All American Television
All American Television was an American television production and syndication company active from 1981 to 1998, best known for rescuing Baywatch from cancellation and turning it into one of the most watched programmes in the world. Founded in New York by Anthony Scotti, Ben Scotti, and Syd Vinnedge out of the Scotti Brothers music business, it began by distributing the pop music show America's Top 10, grew into a publicly traded syndicator, absorbed its partner Lexington Broadcast Services, and in the mid-1990s assembled one of the world's great game-show libraries by acquiring Fremantle International and Mark Goodson Productions. Sold to Pearson Television in 1997 and renamed the following year, All American is now remembered as a bridge between the independent syndication era and the consolidated global format business represented by its successor, Fremantle.
Overview
All American Television, later styled All American Communications Television, began life as Scotti Brothers–Syd Vinnedge Television. Its headquarters were listed in the batch record as New York, where it was founded, and in its later years it operated from Santa Monica, California. Its services were television production and television syndication: it made programmes, distributed programmes made by others, sold them to American stations and to foreign broadcasters, and increasingly licensed formats and merchandising around them. The company's catalogue mixed music and entertainment shows, first-run action drama, talk shows, and game shows, an unusually broad slate for an independent syndicator.
Two threads ran through the business. The first was music-industry showmanship: the Scotti Brothers had promoted and marketed hit records, and their first television success was a chart show. The second was rights accumulation. All American repeatedly bought distribution rights, libraries, and partner companies, LBS, Fremantle International, Mark Goodson Productions, Orbis Entertainment, until the value of what it owned, rather than any single season's productions, made it an acquisition target for a global buyer.
History
The company's roots lay in entertainment promotion. Anthony J. Scotti had acted in the 1960s, playing Tony Polar in the film Valley of the Dolls, before deciding acting bored him and moving into the record business, becoming a senior vice president of MGM's record division. In the mid-1970s he and his brother Ben formed Scotti Brothers Records, a marketing and label business associated with artists including Electric Light Orchestra, Survivor, and Weird Al Yankovic. In 1979 the brothers entered television by producing America's Top 10, a pop music countdown hosted by radio disc jockey Casey Kasem. The show's success in syndication led them, with advertising veteran Syd Vinnedge, to found All American Television in 1981. The name, by company lore, recalled Anthony Scotti's high-school football honours.
Through the 1980s All American built a syndication sales operation. It hired George Back, founder of a small New York syndicator, in 1982, entered joint ventures with MG Perin to distribute programmes including The Dance Show and Inside Video: This Week, and handled barter advertising sales for other suppliers' film packages. The company went public in 1985, first trading over the counter and later joining the New York Stock Exchange. A proposed 1987 merger with Atlantic Kushner-Locke, intended to create a larger public production and distribution company, was never completed. Programmes from the period included further Casey Kasem vehicles and, from 1990 to 1992, distribution of the WWOR-TV talk programme The Howard Stern Show.
The decisive turn came in late 1990. Through Lexington Broadcast Services, All American acquired first-run syndication rights to Baywatch, the lifeguard drama NBC had cancelled after one season. The producers had bought back the rights, and with All American distributing and German and British partners helping finance production, the series returned in syndication in September 1991 and ran for ten further seasons. In 1991 All American and Scotti Brothers Entertainment Industries merged in a stock swap to form the core of All American Communications, with Anthony Scotti as chief executive. It then acquired the assets of LBS, which was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, in a merger completed in October 1991; LBS founder Henry Siegel became All American's president, his brother Paul Siegel led international and ancillary markets, and distribution rights to Baywatch and Family Feud came with the deal.
Services and Operations
All American's operations covered domestic syndication sales, international distribution, programme production, format licensing, and, from July 1996, an in-house licensing and merchandising division created to control Baywatch and other merchandise lines more directly. Domestic syndication meant selling first-run series such as Baywatch, Acapulco H.E.A.T., and the revived Family Feud to stations market by market, and selling off-network and library programmes on continuing terms. International operations, strengthened by the Fremantle and Orbis acquisitions, sold finished programmes abroad and licensed game-show formats for local production in other languages and markets.
The company was never only a distributor. Through All American Television Productions it developed and produced series, signing producer David Gerber to a deal in 1995, and it operated a substantial music business alongside television until the record label was sold in 1997. Scotti Bros. Records, renamed All American Music Group in March 1996 with a Warner Music Group distribution deal, released more than 140 albums from 1982 onward. That cross-media structure, records, television production, syndication, formats, and merchandising under one public company, was ambitious for an independent and helps explain both its rapid growth and the difficulty of sustaining it.
