Kukla, Fran and Ollie/Season One

Season One
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
Season Premiere	October 13, 1947
Season Finale	July 16, 1948
Previous N/A	Next Season Two

Season One of Kukla, Fran and Ollie premiered as Junior Jamboree on October 13, 1947 over Chicago television station WBKB (now WBBM).

The original Junior Jamboree format, a five-a-week hourlong local program, resembled what would become the standard local children's show in the following decades, including film shorts, cartoons, in-studio demonstrations, viewer mail, and interviews. Instead of the more familiar puppet stage, Kukla emceed from a stage designed to resemble the screen of a television set, in honor of sponsor RCA-Victor. By the time the series transitioned to an NBC network feature, the concept had been narrowed to the interactions between Fran Allison and the Kuklapolitan characters.

WBKB schedule cards from 1948 referred to the series at various times as both Junior Jamboree and Kukla, Fran and Ollie, seemingly interchangably.

Besides Burr Tillstrom and Fran Allison, producer Beulah Zachary and director Lewis Gomavitz were a part of the program from the debut. Longtime pianist and musical director Jack Fascinato joined the show in May 1948 after the Musician's Union lifted its ban on musicians on television.

Existing Episodes

As this was a local broadcast which originated before the widespread usage of kinescope recording, no episodes from the WBKB season are known to exist.