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And they’ll include a bunch of the original musical numbers from The Tonight Show.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Alice S. Hall/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
Hi-yoooo! Big news for Johnny Carson fans — and anyone interested in late-20th-century pop-culture time capsules: A hefty batch of 50 not-seen-in-decades Johnny Carson–hosted episodes of The Tonight Show is headed to streaming next month, Vulture has learned. The new collection will live on Johnny Carson TV, the free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) channel launched five years ago by Shout! Studios. In addition to interviews with a slew of famous celebrities, from Lucille Ball and Gilda Radner to Mel Brooks and Muhammad Ali, several of the episodes being added will also include their original musical performances — a rarity with classic talk and variety shows on streaming or even linear TV.
The addition of 50 “new” installments represents the biggest update to Shout! TV’s Carson library since 2021 and will bring the total number of streaming episodes to 471. Housed under the banner of “The Very Best of Johnny and Guests,” these episodes will premiere on the Johnny Carson TV FAST channel Saturday, July 5, with a marathon of exclusively “new” episodes running through Sunday, and then again every weekend in July. For Johnny-heads who want to curate their own experience, all 50 episodes will also be available to watch on-demand a bit earlier — next Tuesday, July 1 — via the Shout! TV website and stand-alone app, or on any of the many platforms that currently house on-demand episodes of The Johnny Carson Show, as Carson-era episodes of Tonight are labeled (so as to avoid even the tiniest bit of confusion with NBC’s current incarnation of The Tonight Show).
Finding a way to refresh the Carson streaming offering has been a priority for Shout! Studios exec Matt Arsulich since he joined the indie media company a few years ago as senior director of brand management. While having 400-plus episodes streaming is nothing to sneeze at, it’s also not that big a number for regular viewers of the Shout! offering. “It’s really not going to take long for somebody who has this channel as part of their usual rotation to see, for lack of a better term, a rerun,” he says. What’s more, Carson hosted about 5,000 episodes of Tonight during his Burbank era (1972–1992), leaving lots of that two-decade run literally in a vault waiting to be seen again. “And luckily, through Carson Entertainment Group, there is an underground vault in Kansas that has every episode preserved in its original analog form,” Arsulich says. “There’s a lot of digital data that’s available as well that has the guest appearances, so it’s pretty simple to look up what talent has appeared on an episode.”
Once CEG agreed to license more of the Carson library to Shout! Studios for streaming, Arsulich and his team began the process of figuring out which episodes they most wanted to add to their collection. They asked Carson’s team and some other outside experts for suggestions, but like any streamer, they also tapped into data, looking back on five years’ worth of viewership stats to understand “what our audience was liking,” as Arsulich puts it. So for example, because the Carson FAST channel puts up good numbers with its weekly Sunday showcase of episodes featuring stand-up comedy, the new batch will include Freddie Prinze’s first appearance after the premiere of Chico and the Man and Jerry Seinfeld’s 1981 debut, as well as multiple episodes with stand-up titans and future late-night icons Garry Shandling, David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Joan Rivers. Other episodes were chosen because they were timely. With the new Superman movie coming out in July, Arsulich wanted to be able to show Christopher Reeve’s first appearance on Tonight from January 1979, just weeks after Richard Donner’s version of the franchise was released and turned Reeves into an instant cultural icon.
While the decades’ worth of curatorial effort by CEG makes figuring out which episodes to go after relatively simple and straightforward, there’s still plenty of work — and expense — involved in adding new episodes to streaming. For one thing, episodes have to be converted from their analog form (videotape) to digital, and then later ingested into the Shout! TV streaming ecosystem. Episodes also have to be edited if there are film clips that can’t be licensed or music that can’t be cleared. “There’s no AI or anything involved that’s doing all this; it is a manual process,” Arsulich explains. And while obviously fans would be thrilled with 100 or 200 additional hours, “50 episodes ended up being the magic number that just made sense based on the workload involved to do the editing.”
As noted earlier, one big difference between this new assortment of Carson episodes and what has been added to streaming before is that the new collection includes about a half-dozen episodes with musical performances, something Arsulich rightly labels “a big, big deal.” Historically, streamers have generally found securing music rights too complicated and/or cost prohibitive when it comes to talk and variety shows produced in the pre-digital era. (There’s a reason that Peacock’s SNL episodes from the last century don’t include musical performances, save for the show’s first five seasons.) But Arsulich says there have “been some changes recently” that made it possible to license music on a few episodes this time. “There’s just more of an understanding about what streaming is vs. broadcast or DVD, so that these days, it’s just a little bit easier for us to make those clearances for musical guests,” he says. As a result, audiences will be able to watch Jim Henson performing “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green” with Kermit the Frog; Johnny Mathis doing his 1973 hit “I’m Coming Home”; and Steve Martin delivering a banjo performance that Arsulich describes as “just gorgeous.” The Jackson 5 (promoting Dancing Machine) and Paul Williams perform on a pair of episodes that first aired in the fall of 1974.
Some other highlights from “The Very Best of Johnny and His Guests”:
➼ Zoologists Joan Embery and Jim Fowler — who appeared with Carson dozens of times, along with all sorts of animals and other creatures — pop up in several episodes.
➼ A slew of episodes feature SNL superstars, including Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd’s June 1984 visit to plug the about-to-open Ghostbusters; Gilda Radner’s one and only appearance on Tonight; and visits from Billy Crystal and Steve Martin.
➼ Besides multiple appearances from iconic Carson characters Carnac the Magnificent and Art Fern, “There’s one episode that opens with Johnny dressed in a huge gaudy cowboy outfit, and he sings ‘Rhinestone Cowboy,’” Arsulich says.
➼ The collection also includes interviews with a bevy of classic movie and TV stars, including Jimmy Stewart, Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall, Sammy Davis Jr., Lucille Ball, Betty White, Jack Lemmon, Clint Eastwood, Suzanne Pleshette, Albert Brooks, Martin Mull, Burt Reynolds, Tom Hanks, and Robin Williams.
In addition to its streaming home on Shout! TV, linear broadcast network Antenna TV continues to air Carson episodes every night at 11 p.m. ET, while Carson Entertainment Group maintains a YouTube page that posts occasional clips from the show’s three-decade run on NBC.