Fate of NTSC prints of early Pertwee episodes?

[tom rogers]

Oct 20, 2023 0:03:18 GMT Robert Lia said:

WTOP 8 a CBS affiliate aired the Jon Pertwee episodes in 1973 for a very short period of time before they vanished from the Washington DC market.

WTOP was channel 9, and that is very surprising. Do you know when and/or at what times? WTOP was the top station in the DC market at that time and Dr. Who would have really stuck out like a sore thumb compared to their regular daily programming. They were a local CBS- owned affiliate with a strict programming schedule. Perhaps late-night after 11:30? As the local CBS affiliate they had no late night program to compete with Carson/NBC but they did have a semi-regular “The Late Show”-slot where they broadcast a variety of stuff from the UK otherwise not shown locally, IIRC.

[Robert Lia]

broadwcast.org/index.php/Airdates_in_Washington,_DC_(WTOP)


Not to much to go on but Washington and Philadelphia were among the very first US station to air and drop Dr. Who in the early 1970's.

[tom rogers]

Thanks. Never thought to look there 🤷. OK, between the two markets I can see that I caught the late 70s stuff out of Baltimore and the rest on Maryland PBS. The WTOP listing is fascinating. Seven weekdays, one episode of The Silurians each day, then gone. At 4p.m., which would have been the lead-in to the top-rated local newscast at the time (the fiercest local tv competition in DC then and now). That may explain why it came and went so quickly - a death sentence time-slot for any program at that time, not to mention something as imaginative as the good Doctor. Wow.

[Robert Lia]

They probably aired the other episodes but there not in the listing. TV news papers often make boo boo's. We had to be a little bit creative and use our heads to finalize the 1977 KCET listing in Los Angeles. As a kid I remember seeing the stories shown in the fall of 1977 but the TV guides were in accurate. Some times the Los Angeles Times would list Dr. Who and it would air. Other times they would list something other than Dr. Who on those Saturday afternoon and Dr. Who would still air.

[Ace St.John]

Apr 19, 2023 23:31:56 GMT @angelamezquita said:

So I was looking at the color state of Pertwee episodes on the missingepisodes.blogspot page and the Broadwcast site to see if any countries had bought any Color copies of Third Doctor episodes that currently survive as 16mm B/W episodes. I noticed, alongside other episodes that survive as NTSC, that Canada and the United States DID in fact buy NTSC prints of

• The Silurians
• The Ambassadors of Death
• Terror of the Autons
  
• The Mind of Evil
• The Daemons

and that that at late as February 1978, BBC Canada had all of them in their Archive (CKVU and TVOntario only loan the episodes from BBC Canada). Also, its worth to note that Canada would buy the episodes it and the US wanted to screen from the BBC and it would loan the US episodes it requested to air, even if Canada didn't air them. Therefore, Canada had all of these NTSC prints at some point. By the time Ian Levine and Sue Malden contacted BBC Canada in late 1978/early 1979, the episodes listed above have disappeared, presumably junked.

Also, a reminder that the off air color copies of all of the episodes listed (except the Mind of Evil) had been recorded by Tom Lundie, a US friend of Ian Levine, who used a Betamax recorder and recorded Doctor Who serials off air from broadcasts in the United States in 1977, they year before the NTSC prints "disappeared".

While it's believed that these episodes were likely junked, it's also possible that someone could have taken them home with them. I hopeful that someone in Canada or the US still has the NTSC prints of those episodes somewhere in their storage. After all, the last NTSC prints to be returned were those of the serial "Inferno" in 1985. There's nothing wrong with the the Chroma-dot color recovery or the D3 color restoration (paring the 16mm prints with the off-air Color signal), but I think if we do find the missing NTSC prints of the episodes listed above, it can get a cleaner/better result than the surviving 16mm prints. After all, the other Pertwee episodes that survive in NTSC had been RSC'd back to PAL by the Doctor Who Restoration Team (with some detail from the 16mm added on for the Blu-Ray release). I'm hopeful that someone could return those NTSC prints back to the BBC, so we can get the Pertwee episodes as close to their lost PAL prints as possible.

In all due respect to you they're not 'prints' which you are referring to.

A print is a film print is made by light striking the celluloid then a process washes the salts away where the light is struck. you can hold them to the light and see the images of each frame.


The NTSC versions of Jon Pertwee were on magnetic tape
Video tape. Not a print .

So your thread title needs edited slightly.

If you said "copies"


for example:

"Fate of NTSC copies of early Pertwee episodes?"

that would be okay 👍 and still be within applicable terminology, however tapes 📼 would the absolute correct word to use in place of "print" when your talking about the NTSC copies
.theyre videotapes📼 not 🎞️ prints. Prints are film prints. NTSC copies you refer to are on video tape therefore "tapes" is the correct 💯 terminology.

Thus, this would be the correct way to phrase your thread title:

"Fate of NTSC tapes of early Pertwee episodes?"




Cheers for your thread I have learned something as in that some video tape copies of materials were intentionally kept in that form --- rather than merely to be taped over again very soon.... so I do get where you are coming from . Would be awesome if something missing was recovered on video tape again. I think the last PAL 625 line video tape recovery was Death to the Daleks Episode one sent from Dubai to BBC enterprises in the 90s, [loading bay,rain anecdote?].


Yes for sure NTSC broadcast standard 525line video tape copies of episodes where the colour was restored from off air domestic sources , would be an upgrade for sure .

*Video tape is a plastic tape coated in magnetic oxide that an electronic signal could be recorded on. Video tape was often wiped and reused in the industry because video tape was expensive and also designed to be reused