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(Newsweek) Sunday nights were always special in our home. Each week, my family would gather in front of our four-legged, wooden box of a TV to see who would be appearing on that week's Ed Sullivan Show. It was the only TV show I watched regularly with my family (assuming my homework was done). Just 10 weeks before Americans met the Beatles, our world was turned upside down on the bleakest Friday...

It was inevitable, time marching on as it does, and yet it also hard to believe: Half a century has passed ince the Beatles touched down in New York for the first time, on Feb. 7, 1964, and seduced the country with three performances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and three concerts, one at the Washington Coliseum and two at Carnegie Hall. Everything about them — their pudding basin haircuts, their Cardin suits and pointed boots, their sharp, irreverent sense of...

Last night, as he stood onstage in Los Angeles to mark the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, Paul McCartney confessed to wondering “if it was seemly to tribute yourself?” By then, none of the thousands gathered in a large ballroom of the L.A. Convention Center was about to object, not with a rare onstage reunion between McCartney and his fellow Beatle Ringo Starr...

Fifty years ago next Sunday, on Feb. 9, 1964, via “The Ed Sullivan Show,” America met the Beatles. It was not the group’s first appearance on American television. CBS News had reported, dismissively, on British “Beatlemania,” and Jack Paar had aired on his talk show a clip of the band playing in England. Their music was in the charts, finally: After a year of outright refusal, Capitol Records (an American...

CBS is digging into its archives to commemorate two notable 50th anniversaries: The Beatles' debut performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The net will celebrate classic TV and classic rock music at 8 p.m. on Feb. 9 when its airs a Grammy salute to the Fab Four. The two-hour special, which will tape on Jan. 27, 2014, (the day after the Grammy Awards), will...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. CBS, to the surprise of no one, will mark the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' first 'Ed Sullivan Show' appearance with a two-hour tribute show on Sun., Feb. 9. That's exactly 50 years to the day and hour from the Fab Four's first Ed Sullivan date — a show that drew massive viewership and, depending on one's tolerance for...

All of the Rolling Stones' appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show in the Sixties are about to be released for the first time on DVD later this year. The set will be issued in two forms – an abridged version titled Four Ed Sullivan Shows Starring the Rolling Stones, due out on October 4th, and a deluxe package called Six Ed Sullivan Shows Starring the Rolling Stones, in stores on November 1st.

Ed Sullivan was one of TV's most awkward hosts. He couldn't tell a joke, couldn't sing and always seemed stiff and unsmiling. And he was one of the greatest friends to some of America's most influential comedians. Sullivan and his influence on popular culture in introducing the country to such groundbreaking comedians as Richard Pryor, Flip Wilson, George Carlin,...

The DVD begins rather worryingly with generic cod-Beatle music, like that episode of Gilligan’s Island with the Mosquitoes. It’s a world in black and white, one in which the kids are about to go way overboard festooning their brittle limbs with a kaleidoscope of color. This is a moment in history, in part because the Beatles were riding the crest of that particular wave. The timing of this new two-disc DVD set,...