Television Specials and Episodes
Before 1962, when Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol premiered, true Christmas specials made for TV were either adaptations of stories such as A Christmas Carol (with live actors), or the Nativity Story, or episodes of variety shows highlighting Christmas music. They were often hosted by such celebrities as Perry Como, Jane Wyatt, or Florence Henderson. That all changed once variety shows began dying out in the late 1980s and Rankin-Bass began producing more and more Christmas specials.
One notable television special usually seen at Christmas was Amahl and the Night Visitors, the first opera written especially for television. Composed by Gian-Carlo Menotti with a libretto in English by the composer, the opera told of a disabled beggar boy living with his (presumably) widowed mother in the Holy Land. They are visited by the Three Wise Men who are on their way to see the Christ Child, and when Amahl offers his crutch as a gift, he is miraculously cured. Commissioned by NBC, the opera was telecast annually in the U.S. from 1951 to 1966. In 1978, it returned to television, but this new production did not have the spectacular success that previous ones did.
Further information: List of Christmas television specialsRead more about this topic: Christmas By Medium
Famous quotes containing the words television and/or episodes:
“Never before has a generation of parents faced such awesome competition with the mass media for their children’s attention. While parents tout the virtues of premarital virginity, drug-free living, nonviolent resolution of social conflict, or character over physical appearance, their values are daily challenged by television soaps, rock music lyrics, tabloid headlines, and movie scenes extolling the importance of physical appearance and conformity.”
—Marianne E. Neifert (20th century)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)