Television
Christmas television is predominantly secular and focuses on the ethical message of generosity through gift giving and Santa Claus, or the psychological message of home, nostalgia and childhood, or both. The theological message of the holiday—the Incarnation—is rarely encountered in Christmas television. Such a message would be inaccessible to many Americans.
In 1949, Gian Carlo Menotti was commissioned by NBC's Opera Theatre to write an opera for television. After a year and a half of delay, he set to work, completing Amahl and the Night Visitors five days before its scheduled airing on Christmas Eve 1951 at 9:30 to 10:30 p.m.. Menotti's work was inspired by Hieronymous Bosch's painting, The Adoration of the Magi. The composer himself appeared on-screen to introduce the opera and give the background of the events leading up to its composition. He also brought director Kirk Browning and conductor Thomas Schippers on-camera to thank them.
An estimated five million viewers tuned in—to this day, the largest audience for a televised opera in America. Skeptic Olin Downes declared in a New York Times front page review that "television, operatically speaking, has come of age" and Newsweek called the telecast, "the best production of opera yet seen on TV."
The opera's appeal lay not only in its story about a crippled shepherd boy healed on the first Christmas Eve but in its wedding of opera and the limitations of television. The broad effects of theater were eschewed and instead an intimacy appropriate to the television studio and home viewing was cultivated. The production starred Chet Allen as Amahl and Rosemary Kuhlmann as his mother. Kuhlmann reprised her role annually for many years.
In 1953, Amahl was colorcast. The opera claims the distinctions of being the first opera written for television, the first presentation of the teleseries Hallmark Hall of Fame, and the first Christmas television special to become an annual tradition. The opera was telecast on NBC from 1951 to 1966 with many of the original cast and crew participating.
On December 18, 1962, NBC aired the first animated Christmas special created specifically for television, Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol. Based on Dickens' novelette, A Christmas Carol, the animated special featured a score by Broadway duo Jule Styne and Bob Merrill.
On December 6, 1964, Rudolph the Red–Nosed Reindeer, a stop motion animation television special by Rankin/Bass, was telecast on NBC. The film was based on a 1948 song by Johnny Marks, and a 1939 poem by Robert L. May. The program has aired every year since 1964, making it the longest-running Christmas television special.
Read more about this topic: Christmas In The Post-War United States
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“In full view of his television audience, he preached a new religion—or a new form of Christianity—based on faith in financial miracles and in a Heaven here on earth with a water slide and luxury hotels. It was a religion of celebrity and showmanship and fun, which made a mockery of all puritanical standards and all canons of good taste. Its standard was excess, and its doctrines were tolerance and freedom from accountability.”
—New Yorker (April 23, 1990)