Best Earliest Movies & TV Shows

The year 2004 saw two hundred years of railways in Great Britain and to celebrate this historic landmark year, dedicated train enthusiast Mark Williams traveled the length and breadth of Britain in an exciting new TV series. Travelling the length and breadth of Britain, Mark tracks down the nation's fascinating railway heritage and gets to grips with locos such as the magnificent 160 ton Duchess of Sutherland. From the earliest designs of Richard Trevithick and George and Robert Stephenson to the advent of Class 31s, and from the development of London's Underground to the evolution of railway coaches, he reveals how our railways have changed over 200 years of history.

In his home studio and revisiting old haunts in Shepherds Bush and Battersea, Pete Townshend opens his heart and his personal archive to revisit 'the last great album the Who ever made', one that took the Who full circle back to their earliest days via the adventures of a pill-popping mod on an epic journey of self-discovery. But in 1973 Quadrophenia was an album that almost never was. Beset by money problems, a studio in construction, heroin-taking managers, a lunatic drummer and a culture of heavy drinking, Townshend took on an album that nearly broke him and one that within a year the band had turned their back on and would ignore for nearly three decades. Contributors include: Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Ethan Russell, Ron Nevison, Richard Barnes, Irish Jack Lyons, Bill Curbishley, John Woolf, Howie Edelson, Mark Kermode and Georgiana Steele Waller.

Comedian Rich Hall hits the road as he takes us on his personal journey through the road movie, which, from the earliest days of American cinema has been synonymous with American culture. With his customary wit and intelligence, Rich takes us through films such as Bonnie and Clyde, The Grapes of Wrath, Thelma and Louise, Vanishing Point, Five Easy Pieces and even The Wizard of Oz. He explores what makes a road movie and how the American social, economic and political landscape has defined the genre.

This High Definition, PBS miniseries uses letters, diaries, speeches, journalistic accounts, historical text and military records to document and acknowledge the sacrifices and accomplishments of African-American service men and women since the earliest days of the republic.

How did humanity's earliest ancestors evolve into one of the most successful species on Earth? An extraordinary journey tracing the footsteps of early hominids. Using the latest paleoanthropological findings mixed with the latest CGI from Square Enix, this story is finally told.

Pennies From Heaven is a 1978 BBC television drama serial written by Dennis Potter. The title is taken from a song of the same name written by Johnny Burke and Arthur Johnston. It was one of several Potter serials to mix the reality of the drama with a dark fantasy content, and the earliest of his works where the characters burst into miming to popular 1930s songs.

Granted unparalleled access, Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan takes viewers on an adventure behind the curtains of Industrial Light & Magic, the special visual effects, animation and virtual production division of Lucasfilm. Learn what inspired some of the most legendary filmmakers in Hollywood history, and follow their stories from their earliest personal films to bringing George Lucas’ vision to life.

Dexter Early Cuts is a web-based series in the form of an animated comic about the character Dexter Morgan and his earliest kills, thus the name "Early Cuts". The series is narrated by Michael C. Hall from the Showtime series and chronicles characters from that series (not the novels).

The miniseries revisits each generation of the Pokémon video game series to shed new light on some timeless moments. From the earliest days in the Kanto region to the splendor of the Kalos region, go behind the scenes and witness Pokémon history with new eyes!

Our Miss Brooks is an American situation comedy starring Eve Arden as a sardonic high school English teacher. It began as a radio show broadcast on CBS from 1948 to 1957. When the show was adapted to television, it became one of the medium's earliest hits. In 1956, the sitcom was adapted for big screen in the film of the same name.

Eyes is an ABC television series starring Tim Daly as Harlan Judd. Eyes follows the firm of Judd Risk Management which uses marginally legal means to investigate individuals and crimes where law enforcement would fall short. With the help of high-tech gadgets, Harlan Judd and his employees recover money for victims as well as investigate individuals for clients but still manage to keep plenty of secrets from one another. In May 2005, having rescheduled the sixth episode twice, ABC announced that they would not be airing the remaining episodes until June at the earliest. They later announced that it would not be picked up for a second season and that the remaining episodes would remain unaired. New Zealand television station TV2 picked up this show and aired the complete series, all twelve episodes, in the second half of 2005. These episodes appeared online via BitTorrent soon after. The show was also partially aired on Singapore television station Mediacorp Channel 5, with the pilot episode and episodes #106 to #112 being skipped. Episode #111 was an exception, and was aired as the fifth episode. The show was also aired in full on France cable television station Canal Jimmy in 2006. In the beginning of 2008 the show was aired in full on Polish television station TVN 7. The series was shown on the Nine Network in Australia in 2007.

