The Hopalong Cassidy Magical Marketing Machine

In 1948, William Boyd made a large bet on television, and on demographics. He had an idea that the first wave of the baby boomers — kids born to newly affluent parents — would be a large and untapped audience for the 66 “Hopalong Cassidy” movie westerns he’d starred in, so he bought the rights and sold them to TV stations that were starved for programming. He also made deals with dozens of consumer goods companies to market authorized Hopalong Cassidy merchandise, from wallpaper to cookies to roller skates with spurs on them. America’s kids snapped them up, and Boyd made millions.

Sources:

” ‘Hasbeen’ Hoppy Gallops Thataway on TV Spurs to $200,000,000 Industry,” Mike Kaplan, Variety, May 24, 1950

“Hopalong Hits the Jackpot,” Oliver Jensen, Life, June 12, 1950

“Wild-West Fever: Will It Sell for You?,” Sponsor, September 11, 1950

“Keep Your Bill Boyds Straight,” immortalephemera.com

“Maxwell House Coffee Time with George Burns and Gracie Allen: George the Cowboy,” May 5, 1949 

The Unsinkable Betty White

Betty Marion White Ludden had the longest television career in history. She made her TV debut in 1939 and in the late 1940s she co-hosted a local Los Angeles series that ran five hours each day. When the Emmy Awards added the "Best Actress" category in 1951, she was one of the nominees, and exactly sixty years later, in 2011, she was a nominee once again. In between she's won eight Emmy awards, three American Comedy Awards, three Screen Actors Guild awards, a Grammy Award and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She's the oldest person ever to host "Saturday Night Live" and passed just short of her hundredth birthday, marking her tenth decade in show business. She is, in short, unsinkable.

Sources:

Here We Go Again: My Life in Television, 1949-1995, by Betty White