American Television Preservation - Collecting and Restoring Historic American Television Graphics, Movie Openings, Show Openings, Promos and much more
For the immediate present, current files are from the former "TV_Vault"

"TV VAULT"

Welcome. No need for a combination to this "vault".

This site contains a collection of what many consider historic television graphics. It is unfortunate that the preservation of these memories has not been a high priority in most corners of the television industry. Because these types of elements are not "revenue generating", many have been ignored, ill-preserved or even thrown out by the American television networks - ABC, CBS, NBC and others.

Our mission is to locate, restore and preserve as many historic American television graphics as possible.

At present, this website is simply a "cut and paste" of what was formerly the "TV_Vault", assembled from my personal collection as well as with the help and contributions of members of various YAHOO groups. More information on these groups later.

Hopefully you will be able to overlook the very crude "design" of this website at present. It was thrown together in literally under one hour simply to get it online. This is a spare time personal hobby and will take some time to develop. Please bear with us.

     -Jay Cordova, 12-27-04  (jay@americantelevisionpreservation.com)

 

Posted 6-12-04

From Billy Ingram of TVParty (www.tvparty.com). From rare tape "30 years of ABC". Mediocre 16mm transfers but very watchable. Tape goes all the way back to late 50's, but only posting a few snippets from late 60's early 70's here. More to come.

ABC Wide World of Sports classic promo

Marcus Welby B&W Promo

Marcus Welby Color Promo

Room 222 Color Promo

ABC Sunday Night Movie Promo

 

ABC Wide World of Sports

Wide World of Sports - decent quality audio - clean (no sponsor v/o)
Slightly different v/o, music and mix than what I remember - date unknown


Wide World of Sports 77 open - video quicktime - low quality

Wide World of Sports 78 open - video avi - low quality

 

Posted 5-28-04

From the 1" Protection Master Tapes of Bill Feigenbaum. This was cutting edge state-of-the-art work during this period. Bill produced this work at NYIT and was the only person on the east coast at this time doing this high-end work. It's amazing stuff. It's also nice to hear the excellent audio quality from the broadcast tapes. These files have been processed and encoded to display 30 full frames per second with no interlace artifacts.

Enjoy. And thank you Bill Feigenbaum for sharing this historic work.

CBS Sports Saturday - early eighties; cutting edge and nice

CBS Sports Sunday - early eighties; ditto

CBS NBA 1985 Montage

CBS National Football League Open 1982

CBS NFL Today Open 1982 (check out the old music)

CBS NFL Today Open 1983 (with new groovy music)


Posted 4-3-04

A few 1966-68 NBC promo snippets from Bill Feigenbaum NBC tapes. Bill was Art Director at NBC at this time and these are his personal transfers from 16mm. No time to put together more than this right now, but I've got tons of fall promos ("NBC Week") from I believe all three years touting each season's new shows. Very interesting to watch, although I don't remember any of this stuff myself.

Posted 12-6-03

1991 Headline News Open Theme (audio wav file)

1991 Headline News Bump - audio wav file. Bill "Troll" Tullis voice-over. Troll was also the voice for "TBS Newswatch" intro and ending. Troll sounded good, a distinctive voice, but he only did very few voice overs - Newswatch and Headline News are the only two I can think of during a 25 year period. Troll got me my job at TBS at age 20 while a student at Georgia Tech. We're both from Valdosta, Georgia.

CBS Superbowl XVIII open (from Cranston/Csuri demo tape satellite feed, with a C/S logo plastered over it). I've got a clean version of this and other C/S work somewhere on 1" tape.

Cinemax Coming up (sometime in the eighties - VHS off-air)

Cinemax Movie open (sometime in eighties - recorded off-air but produced by Pacific Data Images) I'm working on master copy of this and much other PDI material. I've tracked down Glenn Entis (EA Canada) and Richard Chuang (PDI/Dreamworks) seeking contributions of old PDI work at broadcast quality.

