Freeman F. Gosden

Amos and Andy trying to make a go of their "open-air" taxi business while they get caught up in a society hassle, involving driving musicians to a fancy party.

An exploration of The Amos 'n' Andy Show (1951), the first all-Black series on American television. It only lasted a few years before CBS succumbed to pressure from civil-rights groups, which claimed that it portrayed the Black community in a negative light. Clips–and one entire episode–are shown, as are interviews with several members of the original cast and prominent modern-day Black actors and comedians.

For 50 years radio dominated the airwaves and the American consciousness as the first “mass medium.” In Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, Ken Burns examines the lives of three extraordinary men who shared the primary responsibility for this invention and its early success, and whose genius, friendship, rivalry and enmity interacted in tragic ways. This is the story of Lee de Forest, a clergyman’s flamboyant son, who invented the audion tube; Edwin Howard Armstrong, a brilliant, withdrawn inventor who pioneered FM technology; and David Sarnoff, a hard-driving Russian immigrant who created the most powerful communications company on earth.

Steve Allen hosts this collection of clips of some of the greatest comedy teams in movie and television history, including Our Gang, Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Brothers, Burns and Allen, The Three Stooges, The East-Side Kids, Abbott and Costello, and Martin and Lewis.

Calvin and the Colonel is an animated cartoon television series in 1961 about Colonel Montgomery J. Klaxon, a shrewd fox and Calvin T. Burnside, a dumb bear. Their lawyer was Oliver Wendell Clutch, who was a weasel. The colonel lived with his wife Maggie Belle and her sister Sue, who did not trust the colonel at all. Colonel Klaxon was in the real estate business, but always tried get-rich-quick schemes with Calvin's unwitting help. The series was an animated remake of Amos 'n' Andy [or, more or less, "Andy and The Kingfish"] and featured the voices of Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll from the radio series. Using animals avoided the touchy racial issues which had led to the downfall of Amos 'n' Andy. Because of low ratings, the show was cancelled after two months, but returned two months later to complete the first season contract. For a year afterward reruns were seen on Saturday mornings, and eventually syndicated through the 1960s. It was also adapted as a comic book by Dell Comics, and as such the first of two issues was the final installment in the company's extremely prolific Four Color anthology series.