The Lucy Show is an American sitcom that aired on CBS from 1962–68. It was Lucille Ball's follow-up to I Love Lucy. A significant change in cast and premise for the 1965–66 season divides the program into two distinct eras; aside from Ball, only Gale Gordon, who joined the program for its second season, remained. For the first three seasons, Vivian Vance was the co-star. The earliest scripts were entitled The Lucille Ball Show, but when this title was declined, producers thought of calling the show This Is Lucy or The New Adventures of Lucy, before deciding on the title The Lucy Show. Ball won consecutive Emmy Awards as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for the series' final two seasons, 1966–67 and 1967–68.

The second of the four Carry On Christmas specials, this one loosely recounts the story of Treasure Island with Sid James as Long John Silver and Barbara Windsor, strangely, as Jim Hawkins. The writing never quite builds up any steam, and many of the jokes were recycled from previous films anyhow. This special was filmed in black and white -- strangely, since the previous one was in color. I generally love the look of black and white, and the earliest films in the Carry On series do fine with it. But here it is used ineffectively and feels like a budgetary concession, which I'm sure it was.

The story of English rock guitarist Jeff Beck from his earliest days learning to strum on homemade guitars in Wallington, Surrey, to his teenage friendship with Jimmy Page and mastering his craft with guitar legends that influenced his incredible career.

Set in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War II, the film focuses on the brutality and horror that the allied prisoners were exposed to as the Japanese metered out subjugation and punishment to a disgraced and defeated enemy. This harrowing drama concentrates on the deviations of legal and moral definitions when two opposing cultures clash. Although fictional, this was one of the earliest films to deal realistically with life and death in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during the Second War.

Titus Andronicus returns from the wars and sees his sons and daughters taken from him, one by one. Shakespeare's goriest and earliest tragedy.

Using masterfully restored footage from recently declassified images, The Bomb tells a powerful story of the most destructive invention in human history. From the earliest testing stages to its use as the ultimate chess piece in global politics, the program outlines how America developed the bomb, how it changed the world and how it continues to loom large in our lives. The show also includes interviews with prominent historians and government insiders, along with men and women who helped build the weapon piece by piece.

The earliest surviving celluloid film, and believed second moving picture ever created, was shot by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince using the LPCCP Type-1 MkII single-lens camera. It was taken in the garden of Oakwood Grange, the Whitley family house in Roundhay, Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire (UK), possibly on 14 October 1888. It shows Adolphe Le Prince (Le Prince's son), Mrs. Sarah Whitley (Le Prince's mother-in-law), Joseph Whitley and Miss Harriet Hartley walking around in circles, laughing to themselves and keeping within the area framed by the camera. The Roundhay Garden Scene was recorded at 12 frames per second and runs for 2.11 seconds.

In February, 1962, as the civil rights movement reaches Bayonne, Louisiana, a New York journalist arrives to interview Jane Pittman, who has just turned 110. She tells him her story dating back to her earliest memories before slavery ended. In between the chapters of her life, the present-day struggles of Blacks in Bayonne, urged on by Jimmy, are dramatized.

The Cornish military captain, now a member of Parliament, is drawn into the war with France while his son falls in with smugglers. Historical drama, starring John Bowe and Mel Martin, and featuring a young Ioan Gruffudd in one of his earliest roles.

Rolie Polie Olie was a children's television series produced by Nelvana, distributed by Disney, and created by William Joyce, Maggie Swanson, and Anne Wood. The show centers on a little roly pollie who is composed of several spheres and other three-dimensional geometric shapes. The show was one of the earliest series that was fully animated in CGI, and the first CGI animated preschool series.Rolie Polie Olie now airs in reruns on Disney Junior. Rolie Polie Olie won a Gemini Award in Canada for "Best Animated Program" in 1999. The show also won a Daytime Emmy Award for "Outstanding Special Class Animated Program" in 2000 and 2005. William Joyce won a 1999 Daytime Emmy for Best Production Design for this series. The show has a vintage atmosphere reminiscent of the 1950s and early 1960s, with futuristic elements.

A sketch comedy show featuring some of Britain's great comedic talents of the 1980s and 1990s in one of their earliest TV appearances.

