Were syndicated airings of TV series always cut? (1 Viewer)

[Jeff#]

Channel 48 ?? I remember the station (which eventually went out of business), but when I first watched
Star Trek reruns in the very late 1970s / early 1980s it was WPHL Channel 17 that had them.

 

[Harry-N]

Before your time Jeffy, before your time.

These would have been in the early '70s. Ch. 48 aired STAR TREK in the early evenings following its network run. After they milked the airings they let the package lapse, allowing Channel 17 to pick them up later in the decade. I know when I first got a VHS recorder, Channel 17 was airing them, with those awful prints on their awful color chain. Sposck was not the only green-skinned person on the show on Channel 17!

At some point, and it probably dates to the TNG era, Channel 29 in Philly picked up STAR TREK, giving it, at the time, the distinction of having run on three of the Philadelphia independents.

It now airs through Viacom on Channel 57 in Philly, the CW affiliate, so it's now gone to a fourth station, fifth if you count the initial network airings on then-NBC channel 3.

Harry

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

My favorite Trek story from the early days of film-print syndication was one on WPIX, New York. I was watching an episode tht I had already seen several times, and knew well. When they came out of the commercial break after the teaser, the show started up somewhere in deep in act two. After the next commercial, they showed act three. And after the next commercial break, they put up the "Enterprise oribts a random planet" still card with the Trek logo and made the following announcement:

"Star Trek's mysterious Hallowe'en episode, "Catspaw", has been rendered even more mysterious by the fact that our engineers ran the film reels out of order."

Trek was doing very well for WPIX in those early 70s days, and Trek fans were already a vocal bunch, so I recall that they made some kind of scheduling concession to make up for the error - something few stations would do today. Can't remember now if they pre-empted one of the half-hour sitcoms that normally followed Trek and reran the episode from the start, of if they ran an extra sitcom episode that night to fill out the Trek slot and ran "Catspaw" after the regularly scheduled Trek episode the following night, but I know they did run it intact within 24 hours and didn't simply repeat it the next night in place of the scheduled episode. Can't do that sort of thing with film or disc.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Jeff#]

Is long dead Channel 57 back in business? I moved to southern California 5 years ago, so I haven't kept up on the Phialdelphia stations.

 

[Rob_Ray]

As Andy McKinney and others have stated, back in the late 60s and early 70s the syndication prints were apparently delivered to stations uncut and the stations were left on the own as to how and where to make cuts. Back in those days, for example, Ch. 39 in Houston would air "I Love Lucy" in tattered 16mm prints. Half the time, they would lop off about 2 minutes from the opening of the first act (often starting the show in mid-sentence) and half the time they would lop off about 2 minutes from the opening of act two.

My favorite edit was in the episode you may have seen called "The Great Train Robbery," (the train ride back to NY from California). After the mid-commercial break, Lucy discovers that the man in the next compartment has a gun and suspects he's a jewel thief. In one Ch. 39 airing, we came back froim a commercial break to hear Lucy breathlessly telling Ricky, "You better get out of the way of flying bullets!"

There was no attempt to make the cuts subtle but if you were a devoted fan and watched regularly, you eventually saw everything there was to see because of the way they varied the cuts.

 

[Harry-N]

Yes. Our station line-up in Philadelphia is:

3 CBS KYW-TV
6 ABC WPVI-TV
10 NBC WCAU-TV
12 PBS WHYY (Wilmington)
17 MY WPHL-TV
23 PBS/NJN WNJS-TV
29 FOX WTXF-TV
35 PBS WYBE
48 Christian WGTW
57 CW WPSG-TV
65 UNI WUVP-TV (Spanish)

Channel 57 first came on in the '80s as a subscription station offering PRISM programming to over-the-air receivers. It then switched to an independent as WGBS-TV owned by Milt Grant. Finally, Viacom ended up owning it and it's a sister station to KYW Channel 3. Both are co-located in new state-of-the-art facilities in Center City Philadelphia.

As for the Channel 48 airings of STAR TREK, I seem to recall them doing something similar, like starting the wrong episode and switching it by the first commercial break!

Harry

 

[RickER]

In the late 70s channel 8 (ABC) ran Trek at 1030 at night. More than one time they had the reels out of order. The old days of beat up film prints, ahh yes. Channel 23 first started as an independent in Tulsa, now a FOX station. They ran Space:1999 when they first started in 1980, first time we got the show. I remember they ALWAYS got a hair, lint, you name it caught in the projector. Sometimes you could even see a shadow of a finger, but most times they just stopped the show for a second to pull it out. They didnt edit much when they first started. I remember watching a movie on channel 23 called The Iron Cross. It had female bare breasts! Hey, 1981, and i was 18. Dont think i didnt do a double take to see breasts on a local Tulsa station!

 

[Garysb]

Something not mention is that today most syndicated programs are sold for cash plus barter which means the syndicator sells some of the commercials nationally and the syndicator keeps the money from the national commercials.
The stations download the shows from satellites. The shows are all edited with the national commercials in them. The station then inserts its local spots.
The stations, as part of their contract with the syndicator, agree to erase the shows after they air. Today everyone gets the exact same show.

Today older shows like I Love Lucy if still on local stations are probably all cash with no barter but shows like Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and Everyone Loves Raymond all are shown with national spots and are precut.

I remember back in the day that shows would sometimes be edited differently
on different viewings so that if you watched a show twice you would see most if not all of the show. I am not sure if this was because the shows were mailed between stations and different prints had different edits.

I know WSBK TV 38 used to request that films be sent to them unedited and they would show them uncut or make their own cuts. I don't know if they were able to do this with TV series.

 

[ScottR]

I'm afraid that ROOTS may have been taken from syndication prints for two main reasons:

1. The opening title has been changed from an ABC one to a generic one.
2. The episodes run a little short (I also read in a 1978 book that there was a longer version of, shall we say, Kunta's manhood ritual.)

 

[Jack Platt]

QUOTE:"My local UHF station ran syndicated "Brady Bunch" reruns for several years in the late '70s -- not only were they completely unedited with all bumpers, the first several episodes from the first season even included the original network "next week" previews! (Wish I'd had a VCR back then, since these previews are missing on the DVD sets.)"

Hi,

Question to the poster who posted this, did your station include the long lost "The Brady Bunch Will Return in a Moment," generally spoken by one of the kids, whom the story was about between the last commercial break and the credits?

I don't believe I have seen this since the first 1970's syndication cycle.

Jack