Kraft Suspense Theatre; Museum TV; Once Upon a Savage Night

Commenter Nick Hall of the Zoom Boom has alerted us to the availability of Once Upon a Savage Night (# 1.21) on Museum.tv.

Museum TV features four episodes of KST. There appears to be an intention for more episodes to appear in the future. You will have to look at the archive/search page to see what I mean.

The episodes appear in black and white (or possibly very faded color) for reasons that I do not know. The black and white appearance gives the episodes an air of more advanced age than the other episodes.

The episodes use the original Kraft Suspense Theatre title instead of the syndicated "Crisis" title that appears today on RTV and was used in the 1970's. The episodes appear with the original Kraft food commercials.

The episodes are even downloadable using RealPlayer or a similar program.

I have already fully reviewed three of the four episodes that appear at Museum.tv. I provided only a speculative review of Once Upon a Savage Night because I had never seen it before. I will update that review shortly.

Museum TV features many other programs, including news and documentaries, that aired in past decades. There seems to be an emphasis on Chicago based programming.

Kraft Suspense Theatre; Crisis; RTV syndication issues; Equity Media Holdings Corporation; Universal-NBC

I wrote previously about various syndication issues, including the apparant failure of RTV to broadcast certain Kraft Suspense Theater episodes. A commenter named "T.V. Barnum" has posted an explanation that I will repeat here in its entirety:

All the Shows do exist - the only one not in the syndication packages (Either as "Suspense Theater" or "Crisis") is the Two-parter as it was later released theatrically.

RTV doesn't have all the episode for a plain simple fact - they don't want to spend the money for master-tapes. The current owners of RTV didn't receive all the master-tapes to most of the shows they air when Equity Media Holdings Corporation severed the partnership.

Equity is holding them for ransom, literally, as well as owning Universal-NBC back rerun fees. So, RTV only ended up with some of the episodes and only slowly getting a few episodes across the board here and there.

The story is "Not all the episodes are cleared for Broadcast" is Bull. I've spoken to several people involved with the affiliates.

RTV's other issue, not running what they have in the proper order is due to the way they program the automated system.

I believe that RTV does run their KST episodes in order of the original broadcast. But they obviously leave out many episodes from that order. Over the past two years, RTV has broadcast some episodes nearly half a dozen times, while other episodes have not been broadcast at all or have been broadcast once or twice only in the past month or two (or only a year or two ago and never again).

I have no explanation other than Barnum's, so I will use it as a working theory until I learn something different.

Equity Media Holdings Corporation was a founding owner of RTV and declared bankruptcy in 2008. RTV is now independent of Equity's ownership, but apparently suffers from insufficient funding at times. The details of RTV's ownership status and the financial dealings with Equity are beyond the scope of this blog.

It is my hope that by promoting Kraft Suspense Theatre and its various qualities, we will hasten the day when it becomes a true classic that is not dependant on one fledgling network.

Kraft Suspense Theatre; Crisis; RTV - Retro Television Network

Episodes of Kraft Suspense Theatre have been running on the RTV network since 2008. The words "Kraft" or "Suspense Theatre" do not appear in the opening credits (or anywhere else). Instead, the word "Crisis" appears as the title of the show.

The show was presented in syndication during the 1970's as "Crisis." I don't know why the title was changed or why RTV does not use the original name.

RTV has shown only about 45 or so of the episodes during that period. I have seen no evidence of more than a dozen of the episodes during the past two years, while others have been repeated many times. It is possible that only certain episodes were syndicated and received the name change 40 years ago - and that only those episodes are running on RTV.

This is just idle speculation, but I wanted to provide at least some possible explanation (or acknowledgment of the name difference) for those who might see the show on RTV.

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click the following for prior discussions of:

the theme music;

connections between Kraft Suspense Theatre and Star Trek;

The cars of Suspense Theatre;