The Video Archive, Vol. 1

Our family bought its first VCR in April 1985. To me, being able to watch movies on it was only half the fun. It was the ability to record stuff that really got me interested. Over the next 25 years or so, I recorded a lot of stuff. I think by the time it was all done I’d filled all or part of more than 300 VHS tapes. My interests were (and are) eclectic, so there’s a lot of everything on these tapes; other times, I used the machine’s timer or I’d just leave the machine going overnight, and I ended up getting a lot of extra stuff as a result.

A few years ago I transferred all the tapes I could to DVD. From time to time, I’ll pull a disc from the archives, go through it, get some screen captures and make some snarky observations. And for this first installment, why not go back to the very first tape to go through the machine? Over the years it got re-used a lot, so there’s no through-line to what we’ll find, but it’s an interesting crazy quilt to look through. So, here we go.

There’s a somewhat muddy report from Nightline, reported by Ken Kashiwahara, about assault weapons. I got this screengrab for the vintage WLOS-TV ident, obviously.

Then a report from the CBS Evening News about Clint Eastwood’s run for mayor of Carmel-By-The-Sea.

And then some of the Dec. 15, 1984 Saturday Night Live, hosted by Eddie Murphy. He gives his thoughts about the dolls and action figures available at Christmas…

…and there’s also a favorite sketch, in which Bishop Desmond Tutu and Doug Flutie are guests on the same talk show. Tutu accidentally breaks Flutie’s Heisman Trophy and tries to repair it, and it…doesn’t go well. It’s a hoot.

A vintage ID for WYFF-TV! The “arrow” 4 and the Proud N, all vintage goodness, along with a promo for the syndicated version of Happy Days.

Sundays used to mean the fishing programs. You could watch the larger-than-life Roland Martin on another channel, or wait around until 12:30 for Championship Fishing With Virgil Ward on Channel 7. (“From the lakes of northern Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico….”) But my brother the outdoorsman was a big fan of Bill Dance, whose low-key demeanor hid a goofy sense of humor.

I loved this commercial. It made the Daiwa MagForce reel seem like the coolest thing ever. My brother ended up buying one, likely because of seeing this ad so often.

Why is Bill Dance showing us all this airline-supplied footage of a Delta 727?

Why, it’s because his special celebrity guest this week is the Lovable Lush himself, Foster Brooks! And they’re going fishing together. Bill picks him up at the Memphis airport. It sure looked different in 1985 compared to how it looked when I was there in 1998, when it was a huge hub for Northwest Airlines. (And since its de-hubbing after the Delta merger, it’s been modified yet again.)

But not all is fun and games at WYFF-TV. One Sunday night in 1985, a fire broke out in the station building. While they were able to stay on the air, their ability to originate local programming took a hit. The next day, the noon news originated from the front yard.

A glimpse of the damage inside gives you an idea of what they were up against.

Fortunately, some other stations in the market pitched in to help keep them going.

General Manager Doug Smith joins Kenn Sparks at a somewhat worn anchor desk to give an update on how the station is doing. It’s awkward when you are your own top story.

Lunch is delivered while the program’s on the air, much to Kenn’s bemusement. At one point he jokes that they considered calling the noon newscast Brunch With Kenn. Kenn Sparks was a cool cat as it was, and is at the top of my list of best local newscasters ever, but it’s impossible to overstate the aplomb with which he handles this most unorthodox newscast. He’s always in command, but can still find ways to roll with the weirdness of the moment. It’s a master class and it’s beautiful to watch.

They’re back inside for the 6 p.m. news (which was handy, as I recall there were storms in the area that evening; at points you can detect weather-related interference on the recording). Carl Clark and Carol Anderson are in an obvious temporary studio. The audio’s not the best. There are lags in rolling the stories. But they’re still going. It’s what you have to do.

This grab from a story about the night before is of interest, not only because it shows the temporary setup they were operating from, but because of one very vivid memory I have. That Sunday night, we had my grandparents over to watch a movie with us. I seem to recall it was Hang ‘Em High. The television set didn’t have a remote control, and in those days, the youngest child was the remote control. I followed my father’s commands to rewind the movie and find something on television. When I punched the button for Channel 4, the picture was…weird. It was the familiar “arrow 4” and call letters, but at a weird angle and with strange lighting, and the sound of equipment running in the background. It was the scene captured by that TK-760 you see above, aimed at the logo on the van at top right. It startled me. We didn’t find out until later what had happened.

Charlie Gertz! He was one of a kind. He’d been a weather forecaster in the Navy, got into television, was a longtime weatherman for WTOP-TV (and was good buddies with Willard Scott at crosstown rival WRC-TV), and eventually came to Greenville. He had this marvelous deep, froggy voice and a somewhat monotone delivery that local radio hosts loved to parody (seriously, say the word “Saskatchewan” around someone who grew up watching Charlie Gertz). There was an ongoing promotion where you could win an umbrella that had “Charlie Said It Would” printed on it. His forecasts included an aviation forecast, which I thought was awesome. He also owned a local tavern, and one of the running jokes around the region was whether Charlie had a couple before he came to the station. It didn’t matter. He was awesome. I miss him.

The local newscast ends with a report on the landing of the Space Shuttle Discovery earlier that day, on a mission that carried seven crewmembers, including a French scientist and a Saudi prince. (I had no way of knowing that many, many years later I’d get to watch in person as Discovery took to the sky, let alone that I’d someday be up close with that great spaceplane at a big museum in Virginia.) 1985 was a banner year for the Shuttle program, and big things were in the works for the following year. Which leads to the next story, with a lot of well-dressed people on a stage in Washington:

Why are they there?

