The NBC Monday Movie information

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The NBC Monday Movie was a television anthology series of films that debuted on February 4, 1963 (in the middle of the 1962-63 season). It was referred to as Monday Night at the Movies prior to the mid-1980s. Contrary to popular contemporary belief, the corporate initials, "NBC", were, at first, not part of the official title for the network's anthologies of old movies, and would not be for years to come. Thus, in 1964, when the show was transferred by the network's programming executives to Wednesday nights, it became Wednesday Night at the Movies. And in 1965, when the program moved to Tuesdays, it became Tuesday Night at the Movies. It would remain there until 1969.^[1] The name would henceforth change depending on whichever night of the week the program aired. Moreover, by 1968, there was once again a weekly Monday Night at the Movies on the air.^[2] It ran until 1997.

In the latter years of Monday Night at the Movies' run, more and more made-for-TV movies were showcased, while theatrical films, fewer in number, were edited for content, to remove objectionable material, and occasionally, but not always, to reduce the film's running time to fit into the two-hour time slot. Most widescreen films were pan-and-scanned so the image would fit the standard 4:3 television screen (as opposed to letterbox format). An exception was the 1951 film version of Show Boat, which made its television debut on Monday Night at the Movies in 1972. Show Boat had been produced by MGM before the advent of widescreen American films in 1953. It was a rather unusual offering since (then) it was a twenty-one-year-old film. (In fact, the oldest film shown on any of NBC's "At the Movies" anthologies was Saratoga Trunk (1945), which aired on Saturday Night at the Movies, January 13, 1968,^[3] 23 years after its Hollywood premiere.)