More surviving pre-1972 Tonight Show footage

This was new to me - 48 minutes or so of 1970-71 Tonight Shows from New York and Burbank. Pretty rough video quality, as it appears to be a low-res OTA recording off KNBC, and there's some tape damage.

 

Damn, I miss those days.....John M

 

Thanks for sharing!

 

That YouTube channel, in general, is a *goldmine* of extremely rare off-the-air footage of US TV from the early 70's.

Obsolete Video

 

How was someone recording OTA in 1970?

 

There existed home video formats in the 60's and early 70's (EIAJ), but they were not for the average consumer, so they were extremely costly.

 

Hugh Hefner actually had a staff member in his house recording 2" color tapes for him as early as 1966. So very, very wealthy people could record TV shows off the air. The guy who owns the only surviving recording of Super Bowl I was a TV station employee who recorded the show so he could see it later, and by accident the tape was saved and kept at his home. But the current owner and the NFL can't agree on a price. I agree with the guy that it's worth at least $1 million dollars; the NFL only thinks the tape is worth $30K.

Out of a Rare Super Bowl I Recording, a Clash With the N.F.L. Unspools

I think it's no coincidence that the surviving 1970 Tonight Show tape has Jerry Lewis in it, because Jerry very definitely had video recorders at home going back to the early 1960s.

 

"The N.F.L. does not want to buy the tapes and has warned Haupt not to sell them to outside parties or else the league will pursue legal action."


wow, so now the nfl doesn't even want to buy he tapes but wont let him sell to someone else? cold blooded

 

I don't think they can control the physical tapes, but they do 100% own the copyrights to the material. This is not the first time where one guy owned the only surviving film or videotape or audio tape of a show or film, but the studio had no copies at all. They have to come together and agree on some kind of mutual compromise so everybody profits.

The article noted that the guy did allow the Museum of Broadcasting to restore and digitize the videotape, and the show is available for limited viewing at their NYC location. So in that respect, at least the tape has been saved. Note that the NFL makes $8 billion dollars a year, so it's not like they couldn't afford to give the guy a mil or so for the tape.

 

yeah I don't get it....then they even withdraw their offer for 30k? if anything it would be a good promo (during superbowl halftime watch never before seen footage of the first superbowl ever, with commentary)

 

The tapes recorded in the early 1970's in Southern California, such as in the OP, were EIAJ. Notably, whoever made the recordings seemed to go out of their way to record commercials, which has led to speculation the tapes belonged to someone connected with an advertising agency. (The owner of the YouTube channel hasn't specified who the tapes originated with, if they even know ).

 

So basically you had to have the funds to be able to afford Pro level tv studio equipment. Regular folks weren't recording shows OTA.

 

I'd like to see Carson Entertainment Group release more NY broadcasts. Granted, only thirty-three complete shows exist, but there are amusing segments in the many partial episodes that do exist. For curiosity's sake, I'd like to see the earliest surviving monologue. Dick Cavett says Johnny bombed in his early weeks, but there's no video to substantiate that.

There are episodes of historical interest too. For example, UCLA has a partial kinescope of the episode recorded after MLK's assassination. Carson showed his appearance with Harry Belafonte there. Several years ago, there were NY kinescopes on eBay. One was a hilarious animal segment involving a great white shark, long before the Joan Embery days.

There are several NY-era shows on the bootleg circuit - mostly AFTRA kinescopes - dating to December 1963. The earliest extant episode is from November 1962.

 

Show's you how much they've diluted the value of their own product. Even they don't want to buy it.

 

Correct. Technically the first "consumer" VCR was the Cartrivision in 1972, but it didn't work very well and never really caught on. Sanyo's V-Cord hit in mid-1975 but also flopped. It wasn't until late 1975 with the Sony Betamax that the concept of the home VCR really became successful, and it became a big hit by the spring, when the first lower-cost Betamax VCR deck (no monitor) arrived in March 1976.

 

There was also the VX format (marketed in the US as The Great Time Machine) around the same time as the V-Cord and Betamax formats. I remember this format showing up at the local TV shop which also sold Curtis Mathes sets at the time. It had a black-and-white vidicon camera hooked up to it that had burn-in from some dolt aiming it at the sun...

 

Yes, the VX was yet another (as was Omnivision I and a whole bunch of "footnotes" in the history of home video). All were huge duds that went nowhere. At one time, my partner and I owned at least one of every single home video format -- including Cartrivision -- but the Great Time Machine was one that proved elusive, and we were never able to get one. We finally realized after 25 years, "hey, this worthless **** is taking up far too much room in the garage," and took it all to be recycled (or sold it to other collectors).

 

Most of the 9th Anniversary show, (October 1, 1971) the last anniversary in New York. Quality issues, but still fascinating...

 

Ooooh... with Carol Wayne, who had a tragic and violent end in the 1980s.

 

My friend Bruce in the same position - new old stock boxes filled with Quasar Great Time Machine II, Cartivision and other obsolete video formats.

 

Ooooh, let me know if he decides to sell one of the original Great Time Machines. (The later GTM II was just a VHS deck.)

 

Quite a mystery there, eh? Found drowned in four feet of water, no drugs or alcohol in her system and (according to the coroner) no cuts or abrasions on her body. Death ruled an "accident."

 

So, here's the deal with all of the rarities that he put up on you tube. I was the person who sent them to him to be transferred. A couple of years ago, I was visiting LA and stopped by the Paley Center to visit a friend. While I was with him, he took a phone call from someone and then asked me if I had an EIAJ machine, which I actually do. Anyway, he put me on the phone with the person and I then made arrangements to go over to his house and spend the day inventorying. He does salvage and had been contacted by the daughter of a guy who died that was a video fanatic. This person made arrangements to get all of the reel to reel tapes, which numbered 500 as well as 2000 UMatics. He also recorded on Beta and VHS but my contact passed on those and I learned they subsequently wound up in the landfill. Anyway, the tapes turned out to have been recorded on an oddball Sony color format, which was only on the market for a very short time as it was not an official EIAJ format. Maybe only a couple thousand of them were ever produced and who knows how many actually survive today. So, I had to try to find someone who could do the transfers and for a reasonable cost, not $100 or more a tape, since most had no labels and we didn't know what was on them. I found Obsolete Video, who offered to do it for a fraction of the cost anyone else I spoke to was asking. We drew up a contract with him, part of which stated that he was not to post anything online. Well, you see how well he adhered to that stipulation. We weren't too happy about that but considering that he did the work for tens of thousands of dollars less than anyone else would have, we didn't get too worked up over it. As someone told me before I made the deal with him, Obsolete isn't a trained engineer but more of an enthusiastic amateur. Could the stuff have looked better? Yes, had the job been given to DC Video, I'm sure it would have. But I didn't have a spare $50K lying around to lay out for it. The coda to the story is that earlier this year, after all of the transfers were done, the daughter picked up all of the reel to reels and donated them to an archive in order to get a tax write off. So the tapes still exit but they are now in storage similar to how the ark at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark was stored. Its too bad as I would have liked to have been able to pull some of the important tapes and get them professionally done. Oh well.

 

It was actually around less than a foot of water. And the person who was with her in Mexico when she died (and who left the country the next morning), was also the guy who was with Diane Linkletter, when she "jumped" out of a window, high on LSD. If you're with one person who dies mysteriously, its bad luck. Two? I don't think so.

 

Interesting.