The original plan as CBS Sports announced was
- Super Bowl I will re-air for the first time half a century later
Forty-nine years to the day after Super Bowl I between the Packers and Chiefs went down, NFL Films is replaying a recreated version of the game at 8 p.m. ET on Friday, January 15th.
[...] The game originally aired on both NBC and CBS but all the tapes of the game "were either lost or recorded over". There was no "full video version of the game" until NFL Films fully restored the tapes, putting audio of a radio broadcast over top.
In an exhaustive process that took months to complete, NFL Films searched its enormous archives of footage and were able to locate all 145 plays from Super Bowl I from more than a couple dozen disparate sources. Once all the plays were located, NFL Films was able to put the plays in order and [stitch] them together while fully restoring, re-mastering, and color correcting the footage. Finally, audio from the NBC Sports radio broadcast featuring announcers Jim Simpson and George Ratterman was layered on top of the footage to complete the broadcast.
The execution, however, wasn't quite the spectacular that the National Football (hand egg) League's promotions hyped as NBC Sports reported:
[Continued.]
- NFL Network drops the ball with Super Bowl I re-broadcast
When the NFL Films announced that it had cobbled together every play of Super Bowl I and that NFL Network would show the game in its entirety, it sounded like a landmark achievement in sports broadcasting: The full recording of Super Bowl I was previously thought lost to history, and Friday night's re-airing would be a historic moment.
Instead, it was a major disappointment.
Although NFL Network did, in fact, show every play of Super Bowl I, its presentation fell far short of a full re-broadcast of the game. NFL Media had said the game would feature the original radio call of Jim Simpson, who passed away this week at the age of 88, but what NFL Network mostly showed was its own analysts, in their familiar Los Angeles studio, talking over the game. The commentary wasn't particularly interesting, didn't offer much historical insight or actual analysis of the game, and served only to detract from what should have been a big event for NFL Network.
Perhaps NFL Media thought it needed that kind of filler content because the NFL Films footage didn't include all the moments between plays. Maybe it would have seemed jarring to viewers if the broadcast had been full of stops and starts. But even if thats the case, the filler content could have been so much better. The good stuff--like an interview with Len Dawson, the Chiefs' quarterback in Super Bowl I--was far too brief. And the bad stuff--like the Los Angeles studio commentators informing us that The Beatles and The Monkees were the top musical acts in January of 1967, when Super Bowl I was played--went on way too long. I could listen to Len Dawson talk about Super Bowl I for three hours, but I don't want to listen to NFL Network analysts who had no connection to Super Bowl I talk for three hours.
There's a story that the Dumont Network, having been soundly beaten in the ratings by the offsprings of existing radio networks, had their workers load into trucks all the existing recordings of the television shows Dumont had done and those guys were told to dump them into the East River. NASA's official recording of the Apollo 11 landing has been lost. Just think of how much of our culture has been lost because of short-sighted managers, clumsy archivists, and horrible "intellectual property" laws.
Related Stories
According to Consumerist, the NFL has refused to purchase the only known recording of Super Bowl I. The game was simulcast on CBS and NBC but neither saved a copy of the broadcast. So the only known recording was done by a private individual on Quadruplex videotape machine.
According to The New York Times ,
Troy Haupt is a 47-year-old nurse anesthetist here in North Carolina's Outer Banks. He has a secret to reveal about Super Bowl I: He owns the only known recording of its broadcast.
CBS and NBC, which televised the game, did not preserve any tapes. But the copy that Haupt owns — of a broadcast that launched the Super Bowl as an enormous shared spectacle that attracts more than 100 million viewers — might never be seen on any network. 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.
Unless the league and Haupt make a deal to resolve the financial differences that have privately divided them since 2005, the tapes will stay in storage in a former mine in upstate New York.
Haupt's father, Martin, taped the game. Haupt never knew him. Haupt and his mother, Beth Rebuck, say they have no idea what he did for a living back then. They also don't know why he went to work on Jan. 15, 1967, with a pair of two-inch Scotch tapes, slipped one, and then the other, into a Quadruplex taping machine and recorded the Green Bay Packers' 35-10 win over the Kansas City Chiefs. He told his family nothing about his day's activity.
It would take another eight years for Martin Haupt to tell his wife what he had done. By then, they had divorced and both had remarried.
He was sick with cancer and handed her the tapes.
"He said maybe they could help pay for the kids' education," she said. And she put them in the attic, where they accumulated dust and intrigue.
Related:
NFL Has a Recording of Every Play of Super Bowl I and Re-Aired That--but....
(Score: 5, Interesting) by WillR on Friday February 05 2016, @05:27PM
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/sports/football/super-bowl-i-recording-broadcast-nfl-troy-haupt.html?_r=0 [nytimes.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by WizardFusion on Friday February 05 2016, @05:36PM
Simple, upload the first 20 minutes to a streaming site that is outside the US and threaten to upload the rest if no money is forthcoming.! :)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Lunix Nutcase on Friday February 05 2016, @05:42PM
Yes, that's a simple way for the guy to get sued.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2016, @05:43PM
So your idea is that he get sued for copyright infringement and face extortion charges?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2016, @05:50PM
In what way do you think that would get him around copyright infringement charges? Have you never heard of the Bern Convention?
