The First Made-for-TV Movie

NBC broadcast The Pied Piper of Hamelin in 1957 to positive reviews and high ratings, so much so that it became a regular holiday rerun. Unlike other TV musicals of the era Cinderella with Julie Andrews, Pinocchio with Mickey Rooney, The Stingiest Man in Town with Basil Rathbone, or Hansel and Gretel with Red Buttons, this musical was not done live and thus only saved as black-and-white kinescopes.

Starring Van Johnson, Claude Rains, and Kay Starr, The Pied Piper was filmed in Technicolor, so it could also be released theatrically. Unfortunately, it fell into public domain and cheap copies have been sold on video for decades. It has not been fully restored, but it still looks quite good in recent YouTube posts like the one below.

The cast album, minus Rains and Starr, was released on RCA Victor and is streaming on Spotify and others. Songs were adapted from Grieg’s familiar Peer Gynt Suite.

Don’t expect movie-quality grandeur, as this was made for the small-screen world of television in its early days, but it compares well to Abbott and Costello’s Jack and the Beanstalk and other modest musical fantasy films.