Turn-On (found ABC sketch comedy series; 1969)

This article has been tagged as NSFW due to its sexual humor.

The show's logo.

Status: Partially Found

On February 5th, 1969, ABC premiered a television pilot for a comedy series titled Turn-On. The cast included Teresa Graves, Hamilton Camp, Mel Stewart, Chuck McCann, and guest host Tim Conway. Many people across America complained about the show and its sexual and religious content. Co-creator of the show Ed Friendly decided to respond to the complaints by interrupting the live broadcast of the show and stating that "the remainder of this program will not be seen this evening, or ever". The screen then cut to black and the show was never broadcast again.

Eventually, the pilot fell into obscurity until one day in the 1980s, when ABC News aired a news report featuring footage from the show and subsequently revealed that the second episode of Turn-On had been recorded, though not broadcast. Additionally, according to Andrew Sandoval's book The Monkees: The Day-By-Day Story of the 60s TV Pop Sensation, The Monkees made an appearance in a different unaired episode, meaning that more episodes of the show may have been filmed.

Availability

While the two known episodes can be viewed at The Paley Center for Media in New York City, it is unknown if any other copies are available elsewhere, and the episodes can not be viewed outside of the Center.

Besides the news broadcast available below, only one other clip from the series is known to be available: one of the interstitial "dancing" animations. These interstitials were especially notable as some of the first uses of both computer graphics and motion capture in television history, and were produced using the ANIMAC video synthesizer. It can be found on Scanimate DVD-1, a disc compilation of clips generated by both ANIMAC along with its successors CAESAR and Scanimate. The DVD is sold online by Dave Sieg, engineering historian, and owner and caretaker of the last functional Scanimate unit.^[1]