Variety of old footage types in WGN show

[old_tv_nut]

WGN (Channel 9 in Chicago) just aired a two-hour retrospective of their "classic" children's programming, including Bozo the Clown ("Bozo's Circus"), Ray Rayner, and "Garfield Goose".

http://wgntv.trb.com/wgntv-prog-bozo...,5417529.story

The program included the widest variety of sources I have seen in one show; color tape with TK-41s and later cameras; mono kinescope recordings, some of them appparently made from old color tapes (you could see the banding in costumes known to be highly colored); and even some color kinescope recordings.

I recorded it off the Dishnetwork satellite feed onto a DVD recorder and simultaneously from a digital off air receiver onto another DVD recorder. The satellite feed version is long enough to contain the entire program, but may have some MPEG artifacts from the low bit rate that Dish uses. The off- air one went to a DVD recorder that I found out allows exactly 2 hours in the LP mode, so I lost the last minute or so of the program due to the clock being slightly early.

I thought they set the hue on the old tapes of TK-41 stuff a little toward green (reds slightly orange). Some of the TK-41 stuff went green on over-exposed highlights, but the camera registration looked good even in the corners (unlike the Howdy-Doody DVD). On some clips from the TK-41s, poor horizontal linearity was obvious when the camera was panned.

The color kinescope had an interesting and distinctly different quality, with the saturated colors apparently hitting the limit of what the film could do, "blocking up" in film parlance.

So far, I have not seen any plans to make copies of this program available for sale.