Charlie Wild, Private Detective: Case of the Double Trouble (1952, DuMont Network)

Live, March 20, 1952, DuMont Network.
The series first aired live on CBS from December 22, 1950, to June 27, 1951 (20 episodes). It was initially on alternate Friday nights, but it moved to every Wednesday night effective the week of April 16. It then aired on ABC from September 11, 1951, to March 4, 1952 (27 episodes). On March 13, 1952, the DuMont Television Network picked the series up for the last three months, with 17 episodes, ending on June 19, 1952. In this episode, Charlie is given $500 to guard a valuable parchment, but he soon finds out that he may have been grossly underpaid.

[@tomperrone1846]

Interesting plot, and interesting that in the hotel room, the production is arranged so that the same actor can play both twins in the same (long) scene! Ah, the ingenuity of early live TV.....

[@jrsygrl72]

Love the Gershwin-esque piano music! 👍

[@tomperrone1846]

Sorta gives the program a definite "New York"ish slant....

[@betsya7054]

I enjoyed it, especially the villains

[@user-tn1er9mj1p]

Pretty cool 1950's private eye series.

[@fromthesidelines]

According to Vance Packard, in "The Hidden Persuaders" (1957), the makers of Mogen David Wine discovered that sponsoring a program like this gave no guarantee of increased sales: "Weiss and Geller [the ad agency representing Mogen David] found itself somewhat embarrassed because the TV show it had packaged to sell Mogen David wine {"CHARLIE WILD"} was not producing desired results. It was, admittedly, delighting the audience with its who-dun-it mysteries. The show enjoyed a high rating but it wasn't selling any wine. Motivational analysts were put to work on the problem. They found in probing people watching the show that the excitement of the show induced a kind of 'emotional frenzy' in the audience. While this was temporarily exciting, it tended to 'freeze' the audience........The agency decided that even the small degree of panic induced by its mystery show, exhilarating as the state might be to the audience, was causing the viewers marked memory loss so that they were not retaining the announcer's instruction to go right out and buy Mogen David wine. Quite possibly, some people weren't even hearing the commercial! The probers found out that 'the excitement of the mystery acted as a shock' and blotted out the folksy feeling the announcer (Bob Williams) was trying to build up in connection with the wine. A calmer, more gentle type of show was substituted, an easygoing panel show {"WHERE WAS I?", beginning that September on DuMont}. {As a result}, in test areas, sales of the wine shot up more than *1,000 per cent."*

[@j3lny425]

It seemed a bit odd to me that Mogen David would sponsor a show aired on Friday night

[@tomperrone1846]

Well, as Mr. Grauman indicates above, the purpose of sponsoring the show was obviously to increase wine sales, and some of those prospective customers appear not to be Jewish [watch the commercials - they appear to be targeted to a general, not necessarily Semitic, audience.] If so, then why would it matter if the program was aired on the Jewish Sabbath? Does observance of the Sabbath apply to corporations [even those owned by Jews] or does it only apply to individuals of that faith?