Have you seen?

[Marty TX]

Somebody posted the Carpenters 1973 appearance with Johnny Carson on Youtube. Carson promotes (and holds up) the first Singles album. Its so great to see the 23-year Karen acting so mature, playing the drums (and the tambourine!), and singing two renditions I've never heard. This was long before video tape....how was this recorded?

Sorry if you've already seen it....it isn't included on any of the video compilations I own....

Just thought you should know!

 

[Mike Blakesley]

This was long before video tape....how was this recorded?

Maybe it was a rerun or during one of those "Best of Carson" shows. They did a number of shows featuring music clips from over the years. These are just guesses - but there is an amazing amount of "old TV" out there, eh?

 

[Harry]

I think many of these kind of clips come from archives at local TV stations. Somebody knows somebody at a TV station who has access to the stuff that's sitting around in their local archives and gets them to make a VHS dub, then it circulates on the Internet or through copies of copies.

Local stations might have had to preempt Carson for something else - a late baseball game or something like that and air it at a later date, under their contract to the network. Then if the videotape escapes the bulk-eraser, it's theoretically preserved for as long as someone can locate the tape.

Or how about a huge Carpenters fan who happens to work at an NBC station in 1973, gets the engineers to make a dub of the show on whatever video format they had back then. He/she saves the tape until such time as it can be transferred to home video.

Also, home videotaping was theoretically possible way back in the '60s with giant home reel-to-reel video recorders that were monstrously expensive - but somebody out there had them and has preserved stuff long-thought lost.

Lot's of possibilities...

Harry