How the Christmas Yule Log on TV Came to Be - From a TV perspective, Christmas Eve 1966 looked grim. The regular Saturday night college basketball broadcast was suspended due to the holiday, and while many viewers in the New York area might have had something better to do, those who tuned in to local broadcaster WPIX would face an hour and a half of nothing, followed by a roller derby at 11:30. WPIX president Fred Thrower had a suggestion: the station would announce the cancellation of all its programming that evening in order to present a WPIX Christmas card to our viewers. (The roller derby, Thrower noted, we can easily knock out.) That Christmas card, he proposed in a November 1966 memo, would be a closeup shot of a cheery fireplace, complete with Christmas stockings and flaming Yule logs, which would be repeated (via a looping process) over and over continuously accompanied by Christmas music. It would serve, he hoped, as a comforting holiday backdrop for those New York apartment-dwellers with no fireplace of their own. The WPIX Yule Log debuted on Dec. 24, 1966. It ran commercial-free for three hours. (See TIMEs top 10 Holiday TV Specials). The New York Times called it the television industrys first experiment in nonprogramming. It was a surrealists joke, a postmodernists dream — the television, literally, as the family hearth — and an immediate success. The Yule Log became a TV mainstay in New York that regularly won its time slot; dozens of other U.S. cities either picked up the WPIX footage or shot their own. The Log did have its drawbacks, however. The original 16mm footage (shot in Gracie Mansion, home of New York Mayor John Lindsay) was only 17 seconds long, and the flames skipped noticeably every time it looped. In 1970, with the original film deteriorating, WPIX decided to reshoot the video as a six-minute 35mm loop. When producers approached the Mayors office for permission to film again in Gracie Mansion, however, they were denied: during the production of the first Yule Log, the legend goes, the camera crew had removed a fire grate to get a better shot, and sparks had burnt through a $4,000 carpet. The 1970 Yule Log, which is the one most viewers are familiar with (and which was finally filmed in a California fireplace in the sweltering heat), ran until 1989. By that time the show — if you can call it that — had been cut back to two hours; to many station executives, the Yule Log was an antique, and its long-running, commercial-free format a financial drain. The fire was snuffed out in 1989. The Yule Log spirit, however, proved harder to extinguish. In ensuing years, and especially following the growth of the Internet, fans of the original Log began clamoring for its return. Joseph Malzone, a New Jersey-based audio-video technician, and music collector Lawrence Chip Arcuri started theyulelog to commemorate the holiday special, and collected hundreds of supportive email messages demanding its return. After the 9/11 terror attacks, amid growing demand for what WPIXs president called comfort food television, the station agreed to digitally remaster the Log, and restore it to its place of glory. In 2006, for its 40th anniversary, Malzone and Arcuri resurrected the original soporific audio, featuring recordings from Percy Faith, Henry Mancini and the Ray Coniff Singers
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 08:20:24 +0000
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