Historian Dr Janina Ramirez unlocks the secrets of a centuries-old masterpiece in glass. At 78 feet in height, the famous East Window at York Minster is the largest medieval stained-glass window in the country and it was the creative vision of a single artist - a mysterious master craftsman called John Thornton, one of the earliest named English artists. The East Window of York Minster is far more than a work of artistic genius, it is a window onto the medieval world and the medieval mind - telling us who were once were and who we still are, all preserved in the most fragile medium of all.

Noted Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been helping people discover long-lost relatives hidden for generations within the branches of their family trees. Professor Gates utilizes a team of genealogists to reconstruct the paper trail left behind by our ancestors and the world’s leading geneticists to decode our DNA and help us travel thousands of years into the past to discover the origins of our earliest forebears.

Celebrities and creatives -- including musician David Byrne, performance artist Spalding Gray, comedian Sandra Bernhard, radical activist Abbie Hoffman, and poet Allen Ginsberg-- recall their earliest sexual experiences.

In the pre-Civil War South, a plantation owner dies and leaves all his possessions, including his slaves, to his young son. While the deceased treated his slaves decently, his corrupt executor abuses them unmercifully, beating them without provocation, and he is planning to sell off the father'e estate--including the slaves--at the earliest opportunity so he and his mistress can steal the money and move to France. The young boy doesn't want to sell his father's estate or break up an of the slave families, and he has to find someone to help him thwart the crooked executor's plans.

In The Villain, Billy attempted something a little different. He's still imitating Chaplin, but this time he's playing the wicked, top-hatted Charlie found in some of his earliest Keystone appearances (e.g. Mabel at the Wheel), the ones where Charlie himself seemed to be imitating the studio's recently departed Ford Sterling. Throughout this short there is much spoofing of old-time melodramas, a frequent motif of Sterling's comedies.

A bleak mansion sits ominously on a cliff above the sea somewhere on Florida's east coast. In its shadows, two people meet: a scientist haunted by incurable illness and a beautiful woman haunted by the voice of her dead husband. Ronald Reagan and Hollywood-debuting Viveca Lindfors star in an eerie drama steeped in religious faith and supernatural fear, in the destructive power of sexual jealousy and the redemptive power of love. In one of his earliest directorial efforts, Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, The Shootist) displays his command of pacing and camerawork, building the action to a climactic hurricane that parallels the tumultuous emotions of characters precariously balanced between now and the hereafter.

A man (Thomas Edison's assistant) takes a pinch of snuff and sneezes. This is one of the earliest Thomas Edison films and was the first motion picture to be copyrighted in the United States.

A young woman tells her parents and fiance (in flashback) about the recent sinking of the Titanic and her experiences as a passenger during the disaster. Her intended marriage now faces a new hazard because her fiance is a sailor and her parents have just been reminded of the dangers of the sea. Premiering in the United States just 29 days after the event, it is the earliest dramatization about the tragedy.

Despite decades of research, many mysteries remain about the ancient Maya. Now, archaeologists are unearthing new clues that transform long held ideas about how these people came to dominate vast areas of Mexico and Central America. Through immense lost monuments, ancient inscriptions and new forensic evidence, this series tracks the Maya from their earliest origins all the way to the present day, unlocking the dark secrets of the rise and fall of the Maya.

Documentary following young animals as they take their first steps and face their earliest challenges.

Follows the life of Bill Walton, from his earliest days as a high school basketball phenom to some of his wildly successful years at UCLA.

Documentary telling the stories of the men and women who travelled across Egypt to uncover the earliest Christian texts.

Climb up on the footplate and join historian and host Dan Cruickshank for a railway adventure like no other as he investigates how trains helped shape modern Britain. This three-part series resurrects an exhilarating age and kicks off by focusing on the railways' role in defeating Hitler, before unearthing the incredible engineering achievements of Isambard Brunel and embarking on a trip on the earliest steam engines.

Triggers: Weapons That Changed the World is an American television series that premiered on November 30, 2011 on the Military Channel. The program features former United States Army Ranger, United States Air Force Pararescueman and star of Military's hit series Special Ops Mission Wil Willis. In each episode, Willis tests a series of iconic firearms, from muskets and pistols to assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, and examines their historical significance. The premiere episode looks at the evolution of the handgun, going back to its earliest days on 16th century battlefields. Mike Tristano provided most of the weapons featured on the show. He is a fully licensed Master Armorer with over 25 years of experience and more than 400 film and television credits. The series was broadcast weekly in the UK on the Freeview channel Quest starting on Thursday 17 May 2012. The initial word of the title was dropped, giving the shorter form Weapons that Changed the World.