Tonight Show "Vault" Series-Some Thoughts (1 Viewer)

[David Rain]

I'm shocked that people are still complaining about changed/missing theme songs. This has been going on for years. And wasn't TTS theme replaced on other releases?

Not a dealbreaker for me. Some people are never happy.

 

[AndyMcKinney]

I just spotted this on the Carson website blog, in response to a comment asking about new releases:

Stay tuned here for news on new releases coming later this month.

So, looks like by the end of September (or early October) there might (finally) be some news of a new DVD release that isn't just a re-packaging.

 

[Jack P]

It's long overdue. Great as the Antenna reruns have been burned, I have been going through burnout from them (last weekend was the first time in six weeks I recorded any) and would like to some "uncut" episodes in the sense that if there's a music guest it won't be hacked out (and the music issue I'd note is why no episode with a "Stump The Band" sequence ever appears on Antenna!) and dare I hope perhaps for a couple extant NY episodes??

 

[Neil Brock]

It's long overdue. Great as the Antenna reruns have been burned, I have been going through burnout from them (last weekend was the first time in six weeks I recorded any) and would like to some "uncut" episodes in the sense that if there's a music guest it won't be hacked out (and the music issue I'd note is why no episode with a "Stump The Band" sequence ever appears on Antenna!) and dare I hope perhaps for a couple extant NY episodes??

I have a bunch of the Antenna episodes on my hard drive but haven't looked at them yet. Can you briefly go through what they are like and how hacked up they are? Are they worth keeping, in your opinion? I have a friend who is a major talk show fan and I know he isn't bothering to record them.

 

[Jack P]

THey are certainly worth keeping because ultimately a typical Antenna show is about 85% intact at least and maybe as high as 90% sometimes and for those of us who grew up on packaged things like "Carson's Comedy Classics" that's certainly an improvement (some shows have aired that originally had short segments on Carson's Comedy Classics). The things that are missing always are:

1-We never get to hear Ed's reading of the guests because they use a single version of the theme and a standard thing to list the guests (modeled after a late 70s type graphic/font they would use). They only dial Ed's voice back in for "and now here's Johnny."

2-Unless the music guest is performing something in public domain we never hear them perform. There will always ben a jump to when they first come over to the couch after performing a song.

3-Intro music for a guest is sometimes altered/replaced or covered over.

4-End credits are only occasionally left in (depending I suppose on if the band was playing over it).

These are worth having and building up a core group to get many episodes. It's just that after you do a hundred plus or so, you will suffer from burnout IMO and not feel a need to keep doing it every night. But if you have none, then get started and enjoy!

 

[John Karras]

You'll also never hear a note of music coming back from commercial breaks. "More To Come" bumpers are silent until the band stops and the audience applause begins.

In the ones that I've sampled: at the final break, if a guest is still talking as the piano starts tinkling to signal a break, their conversation has been chopped and there's a rather abrupt cut to a silent bumper.

As Jack P stated in item 4, end credits are chopped, which also means Carson's announcement of the following night's guests are gone.

Overall, the Dick Cavett Show run on Decades is far superior since it doesn't suffer from nearly the same kind of hacking and chopping.

 

[Jack P]

Some of the time, I have heard Johnny read off next night's guests and sometimes end credits do run and it may depend on whether the band was playing a number or something more generic, On 80s shows that had the "Carson Productions" card at the end, they have replaced the two second music used originally with another one.

And one thing you will NEVER see on these reruns BTW is a "Stump The Band" segment. Plus, I don't think they'd ever run an "Edge of Wetness" spot because of the constant soap opera type music that would play under that.

 

[Neil Brock]

These are worth having and building up a core group to get many episodes. It's just that after you do a hundred plus or so, you will suffer from burnout IMO and not feel a need to keep doing it every night. But if you have none, then get started and enjoy!

Thanks. I'm only interested in and bothering with the 90 minute ones on the weekend that are pre-80s. Anything from after it went to one hour isn't of interest to me.

