Naturally, the question that raises is how the other three from that era have made their way into collectors' hands. That's awfully early for them to have been home recorded, so you almost have to think that decent "master" copies must exist somewhere. I wonder why Fremantle (and Goodson before that) doesn't have them.
It's been rumoured that masters of
Password were used to record other shows (whether this is true or not, who knows). When a show was originally taped, wasn't there more than one master copy? Is it possible Goodson was re-using tapes with the assumption ABC was keeping at least one copy archived, and didn't know that they weren't being saved?
There are always scattered copies of shows that escape distruction. Series like
Jackpot,
Gambit, and more recently
Blank Check have at least one episode existing.
The "Password" & "Split Second" finales (which aired back-to-back) were indeed archived by a local station (for whatever reason), so they're aircheck recordings. Commercials included for those.
Unfortunatly my copies have commercials edited out - but they do have the "It's a brand new day on ABC" promos, which are cool.
If this was an aircheck, I think we have the answer why GSN squeezed the credits. Obviously there was an announcer announcing upcoming shows - but that never stopped them previously. On the end of almost every CBS show from the '70s the announcer said "stay tuned for....next" - and they left those in.
