Help me identify this old (50s) TV show.

Cafe Society
1

In the late 50s, when I was just a lad, I remember seeing a drama on television about a kid who invented his own flying machine. In my memory, the device looked kind of like the wings “Brewster McCloud” devised. I’m pretty sure the show was an episode of an anthology type program, maybe “Hallmark Hall of Fame” or “Playhouse 90”, something like that. The time period may have been set in the 1800s. Anybody?

2

Can’t help on the show, but I do remember the sort of programs you mentioned. Any clues on actors involved? IMDB could help if you had such data.

3

It sounds much like Darius Green and his Flying Machine, an 1869 poem (the book was reprinted in 1910):

http://www.skygod.com/quotes/darius.html
I don’t know if anyone did a TV adaptation inthe late 50s, but I seem to recall that quotes and possibly illustrations from t showed up in one of the Walt Disney Tommy Kirk movies of the 1960s — The Monkey’s Uncle in 1865

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0059462/

4

Here’s a Magic Lantern slide of Darius Green with his Flying Machine. Based on the dates for the lives of the guys associated with this, and the date of the poem, this slide has to come from between 1869 and 1920:

http://www.geh.org/ar/strip51/htmlsrc/m198108210006_ful.html

5

Say, if you’re not misremembering scenes from The Monkey’s Uncle, is it possible that you recall a reading by, say, captain Kangaroo of an illustrated edition of Darius Green? He used to read a lot of kid’s books on TV, and they showed the illustrations.

I haven’t been able to find any dramatizations of the poem, and I don’t recall any of the TV shows I saw back then that were likely to have this showi8ng anything of the sort. The closest I come is a dramatization of “The Land of Oz” from Shirley Temple Theater" that featured a flying Gump – but that sounds pretty far from wjhat you describe.

6

Thanks for the responses.

I watched Captain Kangaroo regularly but this was not a segment of him reading. It wasn’t the Disney movie either. It was definitely a night time television show. I remember being excited about watching it because I had seen a still of the person wearing the flying wings in the air in a magazine (TV Guide maybe) prior to the show coming on.