Funews was one of Detroit’s most bizarre early morning kid’s programs. The brainchild of WXYZ-TV’s vice president John Pival, Funews provided cartoons for the children while simultaneously giving parents the daily news and weather report.

 Pival called his new innovation Dual-TV. The process involved splitting the TV picture into three separate screens. The bottom right quarter of the screen featured ancient cartoons and Little Rascals shorts. The bottom left quarter held the current time, temperature and the weather outlook for the day. The latest news appeared across the top section of the screen.  The news stories were ripped straight from the station’s Teletype machine and posted on a small board in front of a telecine, a camera used in conjunction with a 16mm film projector.  The cartoons were projected onto the same board and reflected into the lens of the telecine camera. It was a pretty low-tech system, but it worked.

 Funews first hit Detroit’s airwaves in January of 1960 with Awrey Bakeries as the show’s first sponsor. It aired at 7:30 AM, right before Breakfast with Soupy. Pival originally had planned to extend the process to other time periods during the day, but those plans never materialized. Funews lasted until the fall of 1966, replaced by a morning talk show hosted by Bob Hynes. 

 Today, every cable news channel now uses a high-tech electronic version of John Pival’s multi screen process, but Detroit did it first, nearly fifty years earlier.