[QuadList] 1966 Brigadoon question

[David Perrussel]

It's interesting that this subject has been brought up on this forum.

I too am aware of the helical scan version on YouTube and at archive.org

Back in 2004, I looked up the listing on the Intenet Movie Database 
(IMDB) about Brigadoon found the E-mail address for the audio engineer 
for the show.

I asked him about the availability of the original tape and why it 
hasn't been shown since the late 1960s.

Here is his reply:

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Hi David,

I'll answer your questions as best I can.

The original was shot on video tape.

It was shot in color.

What happened to the original tape was this: The show was shot at CBS 
but was to be aired on ABC. Jim Brady was the CBS tape editor and he was 
under the gun to get it ready for air. Keep in mind that in those days 
all the tape editing was done by physically cutting the tape, then 
splicing it back together after eliminating the unwanted portion. Also, 
the video tape of that era was two inches wide and the audio track was 
offset from the video track, making editing quite difficult. To say the 
least, it was a very time-consuming process and I know for a fact that 
Jim had hundreds of physical cuts to make in the program and he got very 
little sleep during the time he edited the show. To the best of my 
recollection, he worked 20 and more hours per day for at least two weeks 
to get it ready for air. I went down to the video tape department 
several times to see Jim and believe me, he was walking on his knees by 
the time he was finishing up. He just completed the final edit about two 
hours before air time, and didn't even have time to make a back-up copy, 
he sent it directly over to ABC and they slapped it on a tape machine 
and played it. They could have easily made a back-up copy as it was 
aired, but they did not do so. After the show was aired, they discovered 
that many of the hundreds of splices had begun to fall apart (as often 
happened with physical splices), so they never bothered to make a copy 
of the show. Too bad, we all thought it was a fine production.

Hope this answers your questions.

Regards,

Ray Kemper

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So there you go. It probably had so many edits that the tape literally 
fell apart after it ran through the machine.

Figured the group would have wanted to see this.

Dave Perrrussel