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-- OriginalOwner_ [tinyurl.com] writes:

from the resurrecting-the-dead dept.

The original plan as CBS Sports announced [cbssports.com] 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 [nbcsports.com]

- 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.

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