Yule Log (TV program)
The show, which has run between two and four hours in duration, is a film loop of a yule log burning in a fireplace, with a soundtrack of Christmas music playing in the background; it is broadcast without commercial interruption.
Thrower, and WPIX-FM programming director Charlie Whittaker selected the music, based largely on the easy listening format that the radio station had then, with the likes of Percy Faith (whose rendition of "Joy to the World" is played at the beginning and the end of the telecast), Nat King Cole, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra, Mantovani and the Ray Conniff Singers, among others.
During the filming, the producers removed a protective fire grate so that the blaze could be seen better; a stray spark damaged a nearby antique rug valued at $4,000.
Station producer William Cooper, a future recipient of a Peabody Award, again asked to film the loop at Gracie Mansion, but the mayor's office refused permission.
[3] The cost of broadcasting the program without commercial interruption prompted Michael Eigner, who had been appointed as the station's new general manager upon Hughes's retirement, to cancel it in 1990; incidentally that year, director Whit Stillman included a scene of a New Yorker viewing the Log in his movie Metropolitan.
[4] On July 29, 2016, a 16 mm print of the original 1966 version of the Yule Log was discovered amongst a collection of films recovered from the estate of former WPIX executive and producer William Cooper two years prior.
For the 2010 edition, WPIX and Los Angeles sister station KTLA (channel 5) aired a four-hour broadcast of The Yule Log on Christmas morning.
[6] In 2011, Antenna TV, a digital multicast network that Tribune had launched that January, aired The Yule Log for the first time, making the concept available nationwide once again.
[12] According to author Ron Feigenblatt, the WPIX Yule Log presentation inspired his similar digital medium demonstration on the then-young IBM Personal Computer, starting in 1985.
At that time, the PC's new Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) finally allowed one to achieve limited, full-color, full-screen, pseudo-continuous, raster-graphics animation on a primitive consumer-grade personal computer, by flipping,[13] during the frame-refresh interval, between four different (synthetic or pre-processed photographic) screen images pre-loaded into the display adapter memory, using a computer application program called PCMOVIE,[14] written at IBM Research and distributed throughout IBM.
In the 2000s, Jason Patton—an executive at INHD (later MOJO HD, now defunct), who was inspired as a youth by WPIX's Yule Log—produced his own version, which has been broadcast every Christmas since, via video on demand.
WKBW-TV in Buffalo, New York (owned at the time by Granite Broadcasting Corporation, and now owned by Scripps), as a replacement for that day's morning newscast, introduced The Yule Log as a replacement in 2008; it did not return in 2009, but WBBZ-TV (who hired WKBW's former program director and Empire Sports Network's former vice president) brought The Yule Log to their station, where it continues to air annually.
Before its conversion to a general children's format in 2017 as Universal Kids, Sprout offered a 12-hour loop called The Sprout Snooze-A-Thon (previously called A Goodnight of Sweet Dreams) during the evening of Christmas Eve, which features scenes of sleeping characters from the network's programming set to soft music to soothe children to sleep before the arrival of Santa Claus.
In its early years, the Home Shopping Network also aired the Yule Log in place of regular programming (the network traditionally does not air live shopping programming on Christmas Day), before switching to a loop of Tampa Bay Area choirs singing Christmas carols and host wishes in subsequent years.
[28] Actor Nick Offerman released his own version of The Yule Log on December 2, 2015, in the style of his character Ron Swanson, from the television series Parks and Recreation.
Offerman pours a glass of Lagavulin single malt scotch whiskey as the yule log fire plays and stares at the camera for 45 minutes.