Clients and Distribution
All American's station customers covered most of the American independent television market: by late 1992 its Baywatch follow-up Acapulco H.E.A.T. had been sold to about half the country before launch. Its producer and rights partners included LBS Communications, DIC Entertainment, with which it launched Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad for the 1994-95 season using footage from Tsuburaya's Gridman, and the Baywatch production companies, whose German backer Beta Taurus, part of the Kirch group, and ITV in Britain underpinned the show's international financing. Baywatch itself was distributed by LBS in its first syndicated season, by All American from 1992 to 1997, and by Pearson thereafter, and its later seasons moved production to Hawaii as Baywatch Hawaii.
Foreign distribution became steadily more important. Fremantle International brought All American the international business of adapting American game shows locally, including The Price Is Right and Family Feud, in exchange for a 20 percent stake for its former owner, the Interpublic Group. Orbis Entertainment, acquired in 1996 and renamed All American/Orbis Communications, added international talk-show production and distribution. By the time of the Pearson sale, All American was as much an international formats company as an American syndicator, which was precisely what Pearson, a British publisher building a global television business, wanted to buy.
Key Figures
Anthony J. Scotti was founder, chief executive, and the company's public face, taking it from record promotion through the LBS merger to the Pearson sale. Ben Scotti led the records side as executive vice president of that division. Syd Vinnedge, co-founder and senior executive vice president, had the longest afterlife in the business: he remained with the successor companies for years and served as executive producer of The Price Is Right for the first several years after Bob Barker retired in 2007. Myron Roth, a former MCA Records and CBS Records executive, joined as president and chief operating officer in January 1991 during the All American Communications merger.
Henry Siegel, who had founded LBS, became president after the 1991 merger and led the company during the early Baywatch expansion, with his brother Paul Siegel running international markets. Both left in 1994, Siegel amid the cancellation of Acapulco H.E.A.T., to form SeaGull Entertainment. Larry Lamattina, former chairman of Fremantle, then became president and chief executive. The succession, founder to LBS operator to formats executive, mirrored the company's own shift from showmanship to library management.
Ownership and Corporate History
All American was independent and publicly traded for most of its life. The 1991 stock-swap merger with Scotti Brothers Entertainment Industries created All American Communications as the parent, and the LBS asset acquisition later that year made it a leading syndicator. In July 1994 it acquired an interest in Fremantle International from Interpublic. In October 1995 it bought 50 percent of Mark Goodson Productions, producer of The Price Is Right, Family Feud, and other classic game shows, and in April 1996 it bought the remaining 50 percent, gaining full ownership of the Goodson library. The Orbis acquisition followed in 1996.
In 1997 Pearson plc bought All American, and the company became Pearson Television's American division, operating for a time under the hybrid All-American Fremantle identity through its Talbot Television international arm. The All American name was retired in 1998, when the business was renamed Pearson Television North America. When Pearson Television merged with CLT-UFA in 2000 to form the RTL Group, the production business became FremantleMedia in 2001, shortened to Fremantle in 2018. The record label had been sold separately to Zomba's Volcano Records in 1997.
Notable Work
Baywatch dwarfed everything else in the catalogue. Cancelled by NBC in 1990, it ran in first-run syndication until 2001, reached audiences in more than a hundred countries, made international stars of David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, and spawned the spin-off Baywatch Nights and a later reunion film. Its success also distorted the company: attempts to repeat it, Acapulco H.E.A.T., cancelled after half a season in 1994, and the police drama Sirens, which lasted one season, left All American fighting a reputation as a one-show company even as its library business boomed.
The rest of the slate was substantial. America's Top 10 ran for years as a syndicated music institution. Family Feud, whose rights came through LBS and Fremantle, returned repeatedly under All American distribution. The Goodson library brought Match Game, To Tell the Truth, What's My Line, and the American and foreign versions of The Price Is Right. Talk and entertainment programmes included The Richard Bey Show, which All American took national from WWOR before cancelling it in 1996, the Howard Stern television show, and the short-lived Arthel and Fred in 1997. Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad showed the company chasing the Power Rangers audience with DIC. Few independents could claim a hit drama, a hit music show, and the world's best-known game-show formats at once.
Legacy and Current Status
All American Television was defunct as a name by 1998, but its assets never left the market. Fremantle today holds the rights to the All American and LBS libraries, the Fremantle International game-show library, and the Orbis talk-show library, and it continues to produce The Price Is Right and Family Feud and to license Goodson formats worldwide. A Fremantle-developed Baywatch remake was reported in development in the 2020s, nearly half a century after the Scotti Brothers' first television show.
The company's legacy is the demonstration that syndication rights, patiently accumulated, could be worth more than production itself. All American did not create Baywatch, Family Feud, or The Price Is Right. It recognised cancelled or undervalued properties, bought the rights, distributed them better than their previous owners had, and assembled them into a library a global group would pay for. That rights-trading model became the template for the modern formats industry.
