First on LateNighter: A previously unknown kinescope from Johnny Carson’s first season hosting The Tonight Show has been discovered in a Southern California garage—a rare find from the largely lost early years of his 30-year run.
Carson Entertainment Group, which maintains the official Carson archive, has only about 10 to 12 kinescopes that predate the newly discovered April 1963 footage, according to Jon Sotzing, the company’s marketing director.
The discovery came in October, when vintage tech archivist Brian Picchi was sorting through a collection of old films and reel-to-reel audio tapes that had belonged to television producer and talent agent Milton Blackstone, who died in 2020.
Picchi had first met Blackstone in 2013 after placing a Craigslist ad seeking vintage computers. The two struck up a friendship and remained in touch until shortly before Blackstone’s death.
It was a small, unpaid debt that eventually brought Picchi back in contact with Blackstone’s family. Years ago, Picchi had taken home $20 worth of computer magazines, intending to pay Blackstone on his next visit. After Blackstone died, Picchi wanted to settle the debt with his family, doubling the amount to $40 to account for the time that had passed.
Blackstone’s daughter told him the family was preparing to renovate the house and clear out some of her father’s belongings. She offered Picchi some of the computer equipment and film reels in the garage, hoping anything historically significant could be preserved or find an appropriate home.
Among them was a plain plastic case labeled “Johnny Carson Toy Reel.” Inside, the leader on a 16mm film reel read: “April 12, 1963—The Tonight Show.
At first, Picchi didn’t realize what he’d found. He assumed most episodes of The Tonight Show had been preserved. It was only after researching the show’s archival history that he began to understand how rare the reel might be.
He quickly arranged to have the film digitized. “I was praying that the quality was decent, given it was a kinescope that has likely been sitting in a garage this whole time,” Picchi told LateNighter.
When the transfer was ready, he “literally drove out the second they finished” to retrieve it. To his relief, the film proved to be in remarkably good shape.
The seven minutes of footage, spanning portions of two acts, show Carson and his longtime sidekick Ed McMahon demonstrating an assortment of new toys in what appears to be an early precursor to the new-product showcases that would become a recurring feature of Carson’s Tonight Show around the holidays.
Though he was still relatively new to the job, Carson’s familiar comic instincts are already evident in the early footage, including his willingness to make the show itself the punchline when a segment wasn’t going particularly well.
At one point, Carson tells viewers not to judge the rest of the broadcast by what they’ve just seen, joking that it can sometimes take an hour or an hour and a quarter for the program to reach the tempo they’re accustomed to.
The Tonight Show ran an hour and 45 minutes at the time.
While the material may be routine, its survival is not.
“Understanding that there is so little video from the early 1960s, any new find is an incredible addition to the library of material that we have,” Sotzing of Carson Entertainment Group told LateNighter.
Other pieces of Carson’s missing early years have occasionally surfaced. In 2012, a 16mm reel containing clips from another 1963 Tonight Show broadcast was discovered in a military visual-information storage facility near March Air Reserve Base in California. The Armed Forces Radio and Television Service had received film copies of network programs for distribution to service members overseas, and the Carson reel was among those left behind.
How the newly discovered kinescope ended up in Blackstone’s garage is less clear, though his career in television offers some possible explanations.
Blackstone managed performers including Eddie Fisher and helped develop programs including The Steve Allen Show. He later spent 18 years running the Comedians Golf Classic, an event that attracted entertainers including Buddy Hackett, Don Rickles, and Jack Lemmon.
Picchi suspects someone involved in the toy segment may have been a Blackstone client. Another possibility, he says, is that Blackstone simply enjoyed the segment and, through his connections at NBC, requested a copy.
For Picchi, watching the transfer meant seeing Carson and McMahon just six months into a partnership that would last until Carson’s retirement in 1992—and viewing footage he believes may not have been seen since its original broadcast.
“It was really an honor to be the first person to watch this since it originally broadcast,” he said.
Picchi has since offered the footage to Carson Entertainment Group. Sotzing confirmed to LateNighter that the company has been in contact with him about the discovery.
Picchi says he hopes to make the recording publicly available with the Carson estate’s permission. He shared more about his discovery in a video posted to his YouTube channel:
