Joan Rivers substitutes for Johnny Carson. Her guest in this fifteen minute segment is Roddy McDowall who discusses his latest entrance into television starring in a series titled "Fantastic Journey."
Roddy reminisces about his first movies made in the UK and coming to America with his family in 1940 when after being there only two weeks landed a prominent role in John Ford's "How Green Was My Valley."
Other topics include memories of working with Lassie, whom he loved, working for eight months in the Keith Vaudeville circuit as a comedian and singer, his love for photography beginning commercially in the 1950's taking pictures for Vogue magazine including those of Ava Gardner, Mae West, and Judy Holliday.
Commercials include 9 Lives, Spray & Wash, NBC News promotional, Bobby Vinton Show and Marcus Welby Show.
Johnny Carson, host of NBC's network late-night "Tonight Show" reigned for 30 unprecedented years...five times the combined tenure of Steve Allen, and Jack Paar. Carson was impervious to competition, including efforts to dethrone him by Les Crane, Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett, Jack Paar, Pat Sajak, Joan Rivers, and Arsenio Hall. Sadly, very few complete "Tonight Show" broadcasts survive during Johnny Carson's first ten years of broadcasting. Around 1965, through the early 1970's, oldest tapes were first erased systematically by orders from myopic NBC executives, to be recycled for purposes of saving money. Ironically, in many cases, these older master tapes were too brittle, and portended probable dropouts for re-use after being erased. Subsequently blank after being erased, these older questionable master 2" Quad tapes were either sparingly used or never used again for recording new programming and eventually were discarded. Saving thousands of dollars at the time (wiping master tapes for potential re-use) resulted in losing millions of dollars by NBC in today's marketplace, and more importantly wiping thousands of historic TONIGHT SHOW broadcasts, which contain precious personal anecdotes from political, show business, and sports icons of the past.