With semi-annual press tours to Pasadena, Calif., shut down, two colleagues from the Television Critics Association, Roger Catlin from Washington and Neal Justin from Minneapolis, decided to cross the border into Toronto. These guys go everywhere — they even went to the Red Skelton Museum in Vincennes, Indiana. Neal, who had already arranged a Second City stage visit, asked if there was anything else to see in T.O.
I reached out to another TV columnist pal, retired Globe and Mail scribe and now playwright John Doyle, who joined us on the adventure. A call was made to Carolyn Stewart, the curator and achivist at the MZTV Museum in Toronto’s Liberty Village. This unique offshoot of Moses Znaimer’s ZoomerPlex media empire houses an incredible collection of television artifacts, including 87 pre-World War II television sets. Unlike a lot of TV critics, many of them still work!
Stewart opened the museum to this group on a Monday following a busy “Doors Open” weekend, so many thanks to her, along with Darryl Komaromi, the Director of Outreach and Digital Development for the museum.
They conducted a tour which included one of the most prized possessions in the collection: the surviving RCA television receiver that was on display back in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair. Encased in a see-through, Lucite-clad case — to dispel any notion that somebody was hiding inside with a film projector or puppets or something — it is now hooked up to a camera so that MZTV visitors can appear on screen. “Camera Shy” Catlin stepped up and demonstrated in his best Edward R. Murrow impression.
Another display is dedicated to the Felix the Cat cartoon doll used in experimental broadcasts in New York dating back to 1928 — nearly 100 years ago. Felix, they found, stood up to the hot lights needed back in the early days of television, when 30 or so lines of resolution was all that was scanned. The museum has the original doll, but ever since its was valued at two million bucks, Felix stays in the vault. A facsimille of the rotating camera model is on display.
Toronto area visitors might get a bigger kick out of the Speakers Corner booth, a popular novelty that once stood outside the now shamefully shuttered CHUMCity Building at 299 Queen Street West. Mike Myers and The Barenaked Ladies were among those who hammed it up on the pre-YouTube video display machine. For nerdy TV critics, however, seeing inventor Philo T. Farnsworth’s tractor wheel seemed more of a sacred find. The Utah teenager sat on his tractor, plowing row after row in a potato field, when he was struck by the idea that electrons could be trained to follow the same back and forth path in order to transmit live images. Smart lad.
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As our group neared a wall full of rare Philco Predictas from the late ’50s, we were joined by our host and the owner of the museum, Moses himself. The 83-year-old CEO, who for years lorded over Citytv and MuchMusic, shared details about how much of the collection was obtained. A repairman is kept busy, he says, swapping bulbs and upgrading wires to keep many of the sets running. If you think it is hard to track down an ethernet cable these days, trying finding the 24-foot, three-inch wide cable python used to connect a Predicta to a microwave-sized box that, back in the ’50s, acted as a remote.
The MZTV Museum of Television is located in the ZoomerPlex, at 64 Jefferson Avenue, in Toronto’s Liberty Village. It is open Tuesday-Friday (2pm-5pm), Saturday (10am-6pm), and is closed Sunday & Monday. Members of the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP) are admitted free. For more information on the MZTV Museum, follow this link as well as this previous report here at brioux.tv.
