IDEAL Records, Discos Falcón and Sunday morning television.

This video clip is from a PBS documentary called Accordion Dreams. It aired on that station back in 2001, and it featured a lot of great conjunto artists like Ruben Vela, Oscar Hernandez, Paulino Bernal, Benny Layton, and Eva Ibarra.

I'm posting this excerpt that discusses the creation of IDEAL Records and Discos Falcón. I've written here before about IDEAL records, which you can find here and I plan on writing more Discos Falcón related material in the future. One thing I never realized before was that Falcón had it's own television program and that it seemed to be syndicated rather well. In the brief clips we see of Fanfarria Falcón we see "El Monarca de la Acordeon", Donna's Pedro Ayala and Los Dos Gilbertos. This show started in 1964 and lasted until the early 1980's.




A September 7th, 1974 issue of Billboard Magazine has some more information about this locally produced television program:

"To promote this line of Falcon artists, the company produces a 30 minute TV show titled "Fanfarria Falcon," which is shown over some 160 TV stations nationwide, including major markets of Chicago and L.A. The show is hosted by Mr. Falcon and is produced by Falcon a&r Director Jeanne Le Normann with the facilities of KRGV-TV, Weslco, Texas. Falcon is also releasing this year a series of LPs titled after the show and featuring the top stars that have appeared in the show."

At some point the name of the show changed to Super Fanfarria and Carlos Guzmán would take over the hosting duties. Some records indicate that the show was finally taken off the air in 1981.