NBC Monday Night at the Movies
| The NBC Monday Movie | |
|---|---|
| Also known as |
NBC Monday Night at the Movies NBC Wednesday Night at the Movies The NBC Tuesday Night Movie' |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Original language(s) | English |
| Production | |
| Running time | 120 mins. (approx) |
| Release | |
| Original network | NBC |
| Original release | February 4, 1963 - present |
The NBC Monday Movie was a television anthology series of films that debuted on February 4, 1963 (in the middle of the 1962-63 season), and ran off on NBC. It was referred to as NBC Monday Night at the Movies prior to the mid-1980s. The show moved to Wednesday nights in 1964 as NBC Wednesday Night at the Movies, and in 1965, the program moved to Tuesdays, under the title The NBC Tuesday Night Movie. The name would henceforth change depending on what night of the week the program was telecast. By 1968, there was once again a weekly NBC Monday Night Movie on the air.
The idea for the show came about when advertisers opted out of two hour-long shows the network ran on Monday nights for the 1962-1963 season, It's A Man's World and Saints and Sinners. Presumably, both shows were cancelled due to low audience numbers. Having experienced some success with NBC Saturday Night at the Movies, the network decided to acquire more feature films as a stop-gap measure. A package of 42 movies from 20th Century Fox and 35 titles from MGM were purchased by the network for both its Monday and Saturday night movie series at a cost of $14 million. With a 7:30 pm (EST) start time, the movies of the show's first season were made up of mostly light comedies, an occasional swashbuckler such as Prince Valiant, and musicals. These types of films were also chosen because they typically ran under 100 minutes, the normal running-time for a two-hour movie slot in 1963.
In the latter years of Monday Night Movie's run, mostly made-for-TV movies were showcased. The theatrical films were edited for content, to remove objectionable material, and occasionally, but not always, to reduce the film's running time to fit into the two-hour time slot. As all widescreen films were then, they were pan-and-scanned so the image would fit the standard 4:3 television screen (as opposed to letterbox format). An exception was the 1951 film version of "Show Boat", which made its television debut on NBC Monday Night at the Movies in 1972 and had not been filmed in widescreen. The choice of Show Boat as a movie offering on the program was rather unusual, given the fact that it was, at the time, a twenty-one-year-old film, rather than a recent one.
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