Unfortunately, I think there is something to that. I remember watching a movie with my then roomate many years ago. It was letterboxed, and he hated it. He kept saying "they're cutting stuff off the top and bottom!" Even after explaning things to him, step by step, (Look at the shape of a movie screen, look at the TV, they are different. When you see the movie taking up the whole screen, that's when they are cutting stuff off.) He still felt like letterboxed movies were cutting stuff from the top & bottom. I just gave up and let him bitch. I only own old 4:3 tube tvs, and I hate it when things are full screen because I KNOW I'm missing stuff. Real obvious during sporting events when you can't really see the score.
I thought I'd posted in this thread before, but I don't see it, so it must have been one of the earlier ones on the subject. 1) I just LOVE that we who care about the quality of our pictures, can now rake the stations we used to watch, over the coals for having crappy standards, and letting studios get away with whatever they wanted. I hope some of those former execs are hearing from their friends, "Some guy on a website is crabbing about your old station, and the way it looked"...and that hurts the current reputations of these stations as well. It's kismet. 2) I remember M*A*S*H running in my home town, Terre Haute IN, back when I was out of town for work; I'd come home, and it would be on, and geez, that was the GREENEST thing on television I'd ever seen! The prints must have been tinted to get that result - and who knows why. Vidot, would you happen to know anything about this print run? It would have been early 80s, even before the show's original run had ended. 3) I remember WTHI-TV always seeming to opt for the ugliest copies of Star Trek available, even though we'd seen way better copies from the Bloomington and Indianapolis stations at various times. WTHI seemed to have some sort of axe to grind with Trek; they would run it waaay late overnight, just to keep hold of it so their competition, WTWO, couldn't get it. In fact, they actually contracted TNG for a number of years, and NEVER ran it, just to deny viewers the chance to see it on a station that might have actually cared. 4) One of my early TV gigs was at KPVI/Boise (Nampa, actually); I remember our telecine being somewhere between an old Rambler and a 1950's Waring blender. Constantly needing upkeep, unable to keep a half-hour reel on-track without an engineer having to jump out of his seat before the film burned a hole in it. It was juuuuust awful. On the other hand, the rest of the sources were 1" tape, such a huge step-up in quality (all paid for by 3 or 4 years of PM Magazine budgets). Now playing on Ariel Stream: Brazilian Girls - Long
Heh, I never looked at it that way before but now that you mention it, KSNF here in Joplin, MO. seemingly used to do the same thing with The Simpsons back in the late '90s. It should have been a huge hit for them, especially because there was no truly local FOX affiliate in the area yet, so your only hope was to have a high-powered antenna and/or a clear night (or to have satellite, like we did) so you could pick up the FOX affiliates out of Tulsa or Springfield, MO., which would always be "snowy" at best. Here's a hugely popular show that many people in the area probably hadn't really got to see much of as a result so for many it could have practically been like discovering the show for the first time. And what did they do with it? Throw it on at 4:30 AM and sometimes even seemingly only if they felt like it. Theoretically it was supposed to run M-F, but it was also entirely possible to tune in on a Thursday and find an infomercial instead. To this day, even with ownership changes and often years of not showing it at all, they still have the local rights to the show and still try to bury it (12PM on Saturdays now), so it often doesn't get aired due to sports events anyway. Someone there must really dislike the show, or still just wants to keep the now-existing local FOX channel from getting it.
Well... but then there are movies shot in Super 35mm where when we transfer them in 16x9, there's no pan-scanning and you just see more at the bottom (but theoretically the same area on the left, right, and top). But even that is a compromise. I can think of a very big, major film I worked on where I wound up actually liking the 16x9 version more than I did the 2.40 theatrical version, but it's because I lived with the film every day for 6 weeks and knew every pixel of it, to the point where every shot was precisely framed. But the sad reality is, most of this stuff is puked out real fast by people who have no time, and you wind up with terrible visual compromises.