(Score: 2, Troll) by WillR on Friday February 05 2016, @06:05PM
What you would need to do is find someone who can digitize the tapes (without damaging them any further) for a percentage of the profit, and can be trusted to keep quiet about the deal. Post 20 minutes on a dodgy streaming site. End it with a note to the NFL that if they want the complete recording, they just have to transfer $xxx,xxx in bitcoins to some address and you'll ship the tapes, and after they verify that the tapes are real they have to transfer another $xxx,xxx or you'll upload the rest of the game. Split the bitcoins, cash them out in small transactions, remember to never say a word about your tapes of Superbowl I. :)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2016, @06:10PM
Yes, because if there's one thing that the legal system lets slide, it's extortion.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Nerdfest on Friday February 05 2016, @08:28PM
They don't seem to have bothered with Microsoft with their sign an NDA to see the "patents" we'll sue you for. Maybe it's based on how much money you have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2016, @08:30PM
That's not extortion. There's no legal obligation that Microsoft freely disclose what they are going to sue you for before they do so.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Friday February 05 2016, @11:41PM
This guy could go to a counmtry with more reasonable laws and put it on the internet. Also perfectly legal.
(Score: 2) by Lunix Nutcase on Saturday February 06 2016, @02:15AM
Protip: Berne Convention.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday February 06 2016, @03:09AM
I was under the impression that there are countries that have not signed. Of course, he'd need to move to one which does take some of the fun out of it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by drussell on Friday February 05 2016, @05:45PM
In any sane copyright regime, this would be in the public domain by now, but....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2016, @05:59PM
If that recording is any good, man, just can't but shake my head for the greed of the NFL people. A god damn million, when they get that from a 6 seconds of commercial time.
(Score: 1) by MikeRo on Friday February 05 2016, @06:28PM
Easy solution:
1. Take tapes to a country that has copyright of 50 years.
2. Wait one year
3. Auction tapes.
Note: Needs to be done before TPP is ratified.
(Score: 2) by Lunix Nutcase on Friday February 05 2016, @08:28PM
1. Take tapes to a country that has copyright of 50 years.
That country doesn't exist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 06 2016, @02:33AM
The property rights to a copyrighted work or a copyrighted visual art work whose author is an institution, enterprise or organization shall be protected for up to 50 years from the moment of its publication.
-- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Copyright_Law_of_the_Democratic_People%27s_Republic_of_Korea#Chapter_3._Copyright_Owner [wikisource.org]
(emphasis mine)
(Score: -1, Troll) by AndyTheAbsurd on Friday February 05 2016, @05:57PM
This isn't the kind of news that I come here for. If I was interested in news about American Armored Wankball, I'd be on espn.com.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2016, @06:00PM
But it's sportsball season! Are you ready for some sportsbaaall!?!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2016, @06:12PM
As user drussel pointed out, this is really another story about the problems of infinity -1 copyright lengths instead of a sports story.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2016, @06:57PM
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=24079&cid=2605409 [slashdot.org]
I'd never thought I'd see the day when a geek site was arguing if football or rugby players are "harder".
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday February 05 2016, @07:57PM
Erf...why do people make comments like this? If you aren't interested in an article, then don't read it. Nobody made you click on it, you did it all by yourself.
I'm not a football fan either, but the Superbowl is well-known, even internationally. Plus, the first comment [soylentnews.org], about someone actually owning a recording of the first ever Superbowl, and being in a copyright dispute, makes the topic suddenly of interest to a wider group.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1) by dboz87 on Friday February 05 2016, @08:45PM
If you don't want to read a story, don't read it. Or are you one of those precious little snowflakes that thinks that the entire world needs to cater to your likes and dislikes?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2016, @09:14PM
Well I don't come hear to see stories analyzing the cultural and civil implications every time Snowden farts, but here we are and you don't hear me bitching about it.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday February 06 2016, @02:25AM
Yeah, everybody stop liking things I don't like!
You should actually read ESPN magazine one of these days - even to a layman the articles are more interesting than a lot of crap in shite rags like Wired, as one example the use of sensors and accelerometers to better determine whether not a Basketball player is flopping. [wikipedia.org]
Sports, like porn, drives technological advancement a lot more than gaming or fad programming frameworks do. Lead, follow, or get the fuck outta the way!
(Score: 3, Funny) by digitalaudiorock on Friday February 05 2016, @06:14PM
...and word has it that the offending employees went on to work for NASA...
(Score: 1) by MikeRo on Friday February 05 2016, @06:16PM
Is Soylent allowed to use the term "Super Bowl"? Have the rights to use that term been purchased? Could you be in for a massive lawsuit from the NFL?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday February 05 2016, @06:39PM
Aren't you glad there's a such thing as Fair Use?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 07 2016, @06:13AM
For now. Enjoy it while you can.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05 2016, @07:18PM
So on Sunday just play a Harry Potter marathon and call it a "Superb Owl" party. The true heroes of those movies are the birds anyway...
See NFL? We're not talking about your little game. We're talking about something far more important - ways to misinterpret movie trivia!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RedBear on Friday February 05 2016, @06:34PM
Remember that the cultural information that has been lost from the 20th Century and earlier eras is already just a drop in the ocean compared to what is being lost from the modern era. It's tragic that some Doctor Who episodes or moon landing footage was lost. But think about how many culturally and historically relevant things are already disappearing from YouTube every day for various reasons. You could run a university on the useful information that's been posted to YouTube at this point. Does anyone really imagine that all that content will still exist even just a hundred years from now? Only a small percentage of it will be carefully curated and archived for the future. The rest will simply... vanish. As if it never existed.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 06 2016, @12:05PM
R.I.P. Geocities.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday February 05 2016, @06:35PM
So... they should a thing on TV, and some guy didn't like the way they did it?
Is that... news?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday February 05 2016, @06:50PM
Showed, dammit. Showed.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk