THE FAMOUS BLUE BANANAS STORY!
This is the perfect image to set the scene for this great behind the scenes story that happened around 1953 at NBC's color test facility, The Colonial Theater in NYC. Quite often, this studio was in use 18 hours a day sending color signals from there to 30 Rock and RCA Camden for engineering work.For a year or so, they produced a 15-20 minute afternoon variety show featuring a then unknown actress named Nanette Fabray for closed circuit broadcast to The RCA showcase store next to The TODAY Show in Studio 1A across the street from 30 Rock.
The other hours of the day were filled with one or more of the 4 RCA TK40 prototype cameras locked off on scenes with floral displays or colorful paintings and fruit bowls filled with red and green apples, oranges, kiwis and bananas. Quite boring, but color tests and adjustments was the reason for the activity.
The boring part is where the trouble started! Bored cameramen and stage hands hatched a plan to liven things up one day and the plan was to leave everything else in the fruit bowl as is, but paint the bananas blue, just to see how long it would take the "genius engineers" in Camden to figure out what they had done.
Many hours of back and forth phone calls from Camden to 30 Rock engineering solved NOTHING, so, they finally called The Colonial control room and after some dawdling, the cat came out of the bag and if the people there had not been the only trained color pros, a few of them would have been fired. SO...there you have the whole story of the Great Blue Banana Escapade, as told to me by someone who was there...our friend, the late veteran NBC cameraman Frank Merklein! -Bobby Ellerbee