The MR. PEANUT Talent Hour! (Bizarre '50s kiddie show)

Calling it talent is stretching a point. From a klutzy tap-dancer who can't quite stick the landings, to a woman puppeteer talking to her hand, to a terrifying man in a giant peanut suit, this is a lineup you won't forget, try as you might. And then there's the barbershop quartet.

And in case you start to forget who the sponsor of all this talent is, the lady with the thingie on her hand pulls jar after jar of Planter's products out of a basket, to the great enthusiasm of the thing on her hand (which looks a bit like a dog in a peanut suit) which keeps "talking" to her (whispering in her ear, of course, which lets her out of any attempt at ventriloquism). Then the peanut man shows us how to spread peanut butter on crackers.

Most of these kinds of shows disappeared into the ether, being live, or if taped were mercifully erased to make way for quiz shows. But I follow a YouTube channel called Free the Kinescopes!, which has a surprising array of "stuff" like this, almost unbelievably bad, but no doubt considered a wonder at the time. Early TV was either radio with pictures, or VERY bad vaudeville-type variety programming like this.

🚗Is THIS the most dangerous car ever made?

This is a kinescope of (obviously, given the long awkward silences) a live stage show which was typical of very early TV. Nobody knew how to use the new medium, so when they weren't doing "radio with pictures", they were just filming vaudeville shows that had been running for years. Ed Sullivan somehow kept this ancient format going into the early 1970s. There were no re-takes, so glitches and ill-timed entries were common. I'd put this ad in the late 1940s, likely on "the DEW-mont Network" (infamous for the fact that when it went bankrupt, most of the kinescopes were quite literally dumped in the Hudson River). We get a good long look at this fierce-looking thing with the bared teeth, but my favorite bit is where they demonstrate just how easy it is to CLOSE THE DOOR - and, even more alarmingly, how easy to open it. That heavy, four-foot-wide passenger door they've just bragged about literally opens at the touch of a finger, so it won't slam on your feet or ankles (which it wouldn't anyway!). But just think about it. Seat belts literally did not exist back then, so one tiny touch would pop the door open like a jack-in-a-box and eject whoever was in the passenger side with enormous force. But, as they used to say in the bad old days, you don't need a seat belt anyway because in the event of an accident, "you'll be thrown clear".