After working on the East Coast and the Midwest for two decades, O’Dell and Carrer began working in the Los Angeles area in 1950. There, she launched her own weekly magic show, connecting with audiences through a rapidly growing, experimental medium: television.
“There’s this kind of groovy thing that happens with new media, where sometimes some of the most interesting material is really playing with the conventions of the medium and drawing attention to its artifice in strange and weird ways,” says Michael Kackman, a television historian at the University of Notre Dame. “The idea of a magician doing a TV show seems really interesting, because a lot of what they’re doing can’t really be experienced through TV. It’s only experienced vicariously [by] imagining what it’s like to be there.”
She wasn’t the first magician to host her own television show. In 1949, Geri Larsen debuted a kids’ program called “The Magic Lady,” which magic historian Connie Boyd describes as “almost like a spoof of Glinda the Good Witch.” But O’Dell was no stranger to the small screen. She’d previously appeared on “The Ina Ray Hutton Show,” “The Spade Cooley Show” and “The Morey Amsterdam Show,” among others. But “The Dell O’Dell Show,” which premiered in 1951 on KECA-TV, a local affiliate of ABC, was entirely her own. Marketed as an “audience-participation program” for children, it aired beyond the Los Angeles area, too, appearing on TV screens in New York City and beyond.
After about seven months at KECA, O’Dell moved to KTLA, the first commercially licensed station west of the Mississippi River, with a new show called “It’s Magic With Dell O’Dell.” In total, she was on the air for a little over two years, with her last episode airing almost 70 years ago, in late fall 1953.
At the time, television was still evolving and gaining popularity, meaning it was more avant-garde than it’s considered today.
KTLA was particularly experimental, though the station’s manager, Klaus Landsberg, also wanted his programs to appeal to everyone. “Landsberg was really a stickler for making sure that this was family entertainment,” says Mark Williams, a film historian at Dartmouth College and the author of the forthcoming book Remote Possibilities: A History of Early Television in Los Angeles, 1930-1952. “You’re welcoming people into your home. He really built a stable of very important entertainers.”
The early 1950s were a crucial time for television in Southern California. “1952 is a huge turning of the tide,” Williams adds. “It’s no longer going to be New York as the source of all these network programs. It’s increasingly going to be Los Angeles.”
It’s in this window—when television was on the cusp of becoming a fixture in every American household (for a more contemporary example, think of the internet circa 1995)—that O’Dell was on the air.