The Big Picture was an American documentary

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 television program

Television program

A television program , also called television show, is a segment of content which is intended to be broadcast on television. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series...

 which ran on ABC-TV

American Broadcasting Company

The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

 from 1951 to 1964. The series consisted of documentary films produced by the United States Army Signal Corps

United States Army Signal Corps

The United States Army Signal Corps develops, tests, provides, and manages communications and information systems support for the command and control of combined arms forces. It was established in 1860, the brainchild of United States Army Major Albert J. Myer, and has had an important role from...

 Army Pictorial Service, showing weaponry, battles, and biographies

Biography

A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...

 of famous soldiers.

After The Big Picture’s run on ABC ended, it aired in syndication

Television syndication

In broadcasting, syndication is the sale of the right to broadcast radio shows and television shows by multiple radio stations and television stations, without going through a broadcast network, though the process of syndication may conjure up structures like those of a network itself, by its very...

 for several more years on some local television station

Television station

A television station is a business, organisation or other such as an amateur television operator that transmits content over terrestrial television. A television transmission can be by analog television signals or, more recently, by digital television. Broadcast television systems standards are...

s well into the early 1970s.

Production

The half-hour weekly program featured famous or before-they-were-famous actors and actresses in quality productions, filmed on the Astoria stages. The host and narrator was Master Sergeant Stewart Queen. In the 1950s, the series was shot on 35mm black-and-white negative, but by the end of the 1960s, it was using 16mm color negative.

From the official government catalog: "THE BIG PICTURE is the official television report by the U.S. Army to its members and to the American people. Subject matter for episodes ranges from historic moments in the Army's proud history to up-to-the-moment coverage of current actions and accomplishments."

On DVD

The National Archives and Records Administration

National Archives and Records Administration

The National Archives and Records Administration is an independent agency of the United States government charged with preserving and documenting government and historical records and with increasing public access to those documents, which comprise the National Archives...

 has made individual episodes of The Big Picture available via Amazon. Episode DVDs can also be copied for free by visitors to NARA's College Park, Maryland

College Park, Maryland

College Park is a city in Prince George's County, Maryland, USA. The population was 30,413 at the 2010 census. It is best known as the home of the University of Maryland, College Park, and since 1994 the city has also been home to the "Archives II" facility of the U.S...

, facility. And many complete episodes and clips have been posted on YouTube

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

.