We once watched a bit of filming of M*A*S*H at Fox Ranch (Malibu Creek St. Park) and the crew were all these vets from the movies. The lighting was very bright and very carefully maneuvered. I was impressed.
No, we did every season, and high-quality video transfers exist on all of them. Ditto with Laverne & Shirley and all the other shows of that era. My memory is that Paramount Home Video paid for the transfers, so it'd be up to Paramount TV Syndication (or Viacom or CBS, depending on who's in charge at the moment) to request copies of those transfers for local TV stations.
Are you sure they used those masters for all of the DVDs? I only ask because I've read reviews saying seasons 1, 5 and 6 of Laverne & Shirley look great, while seasons 2-4 look good, but maybe not remastered. I can't remember how they look, personally. They also said a season 5 or 6 episode of Happy Days that was used as a bonus on season 5 of L&S looks particularly worse than the Happy Days DVDs and the L&S episode it was connected to.
Many thanks for both the work and the info, it's good to know these exist. I just wish we consumers somehow had access to Happy Days' middle and later seasons in better quality. I want to say it's TV Land where I recently watched such shoddy prints of Happy Days' fifth and sixth seasons. If that network can spend money on original programming, surely the bigwigs there can afford to present a syndicated program in already-upgraded form. Would these require the network to pay a higher per-airing royalty rate or to sign a new deal altogether?
I have no idea. I can tell you the masters were created, but the Paramount staff was under a lot of turmoil in the 1980s and 1990s, and different came and went. It'd be up to the execs to make sure the correct master tapes were pulled and the right transfers were used. They were all done at the same time (1982-1984), so I have no idea why some seasons would look great and others would look terrible. I can tell you that different mastering engineers worked on different episodes, so in that respect, different decisions got made in terms of color, brightness, and so on. But all the archival elements were very clean 35mm interpositives, original 3-track mag tracks, and from what I saw, the shows were pretty consistent. If anything, Happy Days was far easier to transfer, because the show looked spectacular. Laverne & Shirley was always problematic, because they used cheaper labs and cheaper crews. I struggled and struggled to get a good look out of the latter show; Happy Days looked good right out of the box, with very little adjustment.
Hard to say. I don't know if the shows were redone at some point or not. It's not unusual for important films and TV shows to be transferred at least four times: 1) early 1980s analog composite standard-def video; 2) late 1980s/1990s digital component standard-def video; 3) late 1990s/early 2000s HD digital video; 4) late 2000s/early 2010's 4K digital. I've worked in all of these. There's not an old transfer I've ever done I wouldn't love to redo today, because the technology is so much better now. But I do still see some really old transfers still used all over the place. This is especially true for minor shows shot on film and cut on standard-def tape -- as far as I know, those were never redone. Dallas, Knott's Landing, and many 1990s sitcoms are high on that list. There are always exceptions.
Completely, yes, but color broadcasting was being done as early as 1973 in NZ (at least all the doco's over here say that, even a recent one from last week), although as you say, we didn't go full color till '75.
I always say, "the U.S. technically had color TV in 1953, but nobody really saw it on a mass-market level until the mid-to-late 1960s." Big revolutions like a change to color take a long time to implement. Even though analogue broadcasting ceased in the U.S. back in June 2009, we still have tons of standard-def content on American television. I think it looks like crap, particularly for old syndicated shows that have never been properly mastered. I'm angry that the content holders don't want to invest in preserving their own content and won't spend the money to convert everything they have to at least HD 1080, if not an even higher-res format.
When "M*A*S*H" was remastered about 10-15 years ago before the dvd's came out, it was reported that HD transfers were made for future use...I wonder why we've never seen them.
As far as I know, very little HD remastering was done prior to about 1999. The handful of things that were remastered look terrible, because the equipment was so bad back then. To my knowledge, M*A*S*H was never transferred in HD, but it should be.
Can you recommend some dvds of classic tv shows shot on film? I would like to have some for the collection.
Seinfeld has been out on DVD for years. Not sure if the Blu-rays ever came out. <checking> No, still not shipped. Interestingly, Friends -- the first film show I know of shot in 16x9 -- is out in Blu-ray.
Funny: I Love Lucy looks horrible on KTTV Los Angeles... in the city in which it was shot. I'm stymied as to why the local station doesn't care, and why Viacom doesn't police the stations that air their content.
I still miss the fancy curly-cue artwork they used to use on the letterbox borders on the credits back then. As I was a little kid, I obviously had no clue as the technical reason behind the practice, but since it seemed like every film I saw on TV growing up had it, I just thought it was a normal part of the film making process for some reason (to draw attention to the credits, I assumed).
"I have no idea why Viacom is run so poorly that they can't send TV stations and cable channels the exact same master tapes used for I Love Lucy on home video" well that would mean less sales for there overpriced dvds
I continue to be sad and disheartened by how Viacom, CBS, and Paramount ignore their great history. I may have mentioned this before, but over a year ago, they let go their Vice-President of Restoration and their VP of Technology, both of which were hugely involved in maintaining their film and tape archive and libraries. To me, it's clear all they care about is the movies done today and in the last six or seven years -- not the vast 100-year history of the studio and network.
God, even Sumner Redstone can't be that stupid! They'll just keep the stuff on old, dusty shelves and let all the emulsion continue to turn to dust and the oxide disintegrate...
Geez, it sucks but very common. Hey, Marc, you want to swing by and get your stuff? I can leave it on our front porch for you.....
