Happy 20th anniversary, TCM!

April 14 marks the 20th anniversary of the day TCM went on the air, or technically showed up on cable systems since they don't broadcast over the air. The first movie they ran was Gone With the Wind, so it's fitting that TCM is going to be showing it at 8:00 PM. Actually, I think the actual launch of the channel was earlier in the day on April 14, as the clip of Osborne pulling the lever to start the channel in New York is much too light for 8:00 PM. Indeed, this snippet from the Chicago Sun-Times says it launched at 6:00 PM.

Following Gone With the Wind will be an encore presentation of the Private Scrrenings interview in which host Robert Osborne was the subject, interviewed by Alec Baldwin. It's a lot of fun, with clips of a much younger Osborne when he was trying to be an actor, and from the early days of TCM. That comes on at midnight.

At 7:00 PM, just before Gone With the Wind, TCM is running Twenty Classic Moments, a new program which I would presume is precisely what the title says: twenty classic moments from the history of TCM. With all the Private Screenings interviews, the Guest Programmers, and the Essentials co-hosts, I'd guess there's enough material for 20 moments.

Unrelated to the 20th anniversary, TCM's tribute to Mickey Rooney last night, just before Boys Town was very nice, showing clips of Rooney at the 2011 TCM Film Festival where he sat down for an interview with Robert Osborne. It didn't occur to me until a day or two ago that this probably wasn't preempting any previously recorded piece on Boys Town that Robert Osborne would have done for a prime time movie. After all, all the other intros from the weekend of the TCM Film Festival were done at the festival, so I should have expected an intro for the previously scheduled Mickey Rooney movies to have been done there too.

Ans shorts are beginning to show up again, at least on the daily schedule. The weekly schedule has shorts for this morning and afternoon, but that's it; the daily schedule for today has a couple in prime time as well. It doesn't seem as though there's anything further out than that, though.