Super Bowl I (partially found live television footage of gridiron football game; 1967)
The logo for Super Bowl I.
Status: Partially Found
The first installment of the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, retroactively known as Super Bowl II, was played and broadcast live on radio and on both the CBS and NBC television networks on January 15, 1967, with the outcome of the game seeing the Green Bay Packers triumph over the Kansas City Chiefs by the score of 35 to 10.[1]
Lost recording
All known broadcast tapes of the game in its entirety were subsequently wiped by both NBC and CBS to save costs, a common practice in the TV industry at the time as videotapes were very expensive (one half-hour tape cost around $300 at the time, equivalent to $2,600 in 2022 dollars, so it was cheaper to wipe and reuse videotapes. Plus it was not foreseen how big the game was going to become. This has prevented studies comparing each network's respective telecast.
For many years, it had been considered lost and only two small samples of the telecasts were known to have survived, showing Max McGee's opening touchdown and Jim Taylor's touchdown run. Both were shown in 1991 on HBO's Play by Play: A History of Sports Television and on the Super Bowl XXV pregame show.[2]
Rediscovery
In January 2011, a partial recording of the CBS telecast was reported to have been found in a Pennsylvania attic and restored by the Paley Center for Media in New York.[2] The two-inch color videotape is the most complete version of the broadcast yet discovered, missing only the halftime show and most of the third quarter. The NFL owns the broadcast copyright and has blocked its sale or distribution. After remaining anonymous and communicating with the media only through his lawyer since the recording's discovery, the owner of the recording, Troy Haupt, came forward to The New York Times in 2016 to tell his side of the story.[3]
NFL Films had a camera crew present at the game, and retains a substantial amount of film footage in its archives, some of which have been released in its film productions. One such presentation was the NFL's Greatest Games episode about this Super Bowl, entitled The Spectacle of a Sport (also the title of the Super Bowl I highlight film).[4]
On January 11, 2016, the NFL announced that "in an exhaustive process that took months to complete, NFL Films searched its enormous archives of footage and were able to locate all 145 plays from Super Bowl I from more than a couple of dozen disparate sources. The footage used contained the partial CBS telecast, recordings that NFL Films retain, and several home recordings made by fans who saw the game. Once all the plays were located, NFL Films was able to put the plays in order and stitch them together while fully restoring, re-mastering, and color-correcting the footage. Finally, an off-air audio recording from the NBC Sports radio broadcast featuring announcers Jim Simpson and George Ratterman was layered on top of the footage to complete the broadcast. The final result represents the only known video footage of the entire action from Super Bowl I." It then announced that NFL Network would broadcast the newly pieced together footage in its entirety on January 15, 2016—the 49th anniversary of the contest. This footage was nearly all on film with the exception of several player introductions and a post-game locker room chat between Pat Summerall and Pete Rozelle.[5]