Those might have been from 16mm prints made by Deluxe (who we used to call "Color by Luck"), which were about four generations down from the 35mm negative and looked like crap. Combine that with a TV station with a crap film chain, and anything is possible. Paramount realized around 1982 that it was actually cheaper to buy a reel of 1" videotape ($100) than it was to get a 16mm print made of a Star Trek TV show (about $400), so for that reason, they had Modern Videofilm master the entire 79-episode run during 1982-1983. The shows looked dynamite, all done on well-maintained equipment, from untouched 1960s 35mm interpositives and mag tracks, and -- for that era -- they looked very good. I'd say it looked twice as sharp as the prints NBC network had in the 1960s. But some stations still hung on to the 16mm prints, and I think their contracts would've required them to pay a little more for the 1" tapes. As a result, a handful of stations continued to run the ugly syndication prints throughout the 1980s until enough people complained, they gave up. In fact, I think most TV stations threw out all their film chains by the early 1990s, because all the studios realized it was cheaper to syndicate their movies & TV shows on tape and satellite than it was to do it on film.
I got to spend quality time at our 4 affiliates in El Paso in the late 80s. Our high school journalism instructor was a former TV reporter and had a lot of connections, and we produced a 'video yearbook' with retired ENG gear in my Jr and Sr years. I recall actually seeing one film chain at the ABC affiliate, but it hadn't been used in probably a couple of years by that time. The other affiliates had scrapped theirs by then as well. The PBS affilaite, by far the lowest rent station (still running a couple of awesome Ampex Quad machines even) had a slide projector for bumpers and graphics and such, but no actual film chain. El Paso was a pretty cheap market, so if they'd moved past running film online by '88 or so I'd bet pretty much everyone in the nation had. I'm sure there were holdouts though. dan c
That doesn't mean it was FROM a laser disc. That is highly, highly unlikely. What is more probable is that it was from a laser disc MASTER, perhaps a D2, that someone pulled by accident. DVD masters from DigiBeta get duped and sent out. It still happens all the time. Has to do with non-TV people, who really could not care less, in charge of masters. Dan
I know what I saw. There's no mistaking a "Laservision" logo, and that would not be attached to any film unless it were from a LaserDisc. These particular showings had all the earmarks of being sourced from a LaserDisc, including a break-point at the end of a side. One time I even caught a glimpse of the LaserDisc turtle on one of these broadcasts. Harry
As I said, improbable, but not impossible. There were professional recorder/players at one point. I even recall a station claiming to have aired off DVD in the late 90's. The LaserDisc and related logos absolutely would be on the master. I have seen them. DVD logos, too. Sometimes the information is on the slate, as well. LD is approximate in quality to 3/4", if that. Cannot imagine it was too impressive over-the-air. I guess the station figured it was tons cheaper than a D2 or 1" Dan
Sort of on that note, but not so unexpected given the source, I've seen stuff on a local college station that's clearly running from DVD players - cheap ones at that, since the one I saw most often was an Apex - because sometimes you'd see the player's on-screen menus at the start/end of a movie or after a break.
Yeah, I swear I that at least one time the disc side ended and the ">Side 2" indicator appeared, just like on my Sony player at the time. Harry
Peggy Ligner, who IIRC worked at KVIA for a time. At least I think that's how she spelled her name. And it's been so long I can't remember if she used a different name for her on-air work. She was cool. dan c
Bob Furmanek and I mastered an official version of Africa Screams for the Lou Costello estate, from the best possible elements, specifically for laserdisc release. Within a year, KTLA in LA aired the movie in the middle of the night, and I saw laserdisc dropouts and the laserdisc opening logo. That tape was never, ever authorized to air anywhere. I'm convinced somebody dubbed the disc to 1" tape and sold it to KTLA without them knowing where it came from, and nobody checked it. It was all public domain, so nobody could sue, unfortunately.
Makes sense to me. I remember a :10 fee spot ad for a popular flashlight that ran during the Christmas season, complete with red and green models of the flashlight against a black background. Someone bulk erased ALL the copies, including the masters! What ended up airing was dubs from VHS(albeit back onto 1" spot reels), with terrible, smeary, noisy color, and head switching more than visible way up into active video and within the safe area. Looked AWFUL. It's "every penny saved" in TV. Dan
Tonight on AntennaTV, they were running "The Wild One," and much to my surprise, in big white letters on a blue background came: THE WILD ONE REEL ONE MONO for about 5 seconds before the movie actually started. It was clearly video-based, not film-based, but still, it was something you don't see very often these days.
Tacky. This is what happens when morons trust automation to run movies and commercials unattended on a TV station. Ya gotta check this stuff.
Very probable. I have an old VHS recording of Elvis Presley's 1968 "Comeback" TV special taken from PBS affiliate WTVS Detroit in the late 1980's. At the beginning of the program is this logo sequence: Either WTVS was playing back an old CED, or a dub from one.
Speaking of syndicated Star Trek prints, it should be known there are five known recorded versions of its theme song. The first one, which was scored during filming for "The Menagerie," had Loulie Jean Norman singing the lead melody over a mixture of flute, organ and muted trumpet but it was soon replaced by the version in which composer Alexander Courage played electric violin. This second version, which was scored during shooting for "The Man Trap," can still be heard today on "Where No Man Has Gone Before." (Note: an unrelated theme had been scored for the second unaired pilot, also titled "Where No Man Has Gone Before," which was soon abandoned.) Then we get to Fred Steiner's remix where the lead melody is played on a cello -- this version, scored during filming sessions for "The Corbomite Maneuver," "Balance of Terror" and "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" -- was most common and, in syndication, had replaced the electric violin version on all of the early episodes aside from "Where No Man Has Gone Before." LJN was brought back to sing the lead melody on the season 2 and 3 versions of the theme. ~Ben
Interesting! Did not know that about the theme. I used to watch Trek starting in around '76 I think on our local ABC affiliate, in afternoon syndication. Our ABC affiliate in Phoenix probably had the worst picture quality of the big three stations - indeed, it was worse than our PBS station - but Trek always looked alright. I think they must have had decent prints and a decent film chain. Our local NBC station probably had the best picture quality. They played Space:1999 starting in September of '75, which looked damn impressive. Sunday evenings as I recall, right before Disney I think. ITC syndicated it by having stations pass the prints around, which cut down on the number of prints they had to make. After the show's initial run ended our local NBC station ran it again Saturdays around noon I think for awhile, and then not again for a couple of years. Finally in the early '80s they played it one last time on Saturday afternoons - still looked very good. Then in the early '90s our crummy local independent Channel 5 aired 1999 late at night for a few months, right before the Sci Fi channel got the rights. I was shocked at how bad it looked. The prints were in terrible shape, focus was poor and their film chain was waaaaay too hot. I had a couple of episodes from that run recorded on videotape, but I think those are long gone now since I got the DVDs. I bought a couple of episodes on Laserdisc when they were released, and they looked pretty good. Contrast was a bit washed out, color slightly greenish, but not awful. Audio was really good. The US DVDs were a complete fiasco. They looked alright - better than the Laserdiscs - but the audio was terrible and the video was heavily overprocessed (for some reason they apparently ran the series thru noise reduction twice). The Blu-rays are spectacular though - I can't get over how good they look. Proof positive the broadcast chain of yesteryear was really awful!
You can see how some syndication prints look on old commercial breaks. The commercial look fine, video is ok--but then the show itself looks horrible. Charlie's Angels looked especially bad in syndication, it's like they were playing the episodes from a school projector. There's an extended commercial on YouTube from circa 1977 that shows how bad My Three Sons looked in syndication. These were the later shows so there's was only about 5 years between the show and syndication print. it's amazing how bad it looked.
That's a great analogy! Yeah, that's exactly how a lot of stuff in syndication looked. The Streets Of San Francisco comes to mind. Or Doris Day's old show.
Ha thanks. I'm going to have to find some commercial breaks to see how bad the shows are. I just remembered, some commercials looked bad too...
I was watching a Spaghetti Western as a kid and I thought to myself, "Clint Eastwood is already tall and skinny. Why the heck would they film the movie this way?" I didn't know any better at the time.
