MZTV Television Museum and Archive

From the Star:

Speaking of rumours, there's one around town that Znaimer will soon be opening a museum at Harbourfront devoted to his collection of antique TV sets.

Where would this go?

I thought at one point the museum was housed at CityTV?

AoD

Now he's supposedly buying CFMX 96.3 perhaps he'll collect old radios as well, if he hasn't already.

The 2006 CNE is working with him to mount a tempoary exhibition of his collection at the fair this year.

Louroz

I think we have our answer as to where it would go ...

Except for owning some shares in CHUM, Znaimer has no relationship with the company anymore so it probably only makes sense that he finds somewhere else for his MZTV Museum.

MZTV Museum Reopens with New Media Showcase

Moses Znaimer will open the renovated MZTV Museum of Television at a new location, and on an historically significant date.

It was a small step for man, but a giant leap for broadcast TV.

On July 20, 1969, more than half a billion people worldwide watched as astronaut Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon. At the time, it was the largest TV audience for a live broadcast ever.

Exactly 40 years later, TVs will be drawing another crowd, albeit not as large.

MZTV’s comprehensive collection of historically significant television sets and memorabilia will be opened to the public on Monday, July 20, 2009, at 550 Queen Street East, also the home of Znaimer’s broadcast outlets, including The New Classical 96.3 FM, the New AM 740, MZTV Production & Distribution, and ZOOMER Magazine.

This exhibit also announces and celebrates Moses’ partnership with the Cinémathèque québécoise (CQ), a major cultural institution devoted to the moving image, located in his hometown of Montreal, to which Moses has donated his collection.

The CQ is the only Cinémathèque in Canada to have a triple mission of preserving, interpreting and showcasing Canadian and international films, television and new media works. Moses’ relationship with the CQ began in 1997, when it mounted a retrospective of his TV career to that point. In 2003, Moses donated a first lot of 94 sets, which led to the bilingual exhibit Do Not Adjust Your Set/N’adjustez pas votre appareil currently on permanent display at the CQ. In 2007, Moses donated an additional 289 sets, which the CQ has loaned back to the MZTV Museum, to display and maintain in Toronto according to strict conservation guidelines.

In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, long before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or MySpace became worldwide phenomena, Moses dramatically transformed the aesthetics and economics of television by anticipating the popularity of viewer-generated content. His groundbreaking concepts such as Speaker’s Corner, Videography (first-person, hand-held reporting), and the Streetfront/Studioless television operating system were at the core of the over 20 popular and independent Stations and Channels he co-founded, including Citytv, CablePulse24, Bravo!, Fashion Television, SPACE, SexTV, Book Television, and Canadian Learning Television; not to mention MuchMusic and MusiquePlus, which served to define a generation of Canadian youth in both official languages.

All the while, Moses quietly accumulated historic TV sets, amassing a collection worth many millions. It’s been called “The Church Of The Holy Receiver†(Toronto Star) and the “A Shrine To Must-see TVs†(The Globe and Mail). Since childhood – at 13, he bought his family’s first TV set with his Bar Mitzvah gift money – Moses has been intellectually dedicated to the medium of TV and captivated by the beauty of the receivers themselves. The museum is his tribute to the most fundamental technology of the 20th century, charting its history from the dawn of image transmission to the arrival of the transistor and the contemporary era.

Highlights include the adorable Felix the Cat, the first star of television; the legendary RCA “Phantom Teleceiverâ€, a translucent set that launched commercial TV at the 1939 New York World’s Fair; the first television set to receive a drama, Ernst Alexanderson’s 1928 GE “Octagonâ€; John Logie Baird’s original homemade scanning discs from the mid 1920s, together with his personal papers and plans relating to the possible launch of television in Canada; and Marilyn Monroe’s own portable TV set presented in a living room tableau, featuring excerpts from her rare television appearances. All told, Moses’ collection to date comprises some 10,000 objects – in addition to the sets, there are original papers & instruments, books, manuals, magazines, tapes, toys, parts, advertising, videos, and assorted ephemera.

Established in 1992, and curated from its inception by Michael Adams, The MZTV Museum of Television & Archive is Canada’s first museum of broadcasting to chronicle the technological history of television and the only museum of the sets themselves. The Museum has hosted over 100,000 visitors at its previous Toronto site at the ChumCityStore at 277 Queen St. West (2002-2006); over 100,000 visitors in the former ChumCityBuilding at 299 Queen St. West (1992-2002) and over 1,000,000 visitors at traveling exhibitions presented at the Royal Ontario Museum/Toronto; Canadian Museum of Civilization/Ottawa-Hull; The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies/Banff; and the Cinémathèque québécoise/Montreal.

TV remains more popular than ever! According to Neilson, an estimated one third of the world’s population – a record-setting 2 billion – watched the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics and 4.7 billion viewers – over 70% of the world’s population – tuned in during the games. Similarly, a record 37.8 million television viewers across 17 broadcast and cable channels (not including the tens of millions who watched live video streaming online) tuned in to watch the inauguration of US President Barack Obama. With the advent of the internet, television is redefining itself and becoming more accessible (and watched) than ever before.

