If you’ve never heard of Ernie Kovacs before, it’s okay, there’s no need to feel ashamed, he died more than fifty years ago and he was at his peak during television’s precambrian era, when the only way to record and store live broadcasts was via kinescope. (You want to talk primitive? Look up how kinescopes worked.) Actually, maybe feel a little ashamed, because Ernie Kovacs was maybe television’s first great pioneer, influencing everyone from Craig Ferguson to the creators of Sesame Street, doing things like trying to find out what it was like to be run over by a train, broadcasting live from a plane he was piloting, and creating an illusion that made it appear he was looking through a woman’s head, all of this in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Astoria’s Museum of the Moving Image will light the lamp on Kovacs again starting April 27, when it kicks off its month-long Kovacs retrospective. (FULL ARTICLE: Dave Itzkoff, The New York Times)