Looking at that now…oof.

Next is the last few minutes of the M*A*S*H episode “Life Time,” which always captivated me because of the clock in the lower corner. I didn’t fully understand the concept when I was a kid; now, through mature eyes, it’s a brilliant and gripping episode. For whatever reason, our ability to pick up WLOS-TV that night was ratty. It could have been my parents had the antenna turned that night for some reason.

There’s a bonus: Bob Hooper (longtime morning host on WESC radio) in a promo for Bowling For Dollars, which occupied the 7:30 slot until Channel 13 picked up the Wheel Of Fortune/Jeopardy! duo:

From November 1986 – because, remember, this tape got used a lot and I tended to save some segments and record over others – an Hour Magazine interview with Buzz Aldrin. I watch this and I’m struck by several things: Buzz was 56 when he made this appearance, and the Apollo 11 mission had only been 17 years prior to this moment. And now, Buzz turns 95 in a few weeks, while I’m only a handful of years younger now than he was here. eek.

Then there’s the special commemorating the 35th anniversary of Today, which NBC aired on a Saturday night in January 1987. Now Today is about to turn 73. Somebody I met once or twice gave this special a fairly thorough going-over some time ago, so I’ll let that post speak for itself.

And then there’s a few moments from an episode of the brilliant miniseries Fresno, which Carol Burnett and her wonderful group of friends did as a spoof of prime-time soaps. Somewhere there’s a tape on which my mother recorded the whole miniseries. I need to find it.

At the end is a segment of the brief “We The People” series CBS did to commemorate the upcoming bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. This segment features House speaker Tip O’Neill, an icon of the era’s politics, a dealmaker of the sort they don’t make any more.

There’s the tail end of another Bill Dance episode, with this blast from the past: an ad for Jim Walter Homes!

“And we save money by using a character generator typeface we got secondhand from CBS!” (If you know, you know.)

A very, very brief glimpse of an ad for Pale Rider, which was Clint Eastwood’s return to the Western genre. (Here’s the whole thing. I thought it was a cool ad, and I loved the music.)

An ad for Sherwood Chevrolet featuring the once-ubiquitous Dave Campo, whose out-loud style stormed onto our region’s screens in early 1984. (This will give you an idea of what he was like.) You loved him or hated him. I was fascinated with him.

One of the treats of summer vacation was getting to stay up late and watch Johnny Carson. It was a special treat when I could watch on the big color television in the den. One night I captured Johnny simultaneously spoofing Rambo and Fred Rogers, in “Mister Rambo’s Neighborhood.”

Sign of the times: John Palmer with a bulletin about the ongoing saga of TWA Flight 847.

Sometime that summer I’d caught a repeat of a “Best of Saturday Night Live” that had the “Buckwheat Shot/Buckwheat Dead” cycle on it. I was speechless with how brilliant it was and started taping SNL episodes in hopes it would get repeated. It didn’t recur that year, but my quest did yield a different moment of brilliance: the Christopher Reeve-hosted episode that featured Jackie Rogers Jr.’s $100,000 Jackpot Wad, which is just shy of perfection itself, and a reminder how good the “ringer” season of SNL could be.

The “Saturday Night News” segment also featured another favorite bit: Rich Hall’s hilarious spoof of Paul Harvey. Sometimes he was a better Paul Harvey than the real Paul Harvey.

Next is the August 5, 1985 rebroadcast of Living Proof: The Hank Williams Jr. Story. My brother was a huge Bocephus fan at the time and wanted me to record it for him. At one point earlier in the day we got into some kind of tiff and I threatened to delete the timer setting for it if he didn’t knock it off. We must have settled it, because there’s the recording:

It’s not a bad movie if you keep in mind its origins, which is that it’s a made-for-television movie produced by Procter & Gamble, and it’s going to bear the hallmarks of a made-for-television movie. Including the casting, which gives us John-Boy Walton as Hank Jr.

And, to be fair, he acquits himself well in the non-concert scenes. But in other scenes, he does his own singing. That in itself wouldn’t be that big a deal, except that in other performance scenes they use actual Hank Jr. tracks, and they don’t sound anywhere near alike. The movie closes with Hank Jr., his demons behind him, recovered from the mountain-climbing accident that nearly killed him, making a triumphant return to stage. Richard Thomas is in full Hank Jr. get-up: the clothes, the beard, the sunglasses and cowboy hat…and he looks like a kid going out for Halloween as Hank Jr. But I can’t harp on it, because given its limitations it’s okay, and it’s earnest, even if it also leaves a lot out, but it gives you an overview.

But this bit of casting really makes it, if you ask me:

Not to mention Clu Gulager! (And a small part played by a pre-stardom Naomi Judd.)

And since this is a Procter and Gamble production, it means all the ads are going to be for in-house products. Including the ads where the Ronald Reagan-looking guy presides over the replacement of an upscale restaurant’s regular coffee with Folgers Crystals!

In the closing credits, I saw this and thought it was a hoot. I read the book not long after seeing this movie, and…yeah, “suggested by” is an apt characterization. (And all kidding aside, it is a very good read that stays with you.)

Only part of this at the end before the next recording cut it off, alas, but here’s future Folgers spokesdriver Tim Richmond for Old Milwaukee. Little did the people at home realize just what a wild man Tim Richmond was in real life. He was a heck of a good racer, a first-class character, and we lost him much too soon.

The tape runs out with part of the repeat of the Nov. 10, 1984 Saturday Night Live, with George Carlin (Saturday Night‘s very first host!) making his return to Studio 8H. Alas, the tape runs out right in the middle of the great 60 Minutes spoof.