 

[Jack P]

One other music edit we always have to endure. Whenever Johnny would have a monologue-bomb moment, the band would sometimes start to do an impromptu performance of "Tea For Two" and Johnny would dance. Now that gets covered with nonsensical gibberish sound when that happens.

I've stopped recording 80s shows outright (I have more than enough from original broadcast) but there are some shows that yielded some gems like the great Shelley Winters-Annie Potts "reunion" moment.

 

[AndyMcKinney]

Well, the Carson website has announced that new release they hinted at before. It's called Johnny's Animal Experts.

The bad news is that it is definitely not complete shows. They have provided an explanation here:

We’ve had the eight episodes included in this collection on our radar for release for a long time. However, they all contained a number of musical performances or a couple of technical difficulties which prevented their release as Full Shows. Therefore the shows included in this collection were most likely not going to ever be released and would’ve remained in the Vault, until now. We’ve edited these eight classic episodes with the fans of The Vault Series in mind and have created an exclusive collection that will only be available at JohnnyCarson.com. Each show contains the opening, the Monologue, the Desk segment or Sketch that night, the full Animal Expert segment, and any other highlights from the evening. So we hope you Carson fans will check it out. We’ll have more details about the contents of the collection next week.

So, not complete shows, but as they said, music performance licencing costs would have kept them from being released complete anyway, so, I can understand.

Wish they'd, at the very least, release some more complete shows as downloads if they're not going to be doing too many DVDs these days.

 

[Jack P]

I'm already getting and accepting compromised material in the Antenna reruns because that's free. For this stuff where there is an expectation of money, the answer is NO SALE.

And I'll be honest, of all the elements of Carson that have been beaten to death the most, animal segments top the list.

 

[LouA]

I'll still probably get this . It's worth it for the other segments. I buy these shows mainly to see Johnny , even though complete shows would be better yet .
However , it's amazing to consider the number of classic TV show releases prevented by music clearance issues! I guess that the forces at work here would rather see these shows never released at all, than compromise on the music rights issues .

 

[LouA]

Just wondering: have we seen the last of the Carson Tonight Show releases?

 

[Jack P]

You won't see anymore DVD releases of Carson material. All you can get now is short extended material on the Carson YT channel (though they did put up the complete New Year's Eve 1982 show with Tina Turner performing recently). The clips have been good and that's really the best we can expect from now on.

 

[Sky King]

Hi all,

I’m surprised at the number of early Carson Tonight Shows that have popped up over the years on YouTube.
Supposedly lost episodes on videotape are being found with some being restored by DC Video. The quality is surprisingly good.
Every time I see an early Carson Tonight Show I can’t help but get pissed at NBC for erasing most of these shows. So much was lost.

John

 

[Neil Brock]

Hi all,

I’m surprised at the number of early Carson Tonight Shows that have popped up over the years on YouTube.
Supposedly lost episodes on videotape are being found with some being restored by DC Video. The quality is surprisingly good.
Every time I see an early Carson Tonight Show I can’t help but get pissed at NBC for erasing most of these shows. So much was lost.

John

What was the line in Animal House? Face it Flounder, you fucked up, you trusted us. That's what NBC told Carson (and Steve Allen as well, who thought his Tonight Shows were being saved). Unless these entities took control of their own shows, the networks couldn't be trusted to preserve them. Then again, when Steve Allen took control of his many later shows, he saved them on the basis of his comedy routines, not on how important the guest stars were.

 

[Jack P]

I do not remember specifically which forum it was, but I copied from it this interesting comment that explained what happened to the NY decade of Carson and that apparently it was the building manager in Burbank where the show set up shop after the permanent move from NY who was responsible for the destruction. It sounds very plausible that someone like this would have done it rather than some NBC VP who wouldn't have wanted to step on Carson's toes at the time.

I knew a longtime NBC videotape engineer who worked on the Tonight Show from the moment it moved to Burbank in May of 1972 to the time it ended two decades later in 1992. He told me that NBC/NY had shipped over the entire vault of 1960s tapes, hundreds of them, and crammed them into some space on a bunch of makeshift shelves on the first floor of the Burbank building. The building manager was unhappy about the intrusion, and made plans to scrap the tapes so that he could reclaim that area for more office space. My friend found out about it, told Carson producer Freddy DeCordova about it, and he stopped it. The tape engineer was in the union, so the manager couldn't fire him, but the guy was p!ssed-off about it.