Beginning July 21, the public is invited to see where it all began at the MZTV Museum of Television. Guided tours are available Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, by advance reservation only. In addition to guided tours, visitors are invited to use the cutting-edge Interactive Gallery hosted by a Virtual Curator. These award-winning touch screen kiosks allow for an even more in-depth viewing of selected artifacts on display. A Media Room of books, magazines, images and videos is also accessible to researchers and students. Equally, these startling images, plus extensive histories of the medium, may be found online @ http://www.mztv.com.

This exhibition receives support from the Cinémathèque québécoise, CTVglobemedia and Panasonic.

I was never a fan of his ego, but at least he's opening up his collection to the public. It'll be six bucks to get in so it had better be good.

Brian69 said:

I was never a fan of his ego, but at least he's opening up his collection to the public. It'll be six bucks to get in so it had better be good.

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Ya its worth the money. I saw his sets at Idea City 4 or 5 years ago at the St. Lawrence Centre. There was about 15 sets and one was about 50 years old and still working considering the phosphorous was still good.

I started in engineering at CITY in 1992...as the new guy, I was the one who had to set up his collection in the 2nd floor lobby. A few years later they moved to a studio space on the fourth floor. Many of the earliest sets used a simple resistive voltage divider to supply various voltages to the circuit. An extremely dangerous design...easy to get shocked!

AGTO said:

I started in engineering at CITY in 1992...as the new guy, I was the one who had to set up his collection in the 2nd floor lobby. A few years later they moved to a studio space on the fourth floor. Many of the earliest sets used a simple resistive voltage divider to supply various voltages to the circuit. An extremely dangerous design...easy to get shocked!

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cool. What was the oldest set he had was it the Granada? I really can't remember, Moses is an interesting character I've heard good and bad. Anyways it's good to see someone collecting these things for our kids to see what we had to look at long ago ( before the internet)

Given where a lot of the Zoomer demo supposedly lives, Znaimer might as well have followed the Ontario Electric Railway Historical Association all the way out to Nassageweya or something...

No idea which was the oldest. I was amazed they still worked, some even had a channel 1.
The 2 piece Philco Predicta's were very cool looking sets.
He's an interesting person, great ideas, seems to be easily irritated though.

History Channelling
EYE Weekly | Chris Bilton
July 21, 2009

The 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk — Moses Znaimer couldn’t have picked a better day to reopen his MZTV Television Museum and Archive at 550 Queen E. The museum — initially created as a small installation for the 20th anniversary of Citytv in 1992 — showcases 150 sets, many of which come from Znaimer’s extensive private collection. But it also celebrates the evolution of early television technology — something most of us take for granted in this age of bigger screens, excessive pixel counts and lifelike quality.

Entering the museum is like walking into a historicized version of that scene in The Matrix where Neo finally breaches the Architect’s control room — except that the picture quality is a little less digitally enhanced, and the brains behind the operation is Mr. ZoomerMedia himself. The warehouse-high ceilings and darkened windows create a strange tranquility to what might otherwise be a sensory overload of flickering cathode ray tubes and horizontal drift. The few sets that are turned on show brief clips of Nixon, Vietnam and Castro — classic transcendental images from the early incarnation of the “world is watching” era — and, more importantly, lend some serious insight into just how far we’ve come from the near-blizzard of black and white reception to HDTV.

While I’d love to power up one of the wood-encased floor models and relive my childhood television watching, curator Michael Adams says that they can only have a limited number of sets operating at once, otherwise the place will get unbearably hot. Instead, I stroll around the chronological exhibits, which are arranged from the Mechanical Televisions of 1925-1935 to the Introducing a New Mass Medium and Electronic Hearth displays that cover 1946-1960 (what Adams calls the “dot.com period for television”) and take us up to 1960-1975 where television becomes The Universal Medium.

Most fascinating are the museum’s oddities — of which there are quite a few. The Kuba Komet from 1957 West Germany, for example, is all angles, like a beech-wood version of the ROM Crystal. And then there’s a large white sphere that looks like it was salvaged from the Death Star (the Karacolor from the UK circa 1969) as well as the museum’s centrepiece, the clear Lucite RCA Phantom Teleciever that made its debut at the 1939 World’s Fair as proof that television’s talking pictures didn’t involve magic or demonic possession.

On many of the older sets, the picture screen seems like just an additional feature shoved into an otherwise already elaborate radio. The technological crossover is interesting, like when ghetto blasters had tape decks, radios and TV screens all in one portable — but battery-sucking — unit, and it’s amazing to imagine that anyone could find space for a television that’s approximately the size of a La-Z-Boy. I guess that’s why everyone in the 1950s and 1960s moved to the suburbs.