"On the full-color network, NBC..."
Vintage William Shatner VO Promo for "The Conscience of the King"
- Thread starter Joanna McCoy-Kirk
- Start date
Fantastic find!
Very nice. I wonder where they found it as video recorders weren't in use for the public back in 1966 surely? 
JB
JB
Very nice. I wonder where they found it as video recorders weren't in use for the public back in 1966 surely?
JB
That's a good question. This thing is a b&w video tape of what had to be a color broadcast, which I think was originally shot on color video tape. So it isn't the network's copy.
My best guess is that a b&w, reel to reel VTR was used to record the broadcast, probably by a teacher whose school had the machine on hand.
That said, it was possible in 1966 for an affluent "early adopter," a rich hobbyist, to own a home-use VTR, if he was willing to shell out our equivalent of over $9000:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_tape_recorder
The Sony model CV-2000, first marketed in 1965, is their first VTR intended for home use and is based on half-inch tape. Ampex and RCA followed in 1965 with their own open-reel monochrome VTRs priced under US $1,000 for the home consumer market.
But that's a lot of money. I'm saying it was a teacher who wanted the preceding program for a class.
Yes, video recording equipment was dangerously expensive back in the seventies I remember as my school had one but we weren't allowed anywhere near it! 
Eventually most people had one in the next decade...
JB
Eventually most people had one in the next decade...JB
Or perhaps it was just a b&w backup recording done by a local station.
Mildred Trares played Edith in a 1966 TV movie version of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. This must come from that broadcast.
Thanks IMDB!
Thanks IMDB!
Also music by Bernard Green. That locks it up.
It was a Hallmark Hall of Fame production, which was a prestige program for many years, and George Schaefer, Dirk Bogarde and Ruth Gordon were some fairly big names, so an archive kinescope makes sense. The stills on IMDB are all b&w, too.
It also aired on the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor!
It also aired on the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor!
In 1966? I don't think so. A kinescope of that quality would require a specialized, expensive machine that would be owned by the network. A homemade kine wouldn't look that good, by a long shot. And the networks had been using quadruplex videotape for almost 10 years by 1966! Kinescopes were out.
So I still think the clip with Shatner's voiceover is a b&w video tape made from a color broadcast. Since NBC's tape of the movie was in color ("the all-color network!"), and since NBC affiliates would have no use for a b&w copy, what remains is for a high school or some such to have owned a b&w, "consumer grade" VTR, and a teacher recorded the broadcast to show in class. And that is what has turned up on youtube.
I'm sure you're right, I was not familiar with b&w-only videotape. The stills do have a video "sheen" to them, I don't know how to describe it.
I think what you're trying to describe is "halation," the blooming of light around bright objects on a dark background on older, B&W CRT televisions. Part of that artifact was the phosphor screen itself, and the distance to the glass. Since a kinescope is a film camera pointed at a video screen, such an artifact would be seen in such recordings. Another common artifact seen in kinescope recordings is the "inchworming" flicker of the video scan running up the screen. This was caused by the mis-match between video and film frame rates. Because of the scrolling titles and the blurry quality (or lack thereof) of the clip, I can't be sure if I am seeing video scan flicker or not. Is the blur from kinescope, or modern codec compression noise?
As Zap noted, quad had been in use for a long time by 1966. So what are we looking at? "Skip field" recorders were available at the time, which might account for the muddy resolution. Overall, why would somebody record this? It might be the tail end of the show that had been recorded, or stuff captured before the desired show. (Back then, you let recorders get up to speed. There was none of that "clean recording as soon as you hit the button" back then. Heck, there are even cameras today capturing video on solid state when you are not recording, so that when you hit the button, you'll have the few seconds of whatever amazing thing was happening just before your slow human reflexes got around to it.)
My father was a high school English literature teacher, and had a course built around sci-fi, instead of the more common syllabus. This was early '70s when Trek went into re-run. And my dad had the media center record "The Enemy Within" on one of the Sony AV-3600 series recorders. (Thus, the recording was B&W.) The first video I ever edited was on a Sony AV-3650, and I'd curse if I forgot to press the edit button before pre-rolling and trying to press the "take" button. (Sprained finger.) Those machines had the dull red panels, while the later VTRs with color circuitry had the teal panels. The red cover panels in the Death Star docking bay made me think of those old VTRs. ("TK-421, why aren't you at your post?")
In conclusion, I have no conclusion as to the source of the OP video clip. It looks like it might have been kinescope, but the arguments against that are perfectly valid. And the clip isn't clear enough to be sure. Some wealthy hobbyists owned some of those early reel-to-reel VTRs, and they were a common enough sight in schools and businesses in the late '60s and early '70s.
(If the changes in media technology seem rapid to us, imagine how they look to a Man From Earth.)
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