rail against all the game shows, slapstick comedies, phony portrayals of family life and the violence, which though tame by our modern standards, must have been shocking…
A Brief History On April 30, 1961, the Soviet Navy commissioned their first nuclear armed submarine, the K-19, later made famous in the 2002 movie, K-19: The Widowmaker. Other ships have had movie titles featuring their name, and we have 10 prominent ones listed here. Digging Deeper 10. Battleship Potemkin, 1925. A silent film about the revolt on board the battleship in 1905 that eventually led to the Russian revolution and the overthrow of the Czar. Considered a propaganda film, it was named by the Brussels World Fair in 1958 as the greatest movie of all time. Many modern movies…
A Brief History On March 24, 1944, the hard work of 600 American and British POW’s was ready to pay off, and 200 of them were ready to escape from Stalag Luft III! Digging Deeper Stalag Luft III operated as a prisoner of war camp run by the German Luftwaffe to hold allied aviators (officers) that had been shot down and captured. Having been opened in 1943, the camp held almost 11,000 allied airmen, mostly American with about a quarter of the total British and some 900 from other allied air forces. Determined to escape, 600 of the inmates worked…