The Phantom of the Open Hearth

In these humorous and affectionate television poems, humorist Jean Shepherd celebrates America in all its richness and diversity -- from cars to candy, baseball to beer, motels to money. Each week a different aspect of our national psyche is explored as Shepherd travels to the Okefenokee Swamp, Death Valley, Milwaukee, the Old South, and other far-flung locations -- using the PCP-90 portable camera.

A poet-astronaut is shot through an area of space called the Chronosynclastic Infundibulum. He is duplicated into infinite copies of himself, each of whom finds himself in a bizarre situations on a different world.

NET Playhouse is an American dramatic television anthology series produced by National Educational Television. NET subsequently merged with WNDT Newark, New Jersey to form WNET and was superseded by the Public Broadcasting Service. American television anthology series of wide range of genres, from history and drama, to fantasy, and science fiction. Fiction novels, stories, stage plays, fairytales, and historic events are dramatized in each episode.

A comedy written and Narrated by Jean Shepherd. The story involves several different events such as Ralph's first serious romance with his new neighbor, Randy playing a turkey in the school Thanksgiving Day play, The Old Man setting his sights on a yellow buick and the High School basketball rival game of the season.

An adult Ralphie Parker narrates several humorous stories about his teen years in an Indiana steel town.

American Playhouse is an anthology television series periodically broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.

George Orr, a man whose dreams can change waking reality, tries to suppress this unpredictable gift with drugs. Dr. Haber, an assigned psychiatrist, discovers the gift to be real and hypnotically induces Mr. Orr to change reality for the benefit of mankind --- with bizarre and frightening results.

A fictional confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the Persian Gulf. The narrative of the film details the events that lead up to the initial exchange of nuclear weapons from the perspective of an on-going news broadcast.

The New Wave is the seminal compendium of independent video work in the early 1970s. Written and narrated by Brian O'Doherty, this overview of the emerging video field includes examples of guerrilla television and "street" documentaries, early explorations with image-processing and synthesis, and performance video. This historical anthology includes excerpts of tapes by the following video pioneers: Stephen Beck and Warner Jepson, Peter Campus, Douglas Davis, Ed Emshwiller, Bill Etra, Frank Gillette, Don Hallock, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, Paul Kos, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, Willard Rosenquist, Dan Sandin, James Seawright, Steina Vasulka, TVTV, Stan Vanderbeek and William Wegman.

Produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, the Medium Is the Medium is one of the earliest and most prescient examples of the collaboration between public television and the emerging field of video art in the U.S. WGBH commissioned artists — Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock and Aldo Tambellini — to create original works for broadcast television. Their works explored the parameters of the new medium, from image processing and interactivity to video dance and sculpture.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin -- three of the most highly regarded civil rights leaders of the 1960s -- were united in their quest for Black empowerment. But their methods of approach were polarizing.

"The Electronic Canvas" focuses on Boston as a major center in global movement where artists in the 1960s were drawn to the growing power of television and media. Viewers learn how these artists responded to the initial challenge of not being able to become creatively involved with television. The show looks at how cultural institutions and organizations responded to this challenge and what happened when the doors were opened to artists’ desires to probe this unexplored territory. From these early efforts and experiments, the program follows the rapid growth, diversification, and sophistication of video and media art from single channel works to complex pieces involving computer programs, museum video installations, and in the Internet. The Electronic Canvas aired in April 2001 on WGBH Channel 2 in Boston and then on public television stations nationally.

In 1972, Chinese American chef Joyce Chen returned to China for the first time since she left in 1949. The program chronicles her and her family's visit to her home through her own eyes. It's one of the first documentaries about China filmed by a Chinese American family.

“It seems funny to say it, but long before there was an ‘art world,’ there was art in the world.” So begins the artist and writer Russell Connor’s meditative tour of public art in New York City.