Classic TV shows get U.S. stamp of approval

The other day my wife came home from a visit to the post office with a sheet of stamps featuring 20 images from "classic" TV, which means the earliest black-and-white, baby-boomer days of series television.

Whether every show is indeed a classic is debatable, of course, but most are certainly iconic: "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "The Dinah Shore Show," "Dragnet," "The Ed Sullivan Show," "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show," "Hopalong Cassidy," "The Honeymooners," "Howdy Doody," "I Love Lucy," "Kukla, Fran and Ollie," "Lassie," "The Lone Ranger," "Perry Mason," "The Phil Silvers Show," "The Red Skelton Show," "Texaco Star Theater," "The Tonight Show," "The Twilight Zone" and "You Bet Your Life."

These are first-class stamps, which now sell for 44 cents.

Quick now, how much did it cost to mail a letter in 1955? Would you believe 3 cents?

These new stamps, designed by Las Vegas artist Carl Herrman, have an attractive black-and-white "retro" look — and for some reason he has chosen to show both the Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy with their horses (Silver and Topper, respectively) but Lassie without her master! (Perhaps he just couldn't choose between Jeff and Timmy.)

When promotions such as this come along, I sometimes wonder if younger TV watchers ever become curious enough about what their grandparents were watching back in the olden days to actually look up these shows.

If so, it's pretty easy to find "I Love Lucy," "The Twilight Zone" and "The Honeymooners," which are fully represented on DVD (and still rerunning on TV).

And many of the others are represented by full-season or multiple-episode DVD sets with excellent print transfers — early seasons of "Perry Mason" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" are on the shelves, as well as professionally packaged collections of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet," "Dragnet," "The Ed Sullivan Show," "Hopalong Cassidy," "The Lone Ranger," "Texaco Star Theater" (Milton Berle's variety show), "You Bet Your Life" (Goucho Marx's quiz show) and "The Phil Silvers Show" (aka "Sgt. Bilko").

Most of the rest can be found in various public-domain DVD sets, which means the episodes have fallen out of copyright and the prints are likely to be dubious, with skips, edits, sound drops and other problems.

Having said that, I'd rather have a smidgen of "Burns and Allen" any way I can get it than never see the show again. But wouldn't it be nice to have original network prints of more golden-oldie shows compiled in appealing, quality box sets?

Most surprising is that two of the shows on these stamps are not available — "The Dinah Shore Show" and "The Tonight Show" with Steve Allen! The best you can do is glimpse snippets on YouTube.