According to their US manager Nancy Lewis, the major hurdle for trying to sell PYTHON in the US before 1974(besides that American TV was as isolationist as Mainland Chinese TV)was that there were no NTSC versions of the programs, and current owner Time-Life couldn't afford to make them. Then the...
More things that puzzled me. NTSC versions of FLYING CIRCUS didn't exist before 1974, but PYTHON had been shown in Canada some time before then! Did CBC show earlier NTSC tapes that were subsequently erased? Were they B/W film telerecordings(many BBC programs went to other countries on B/W film...
Maybe a little off topic, but I remember watching SONG OF THE ISLANDS(1942)on TV a year before Fox's nitrate purge, and it was obviously not a Technicolor print, and it was really watermarked during the early scenes.
I tried to play my POPEYE 1933-38(?)set from Warner I bought in 2007 and it just said "dirt on disc". But there wasn't any dirt on the disc. Maybe I'll buy another one.
I remember gong to see Disney's SNOW WHITE in 1975, and I wanted to like it, but the image was so dark, drab, and grainy that I really couldn't. Same thing with 70s prints of GWTW, which were also really muddy and grainy. I did see a 16mm Technicolor print of Western Union, but I was puzzled...
I was a rabid fan of THE GANG'S ALL HERE in my teens, and was hoping to see more Fox Technicolor in the 70s. I'd have been bitterly disappointed if I'd known that Fox was in the process of ruining all their Technicolor films at that very time!
About the unedited NTSC versions originally seen in the US: would I be right in suspecting that those were from tapes that Time-Life had lying around since 1970, and that's why they had bits that had already been cut in the UK?