Not much of a margin yet...
Wheeerrre's Johnny?
Lacey Rose, 10.24.06, 12:00 PM ET
Earlier this week Johnny Carson, the late legend of late-night TV, took to the airwaves yet again. This time, it was in the form of a 30-minute TV infomercial, peddling his second slew of DVDs, which include "The Best of Carson" and "Carson Country," compiled from his 30-year reign on NBC's The Tonight Show.
Since Carson went off the air in 1992, fans have seen very little of his Tonight Show footage. In fact, less than 20 hours of tape has been released, despite the fact that Carson's estate owns the rights to approximately 4,000 hours' worth of footage. And it isn't for a lack of demand. One and a half million to 2 million copies of the first compilation, "The Original Ultimate Carson Collection," priced between $40 and $80, have been purchased over the last six years, according to Tim O'Leary, chief executive of Respond2 Communications, the agency that markets and sells Carson DVDs.
So why the tortoise-like pace?
"The Carson company has always been very picky about the quality of the material we release," explains O'Leary. "A lot of other people would have just started releasing tons of material. But these guys are as sensitive to the Carson brand as any major corporation."
Since Carson's death from emphysema in early 2005, the job of maintaining his legacy has fallen to his nephew Jeff Sotzing, a former Tonight Show producer and president of Carson Productions, which controls the rights to the library. Carson gained control of the show's tapes--except for the episodes that aired from 1962 and 1972, which were erased to save on storage costs--from General Electric's (nyse: GE - news - people ) NBC in a host of unprecedented negotiations over the course of his 30-year tenure.
"That just shows the tremendous clout Johnny Carson had throughout his career," says television historian Walter J. Podrazik, author of Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television.
Today, the library--one of the largest television collections in history--is stored 54 stories underground in a climate-controlled salt mine near Kansas City, Kan.
"People would be very interested in the guest interviews [today], because you're talking about people who are now icons or gone," says Podrazik. "They might even be more interested than you think in the monologues, because they could serve as a window into another era."
At the moment, Carson Productions has no plan to create its own television show, a tactic it tried in the early 1980s with Carson's Comedy Classics. And there's little chance that Carson's image or The Tonight Show logo will adorn merchandise either. According to Sotzing, "There were lots of opportunities for [Carson] to sell whatever he wanted with The Tonight Show logo on it, and he never felt comfortable doing it... so I don't think it will happen in the future."
But Sotzing's firm is using other methods to keep Carson's legacy alive, including the repackaging of Tonight Show highlights. For instance, Johnny Cash's 1964 appearance and the Judds' first appearance on the show, in 1989, will be marketed through infomercials and then distributed through big-box retailers like Wal-Mart Stores (nyse: WMT - news - people ) and Costco (nasdaq: COST - news - people ), in addition to Carson's official Web site, www.johnnycarson.com. The company is also releasing audio podcasts and Tonight Show monologues on radio broadcasts.
What about YouTube? While Sotzing and O'Leary admit YouTube and other video-sharing sites seem a logical fit for Carson's content, they have been hesitant because of legal concerns.
"The problem is that if we put Johnny on YouTube, depending on how hard we police it, we're going to see dozens of [unauthorized] uses of the clips," says O'Leary. "We're trying to figure out how to use the format."
But while they are busy figuring it out, Carson content has already found its way there. In fact, a quick search of YouTube, which was recently purchased by Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), pulls up well over 50 videoclips from his 30-year reign. (According to Sotzing, "Any material from The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson that is posted on YouTube is there without our permission. We have asked them to remove this material, and they have been very helpful in doing so.")
The good news: They insist they're moving in that direction. Says Sotzing, "We hope to have authorized Johnny Carson material on YouTube in the very near future."
But until that happens--or his estate releases more footage--don't look for Carson to grace our list of top-earning dead celebrities.
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