In recent weeks, with NFL playoff fever at a high pitch, I’ve been hearing mention of the lost footage of Super Bowl I, foolishly taped over by the networks which aired it due to lack of storage space. Occasionally, that mention is accompanied by “if a full copy ever turned up…”. For example, the wikipedia article on Super Bowl I says “Television and sports archivists remain on the lookout.”
Is there any possible way for this to happen? Consumer video recording devices certainly didn’t exist back then. Obviously CBS and NBC, which had the original broadcast rights, are dead-ends. Were there any other TV camera crews known to be present? Was home-movie taking simple enough, or stadium security vis-a-vis video rights lax enough, that it’s possible someone in attendance might have filmed it?
My question, in a nutshell: is there any realistic hope that a complete recording of Super Bowl I might turn up somewhere? Or when football afficianados say things like my above quote it’s just wishful thinking, but no realistic way that it might happen.
I’d say there’s a chance. I’ve seen recordings of 30-year-old concerts turn up seemingly out of nowhere, so it’s not impossible there’s footage of SB1 out there. If it’s something that was officially recorded and nobody can find it, I think more possibilities have probably been eliminated.
There’s always a chance that technology can be invented that can extract the original footage from the memory of a viewer. But whether it will be invented before the last viewer dies…
I seem to recall that not too long ago a few 40-year-old episodes of Doctor Who, which had suffered a similar fate in the '70s, were recovered from a collector who somehow came upon some second-generation copies of them.
So, chances are there’s footage of the game hiding in someone’s closet or garage somewhere and the owner doesn’t even know they’ve got it.
Well, that old “Up the Butt, Bob,” footage from the Newlywed Game turned up decades after the show first aired (and after years of Snopes insisting that it never happened) so it’s always possible that someone might have a copy of Superbowl I stashed away somewhere.
What about possible armed forces tapes that were sent overseas? I believe, although I can’t be certain, that some old shows and footage has been found in military bases.
They recorded over the broadcast, but do they still know where the original tape is? How many times was that tape recorded over?? Aren’t there techniques that can allow a Genius Techie (or CSI: Miami guy) to pull the copied-over data from the tape?? Like how when you erase over something, it doesn’t always line up perfectly and erase all the info and stuff. So a person can go in there and come up with some kind of workable copy of the Super Bowl. And then use digital editing and George Lucas to fill in the gaps in the frames???
The OP is obviously looking for tape of the first of three AFL-NFL World Championship Games which was relabeled well after the fact as Super Bowl I. The first Super Bowl was the other game the Chiefs played, against the Packers. The numbering system has been off by three since that time.
It wasn’t just Snopes - IIRC several formerly “prominent” people on here refused to believe it was real, and even after it surfaced some refused to admit they had ever claimed it wasn’t real… :rolleyes:
Good Lord, don’t even joke about that. “What do you mean? Of course Dan Marino was the QB of the '66 Chiefs. What made you think it was somebody else?”
NFL Films has footage of the game, and I believe that either TV audio or a radio broadcast survives as well.
The goal is to find the video of the first (and, for that matter, the second) Super Bowl.
One possibility: As a live event, there is the possibility that some broadcaster may have made a kinescope of the game. That’s the only way quite a lot of programming from the era survived.
I recall an episode of *The Adventures of Pete and Pete * where they pondered the chance of the original broadcast signals seen by those on a distant planet.
The kinescope possibility is likely the best hope. It is possible that someone working at the networks made a copy for themselves. However, with video recording technology being so expensive that the networks themselves re-used the tape, then likely it would have been too expensive for their employees also. To the networks, likely they would have seen this as having no commercial value at the time. It isn’t like many people (at least back then) would have wanted to watch a rebroadcast of a football game. The only value this would have been possibly as a part of TV history. However back then, the networks often didn’t save shows. And on the assumption the NFL had filmed the game themselves, the tape of the broadcast wouldn’t have been seen as valuable as a piece of sports history. Anyone who wanted to see how the game was played could use the NFL film footage.
Ok, but joking aside, could enough information be salvaged from the film using modern (or future) technology to reproduce that Super Bowl? Like the way the FBI can pull data off a hard drive even after it’s been copied over.
Am I making any sense. Could this be done?
