NFL Network will show Super Bowl I on Friday night, which should please and surprise anyone who thought copies of the game had been lost, erased or turned to video dust.
In resurrected form, it is a relic of the time before Super Bowl excess: a daytime game, contested in a stadium with swaths of empty seats, televised by CBS and NBC, and played by men of reasonable dimensions, at least by today’s standards. It featured the Grambling College marching band at halftime — and a bizarre second-half kickoff that had to be rebooted because NBC was late returning to the first one from a commercial break.
And it had a few Green Bay Packers on the sideline happy to see Fred Williamson, the loudmouth Kansas City Chiefs cornerback, laid out on the field and carried away in a stretcher.
But this is not an original broadcast from Jan. 15, 1967; no complete copy of either network’s production appears to exist.
Instead, it is a version stitched together by NFL Films from its archive — every play of the Packers’ 35-10 victory over the Chiefs is included (as is the original radio call by Jim Simpson and George Ratterman). The huddles and other extraneous moments that NFL Films shot have been cut out.
Some of the footage will be familiar to viewers from other NFL Films programs — that one-handed touchdown catch by the Packers’ Max McGee is certainly well known — but much of the original film has remained in hibernation. There simply hasn’t been a big demand to revive the game, despite the historic meeting of the AFL and NFL champions and the presence of Packers coach Vince Lombardi, a symbol of NFL power.
“The game has been viewed historically as a one-sided affair,” said David Plaut, a senior producer at NFL Films.
But the approach of Super Bowl 50 next month prompted the league to ordain that the inaugural game in the series be reconstructed.
“I was surprised that we had the full game,” Plaut said.
He said he thought it was unlikely that every shot had survived 49 years, especially because in the early days of NFL Films, sequences that were used in various NFL Films programming were sometimes lost forever.
The network plans to announce Monday that it has reassembled the first Super Bowl.
NFL Films produced the game with five or six cameras (it will use up to 35 for Super Bowl 50) and few of the dramatic touches that would later become hallmarks of its style: a mix of riveting cinematic technique and league propaganda. Except for some slow-motion plays that were used in live action, the NFL Films’ production of Super Bowl I looks as if it could have been CBS’ broadcast.
“It was primitive,” Plaut said. “It was only the second year we were called NFL Films. The coverage was crude. But when we filmed Super Bowl II, the change was exponential. We were using long lenses, more slow motion, and we doubled the size of our crew.”
A videotape of the CBS broadcast exists — a broadcast that was called by Ray Scott, Jack Whitaker and Frank Gifford — but is in a forced hibernation. It was discovered in 2005 by the son of the man who taped it at the TV station in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he was working. The son, whose lawyer would not divulge his name, has tried to sell it to the NFL, with no luck.
It is not complete. It lacks the halftime show and part of the third quarter, with its critical play: the 50-yard interception return by Green Bay’s Willie Wood that led to the touchdown that extended the Packers’ lead to 21-10.
“The NFL isn’t all that interested in our tape,” said the lawyer, Steve Harwood. “They have threatened that if we wanted to sell or profit in any way from our tape with a third party other than the NFL, they would sue us, and my client is not in a position to do legal battle with the NFL. So we’ve said, ‘OK, let’s try to work things out,’ and they’ve said, ‘We don’t need your tape.’”
A request for $1 million was met by the league with a lowball response.
A copy of the original reels of 2-inch tape was donated to the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan, which has restored it. But it will not be available for the public to watch until the financial wrangling over the original is resolved. The league owns the broadcast’s copyright.
“It really documents how games looked at that time,” said Ron Simon, curator of television and radio at the Paley Center. “It’s closer to the beginning of time.”
NFL Network’s plan is to turn the 40-odd minutes of game footage into a three-hour extravaganza, surrounding it with pregame, halftime and postgame shows that will be taped Thursday, and the addition of statistics, game notes and down, distance and clock graphics.
“You can’t just throw the footage up on the air and expect it to be a good viewing experience,” said Ronit Larone, a senior coordinating producer for the network. “If you watched without the enhancements you wouldn’t understand what’s going on.”
A potentially interesting part of the enhancements will be the use of a group of commentators, seven at any given time, to discuss the game as it is being shown.
The group will include players from the game, including Willie Davis of the Packers.
“We’ll make sure we don’t ruin anything with the chatter,” Larone said. “If we have the right people together, it will be like a viewing party.”
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