Now to the topic of our lost television heritage...
Kudos to twoinchquad for accuracy in his earlier post.
Here's a thorough overview of the state of TV archiving, including specific information from the big 3 networks and studios:
http://www.loc.gov/film/tvstudy.htmlRead this for more discussion of CBS and ABC news archives, as well as technical information about tape preservation and restoration (Kitty Carlisle Hart is part of this discusion):
http://www.loc.gov/film/hrng96ny.htmlEdie Adams "tells it as it is" here:
http://www.loc.gov/film/hrng96la.html. You'll love her story of the destruction of the DuMont library. " ... three huge semis back up to the loading dock at ABC, filled them all with stored kinescopes and 2" videotapes, drove them to a waiting barge in New Jersey, took them out on the water, made a right at the Statue of Liberty and dumped them in the Upper New York Bay. "
This site also includes statements from all the major studios, as well as a history of video recording. "... The Ampex VR-1000 was introduced in Chicago at the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters Conference on April 14, 1956. At the NAB Conference, Ampex sold 90 machines at a cost of $50,000 each, for a total of $4.5 million, which wasn't bad for a small company in those days... The first on-air broadcast of videotaped material occurred on November 30, 1956, with the CBS Douglas Edwards evening news broadcast. The show was time-delayed by using videotape recorders in each time zone. And that's why the Ampex marketing people had a limited vision of how many tape recorders would be sold. They thought it would only be used for time delay, not for anything else."
And the site has the story of the Goodson-Todman shows and CBS' "Jurassic Park". "CBS entered into a contract with Mark Goodson Productions to transfer their entire library of approximately 34,000 programs from their current formats, which consisted of 16mm kinescopes, 2" and 1" videotape, to serial digital betacam format... Over 34,637 shows were transferred. Approximately 2700 of these programs originated on kinescope. The rest were transfers all from videotape originals. None of the tapes in the Goodson collection had been stored in what anyone would call "proper" videotape storage environments. They were basically stored in "furniture" warehouses where the temperature and humidity changed along with the weather. There was even a rumor that about 8,000 of the tapes were stored on pallets covered in black plastic, on the back lot of one of the other studios in town, for several years."
Somewhere I also have a list of what specific shows are stored in the Library of Congress. But that must wait for another day. ;-)
Randy
tvrandywest.com
