AARP Hearing Center
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Emmy Awards, so it’s high time to look back on the high points of TV history — the historical events it brought into our living rooms and the shows we can’t forget. Here are 75 moments worth remembering.
April 30, 1939
In the first TV telecast, FDR opens the New York World’s Fair.
January 25, 1949
At the first Emmy Awards, Pantomime Quiz Time wins the most popular television program award. The award was originally supposed to be called the "Ike," short for the iconoscope tube that made TV possible (originally invented to guide flying bombs in World War II). But President Eisenhower was called Ike, and the device used in TVs was called the camera image orthicon tube, so they changed it to the "Immy," then feminized it to the "Emmy."
Groucho Marx (left) accepting his Emmy Award.
TVA/PictureGroup/Invision for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences/AP Images
January 23, 1951
Groucho Marx hosts the Emmy telecast, and when he also wins Most Outstanding Personality, instead of taking his trophy, he carries Miss America Rosemary LaPlanche offstage, explaining that he thought she was the Emmy.
September 15, 1952
In one of the most celebrated episodes of TV’s No. 1 show, I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball works at a candy factory and can’t keep up with the conveyor belt, so she stuffs her mouth with chocolates.
September 23, 1952
Vice Presidential nominee Richard Nixon delivers his emotional “Checkers speech," saying he plans to keep the cocker spaniel named Checkers that a citizen gave his 6-year-old daughter, Tricia, and saves his career from a political donations scandal.
June 2, 1953
Defying advisors including Winston Churchill, England’s Queen Elizabeth II, 27, allows TV cameras into Westminster Abbey for the first time, so that 20 million Britons (and millions more in America) could watch her coronation – the first TV event whose audience outnumbered any radio audience.
September 11, 1954
Reality TV begins with the Miss America pageant’s TV debut.
September 9, 1956
60 million watch Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show, 82.6 percent of the TV audience. Despite Elvis’s scandalous swiveling hips, Sullivan calls him “a real decent, fine boy.”
September 26, 1960
In the first televised presidential debate, an estimated 70 million see sweaty candidate Nixon seemingly win on points against opponent John F. Kennedy but lose on looks.
September 30, 1960
The Flintstones make animation fun for the whole family, popularizing Fred’s catchphrase “Yabba-Dabba Doo!” (inspired by the Brylcreem slogan “A little dab’ll do ya”)
March 2, 1962
On The Twilight Zone, aliens invade earth, tell humans their goal is “to serve man” – turns out they mean to cook and eat us all.
November 22, 1963
Near tears, Walter Cronkite breaks into the broadcast of As the World Turns to announce the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
November 24, 1963
A CBS News camera records nightclub owner Jack Ruby’s assassination of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. In 2018, that camera sells to a collector for $16,000.
February 9, 1964
73 million viewers watch The Beatles debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, the antidote to the nation’s grief over the fallen young President.
William Shatner as Capt. James T. Kirk in "Star Trek."
Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
December 29, 1967
The ordinarily somber sci-fi show Star Trek does a comic episode about cute, uncontrollably reproducing furry creatures invading the U.S.S. Enterprise, “The Trouble With Tribbles,” inspired by invasive rabbits in Australia.
July 20, 1969
Ninety-three percent of Americans watch Neil Armstrong take one giant leap for mankind onto the moon.
September 25, 1970
The Partridge Family debuts. Star Shirley Jones had turned down the mom role on The Brady Bunch because she didn’t want to spend her time making sandwiches. Her band’s first No. 1 hit, “I Think I Love You,” outsells The Beatles' “Let It Be.”
March 30, 1971
In the proud tradition of Leave It to Beaver, which depicted the first toilet on TV in 1957 in an episode where the kids hide a pet alligator in the toilet tank, All in the Family features TV’s first toilet heard flushing.
Bea Arthur (left) and Bill Macy as Maude and Walter Findlay in "Maude."
Courtesy Everett Collection
November 14 and 21, 1972
Two months before Roe v. Wade, TV’s Maude gets an abortion at age 47.
April 2, 1974
A streaker races past David Niven, who’s about to present the Oscar for Best Picture. Niven quips, “But isn’t it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?”
May 19, 1975
Emmy Awards presenter Lucille Ball realizes she forgot her glasses. Milton Berle leaps from the audience to give her the specs, and she gives The Mary Tyler Moore Show the first of its 29 Emmys.
October 25, 1975
Mary finds it impossible not to burst out laughing at the funeral of a famous clown in the legendary Mary Tyler Moore Show episode “Chuckles Bites the Dust.” The New York Times calls it “the funniest half-hour in television history.”
November 13, 1976
In The Carol Burnett Show’s most famous episode, “Went With the Wind,” she channels Scarlett O’Hara and wears an actual curtain for a dress, explaining, “I saw it in the window and I just couldn’t resist it.” The laugh is the longest in the show’s history and has to be edited down to fit on TV.
(Left to right) Alex Haley and LeVar Burton on the set of "Roots."
Warner Bros Television/Courtesy Everett Collection
January 30, 1977
Until the M*A*S*H finale in 1983, the 100 million viewers of the final episode of Alex Haley’s Roots, dramatizing the author’s search for his family’s African past and American experience, is the biggest audience for any show.
September 20, 1977
Fonzie (Henry Winkler) jumps the shark on water skis on Happy Days. In 1985, college student Jon Hein coins the phrase “jumping the shark” to signify the point where a show is doomed. It catches on big time; in 2006 Hein sells his company, Jump The Shark, Inc., for over $1 million. Later, on Arrested Development, Henry Winkler jumps over a tiny shark on a dock. Viewers get the joke.
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