Introduction
Film strips from December 1949 show Emerson and guests on the Christmas week edition of The Faye Emerson Show on CBS.
Stories of television and the archive are often framed in terms of failure and absence: limited access, lack of foresight, partial or complete loss.
While there have been plenty of such cases in our field, some of them heartbreaking, here, share something different—a story of recovery, preservation, and access. This is a success story, rooted in collaborations, curiosity, and a willingness to explore the boundaries of what is possible.
Over the past several years, scholars and archivists with the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) have collaborated with enterprising UW-Madison graduate students to revive television programs within the WCFTR collections.
The result is that all episodes of the WCFTR’s episodes of The Faye Emerson Show (1949–1951) and World of Giants (1958) have been digitized, and many of them can be freely viewed online. Here, you will get to see those episodes—as well as peek into the preservation trajectory from broadcast television decades ago to internet browsers today.