Comments on: Television’s First Sports Delay

By: John

John — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:21:52 +0000

I know. It is too bad that some AFL games weren’t kept. NBC should have kept a lot more football and baseball games from the 60’s to 1977 than they did, especially playoff games.

Speaking of the Heidi situation, NBC had another situation like this in 1975. On Sunday, November 23rd, they had the network TV debut of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory scheduled at 7:00 p.m. However, the 4:00 national game that evening, Oakland@Washington, went into OT, pushing back the start of the movie by 45 minutes. NBC learned their lesson from seven years before.

By: Eric Paddon

Eric Paddon — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:38:47 +0000

The next night on the “Huntley-Brinkley Report”, NBC showed the videotape of the final two dramatic Oakland touchdowns that East Coast audiences missed. Curt Gowdy had to do a recreation of his play by play calls for the clips shown.

Ironically that part of the game which irate viewers didn’t get to see is the ONLY surviving portion of the actual game telecast because it was shown the next night on the evening news (as the Vanderbilt Television News Archive has the newscast) while the original game broadcast, like so much vintage sports material done by NBC in the 60s, was erased and wiped out of existence.

By: RGJ

RGJ — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:20:04 +0000

There’s nothing CBS shows on Sunday that I watch regularly these days but in the past I know it was frustrating trying to figure out exactly when the 10-11PM show was actually going to start. Would it be ten minutes late? Thirty minutes?

There was at least one Sunday evening earlier this year when The Unit, usually shown from 10-11PM, didn’t start until close to 11PM and yet it still drew its typical eight or nine million viewers. That couldn’t have helped its renewal chances, though, because it was so often outside of prime time by twenty or thirty minutes.

As for Heidi being available on those cheap public domain DVDs, there must have been at least a half dozen listed at Amazon. Many of them, however, had reviews suggesting that the opening portion of the movie had been cut out for some strange reason.

By: Barry I. Grauman

Barry I. Grauman — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:57:34 +0000

CBS intentionally allows the NFL to let their games run over on Sundays, because they KNOW that “60 MINUTES” always follows it; no matter what the start time [in some cases, it isn't until 8:00pm(et) when "60 MINUTES" finally appears!], the network knows viewers will stick around for the rest of their Sunday night schedule after “60 MINUTES” (especially if there’s a profile of a football or sports celebrity included to keep sports fans tuned in, you can thank Sean McManus, president of CBS News AND Sports for that). That’s how CBS has been holding its own in the ratings on Sundays all these years….

By: Barry I. Grauman

Barry I. Grauman — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:49:12 +0000

…and would you believe it? That “Heidi” movie is available today, in “public domain”, on several “dollar DVD”’s, if you know where to look for it….now you can watch it, and NEVER have to worry about a football game delaying it ever again!