NBC Saturday Night at the Movies

NBC Saturday Night at the Movies was the first continuing weekly prime time network television series to show relatively recent feature films from major studios in color. The series premiered on September 23, 1961.

Previously, movies on television were usually low-cost B films or older films that the major studios or producers no longer found suitable for theatrical presentation. In the earliest years of television, major studios wouldn't release films to television; by the late 1950s, however, major studios began making movies available to the new medium, but a gentleman's agreement between the top studios kept movies made after 1948 by major studios off of the home screen. Movie audiences had grown to expect films to be shown in widescreen and in color, so older black-and-white Academy ratio films had lost much of their value to the theatres. By the late-1950s, with the exception of some of Walt Disney's films and The Wizard of Oz (1939), these older films had become standard fare for independent stations and the non-prime time schedules of the network affiliates.

Up until the early 1970s, the time span between a film's theatrical release and its appearance on commercial network television was much longer. Whereas today it can take as brief a period as three years before a theatrical film shows up on commercial television, between 1954 and 1972 a theatrical motion picture (even a relatively recent one) usually had to wait as many as twelve years (as in the case of the 1959 Ben-Hur) before it turned up on the home screen.

A short-lived black-and-white ABC-TV series entitled Famous Film Festival had premiered in the fall of 1955, but had shown British films made in the 1940s and early 1950s. In 1957, ABC broadcast Hollywood Film Theater, which also featured some pre-1948 films produced by RKO Radio Pictures. RKO decided to sell some of their "better" pre-1948 movies to ABC while other films would be syndicated to local TV stations. Films in both series were shown in a ninety-minute time slot, which meant that some of the films had to either be severely edited or shown in two parts. NBC Saturday Night at the Movies was the first network movie anthology series to run two hours (and occasionally longer), so that almost all of the films could be shown in one evening, and edited (especially in later years) only to remove objectionable content.

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