Howdy Doody

Howdy Doody is an American children's television program (with circus and Western frontier themes) that was created and produced by E. Roger Muir and telecast on the NBC network in the United States from December 27, 1947 until September 24, 1960. It was a pioneer in children's television programming and set the pattern for many similar shows. One of the first television series produced at NBC in Rockefeller Center, in Studio 3A, it was also a pioneer in early color production as NBC (at the time owned by TV maker RCA) used the show in part to sell color television sets in the 1950s.

Characters and story

The character first came to life from the creative mind of Bob Smith, who created Howdy Doody during his days as a radio announcer on WNBC. At that time, Howdy Doody was only a voice Smith performed on the radio. When Smith made an appearance on NBC's television program Puppet Playhouse on December 27, 1947, the reception for the character was great enough to begin a demand for a visual character for television. Frank Paris, a puppeteer whose puppets appeared on the program, was asked to create a Howdy Doody puppet.

Howdy

Howdy is an informal greeting, commonly thought to have originated as a shortened form of the greeting "How do you do?". It was first recorded as part of the South England dialect in 1680. Literature from that period includes the use of "How-do, how-do" and "How" as a greeting used by the Scottish when addressing Anglo settlers in greeting. The double form of the idiom is still found in parts of Texas as "Howdy, howdy". Without regard to etymological beginnings, the word is used as a greeting such as "Hello" and not, normally, as an enquiry. As a result, it's not followed by a question mark. Punctuating "Howdy" commonly follows these rules: (i) If "Howdy" is used as a complete sentence, it's followed by an exclamation mark. (ii) If "Howdy" is the first word in a sentence, it's followed by a comma.

In Texas, "Howdy" is a colloquial contraction of the formal greeting of "How do you do?", and as such is considered a formal and acceptable greeting for residents of that region of the world.