About six months later (I think spring of 1973), my friend went on vacation. When he came back 2 weeks later he was stunned to find there were now 12 new small offices in the bottom corner of the building where all the Carson tapes used to be. He made some inquiries and discovered to his horror that the tapes had been hauled out to a landfill and bulldozed. (They couldn't be reused because by the 1970s, they were using a new 3M tape formulation optimized for the later VTRs and color TV.)

My friend made contact again with DeCordova, who hit the roof about it and had the manager fired. But the damage was already done: the shows were gone forever, and there were no backups. DeCordova swore the engineer to secrecy, and they agreed that for the most part all of the "memorable moments" from the first 10 years of the Tonight Show were already preserved on "Best of" anniversary shows. The chances of Carson asking for a clip outside of the anniversary shows were slim to none.

But a year later, that's exactly what happened. Carson asked for (I think) a 1968 clip of a minor star who later became much more famous. DeCordova had to break the news to his boss that not only was that show gone, but so were all the others. Carson went ballistic and said, "if I had known it was just a question of storage space, I would've gladly paid the $1000 a month for a warehouse down the street." But technically, the shows and tapes were owned by NBC, not him. Carson vowed that when his next big contract negotiation took place, he would not only got a big raise, he also got ownership of all the surviving tapes and all the rights to the shows -- past, present, and future.

 

[Jack P]

Some of the lost Carson shows from NY that have turned up have come from these sources:

1-The LBJ and Nixon Presidential libraries. Both administrations recorded shows sometimes whole, sometimes partial if they felt a political guest was going to be on who might say something controversial or worth recording for the WH media briefing summaries that would be prepared (These were the days when the show had that kind of potential controversy that largely disappeared after the show moved to California).

2-The "Obsolete Video" channel on YT which has unearthed a number of partial recordings from the 70-72 period including most of the 9th anniversary show (last one in NY).

3-It also wasn't uncommon apparently for civilian guests in the 60s to get kinescope reels of their segments of the program and family members have sometimes posted some of those on YT.

4-A large stash of condensed half hour audio only transcription discs that were prepared for Armed Forces Radio airings have turned up and old time radio expert Jerry Haendiges has restored and put out a couple dozen of them. These have included some guest host shows from the likes of Bob Barker, Pat Boone etc.

Going further back, someone on YT actually posted a 15 minute kinescope reel of Jack Paar's walkoff from the Tonight Show! But he was just showing it projected onto a wall rather than digitized. I synched his video up to my clear line-check audio of the original program.

 

[Sky King]

Hi all,

Jack Paar’s Tonight Show videotaped episodes were also destroyed.
Starting in 1960, The Jack Paar Show was videotaped in color and broadcast on NBC from 11:15 P.M. to 1 A.M. Eastern time.
Only black-and-white kinescope recordings of some of the shows still exist.
Another stupid move by NBC and I’m sure they now regret this and their great game show videotape destruction.

John

 

[BobO'Link]

In the 50s/60s/70s Video tape, especially quad tape (which was the primary format in those years), was very expensive. The reason it was used over film is that it's reusable which makes the ROI very good. If they really wanted to keep those broadcasts they'd have used film. Video tape is easy to use, easy to store, has good enough quality, and can be reused many times making it very cost effective. A single use is *not* cost effective and why programs produced on video tape were regularly wiped. It's partially a lack of foresight - but most producers just didn't see any reuse possibilities of their programs, whether sitcom, drama, or other, and you'll often find that even film copies of shows were destroyed due to that lack of foresight. A show like The Tonight Show, something that's highly topical, is one that's easy to understand being erased. Sure, you might keep a few for posterity but keeping them all? Nonsense... who'd ever want to rewatch those, especially in 5-10 or more years.

So... "NBC" *might* regret it but I'd bet not. There's not enough money to be made vs. how much it'd have cost to archive those shows for decades.