Disposable

When television was introduced to the American public at the New York World’s Fair, its prerecorded content was dominated by sponsored film. These programs, designed to achieve goals ranging from securing participation in public health campaigns to cultivating viewer goodwill, were produced by diverse civic, governmental, educational, and industrial institutions. For many fairgoers being introduced to television, the marvel of the new medium would have been interlaced not with Hollywood and entertainment programming, but with the tropes of industrial and civic progress, corporate goodwill, and national expansion so often found in the period’s sponsored films. This article traces these intersections beyond the Fair, when sponsored films found their way to television in high numbers thanks to their ability to mediate between the needs and interests of several key groups within early American broadcasting (stations, networks, industrial film producers, and the government). Operating as “filler” for stations hoping to nourish and grow their local schedules, sponsored film provided a critical resource that supported the development of broadcasting infrastructure (and, of course, flow) while reinforcing the medium’s commercial status through the provision of an additional, alternative avenue of corporate speech on the small screen. Returning to a wide set of texts that continue to persist—despite assumptions regarding early American television programming’s irrevocability—this article works with and against disposability, positioning ephemerality as a problem of attention.