Producer Carl Hittleman mounted a new series, titled
The Buster Keaton Show, in 1951. This was an attempt to recreate the first series on film, allowing the program to be broadcast nationwide. The series benefited from a company of veteran actors, including
Marcia Mae Jones as the ingenue,
Iris Adrian,
Dick Wessel,
Fuzzy Knight,
Dub Taylor,
Philip Van Zandt, and his silent-era contemporaries
Harold Goodwin,
Hank Mann, and stuntman
Harvey Parry. Keaton's wife Eleanor also was seen in the series (notably as Juliet to Keaton's Romeo in a little-theater vignette). Despite the hardworking cast and crew, the series was unsuccessful and only 13 half-hour episodes were filmed. Producer Hittleman audaciously reissued these same episodes in 1952 as though they were entirely new, with the series now titled
Life with Buster Keaton.
Variety reporter Fred Hift reviewed it as a series premiere, noting that it was filmed without a studio audience: the "lack of studio laughter weakened the climax of several of its acts." The producers fashioned a theatrical, hourlong feature film from the series, intended for the European market:
The Misadventures of Buster Keaton was released on April 29, 1953 by British Lion, and it began playing on American television in September 1953. "Roughly reproduced slapstick museum piece, it's most likely to amuse those too young to remember the real thing," reported Josh Billings in London's
Kinematograph Weekly. American television syndicators agreed, and marketed
Life with Buster Keaton as a children's show. It continued to play for years afterward on small, low-budget stations. An episode of
The Buster Keaton Show, and three episodes of
Life with Buster Keaton can be viewed on the Internet Archive. The former is a kinescope of a live telecast, and includes the original commercials for
Studebaker cars. (This was an era where television shows typically had a single sponsor, with
The Buster Keaton Show having three commercial breaks, each for Studebaker.) ==Known Surviving Episodes==