CBS Sports 80s Football Open. Poor quality. VHS off air.

Entertainment Tonight Open 1984. First material produced by PDI broadcast un US. Made a big bang on the American broadcast scene. Off-ar from VHS, but I've got this at high quality from a PDI tape on 1" somewhere.

Letterman Classic. Just for fun. My favorite Letterman bit of all time. Without a detail missed, they redubbed Dave's voice and Paul's voice in with other announcers. It was perfect and not a word was mentioned about it. The lipsync, mic isolation, crowd mix, etc., was perfect. Had to grind this to lower quality for filesize purposes.

Mary Tyler Moore Open - very first show, with 3:2 pulldown processing to original 24fps, and some frame by frame adjustment of film jitter. From DVD realease of MTM first season.

Mary Tyler Moore CBS Promos 1970. From DVD "The Making of MTM Show" edited by Ko Maruyama; produced by Matt Asner (married to Jules, the lucky guy). Ko said that Matt had interesting stories of growing up with the show and cast.

Movie Channel Feature Presentations - eighties, off-air VHS

ABC Movie of the Week. Original 1969 version produced by Harry Marks. I've restored it as best I can from VHS version of poor 16MM film transfer - frame by frame in places. Thanks to Billy Ingram for providing this classic. Most of you know of his "TVParty.com" website, but check it out if you haven't.

Jay's 1980's Demo (lower quality mpeg - ancient history 18MB)

Jay's 1990's Demo (semi-ancient history mpeg 23MB)

One day I'll edit a demo with the last 6 years of my work. Just can't seem to find the time, though.

Contributions from library of Jermaine Schex

HBO in Space full open. Lots of work to restore this one from VHS. Along with processing, 3:2 pulldown back to original 24 frames-per-second film animation. A lot of people have been looking for this one, and you can thank Jermaine for coming through with this.

CBS Classic Special Movie open - plus. This is three for the price of one. Begins with Mort Stevens theme special filmstrip open and a tease for the classic flic "Network". Then we're into the Special Movie Presentation open, another tease for "Network" and finally the Saturday Night Movie open. 12MB. Not sure if it aired all together like this, but it makes for a nice clip.

ABC Friday Night Movie open from the eighties. I consider this a semi-classic I refer to as the "star tunnel" open. This one was also restored to original 24fps film speed.

Links for Gareth Price for International Collection

1984 CNN PrimeNews open (Grid version)
Producer, designer, animator, music: Jay Cordova. This is from my original master tape, the cleanest version of this open in existence, before dubbing and adding of voice-over at CNN. Music was changed in 1985 and I extended the opening, adding an additional grid map to cover lengthened music cut.

1990 CNN PrimeNews open (Video/marble matrix version)
Producer, designer, animator: Jay Cordova. Also from my original master tape and the cleanest version of this open in existence, before v/o and dubbing at CNN.

Note: I also produced a 1987 PrimeNews open I called the "arctic" version. I'll post that at a later time. Must recover that from the original 1" master.

More to come. I've got tons of my work from CNN and TBS in original form and well presereved in ziplog bags!. Hopefully you'll enjoy the original masters, although I'll admit they're not quite the same as seeing the nostalgic on-air versions with voice-over, etc.

More (some may be inactive)

CBS_Late_Night 80s - from Pacific Data Images, Glenn Entis animator (mpeg 1.63MB)

CBS Tuesday Movie 80s - from Pacific Data Images - Glenn Entis animator (mpeg 2.3MB)

NBC Movie Filmstrips 80s - from Pacific Data Images (mpeg 2.7MB)

NBC Movie Stripes 80s - from Pacific Data Images (mpeg 2.6MB)

NLF Today requested by Ben Masters - from Feigenbaum Productions, NY - Bill Feigenbaum produced this piece at NYIT.

Kimba Open (just for fun - Disney literally stole this, almost down to the detail, and called it "The Lion King". Disney said they'd never heard of "Kimba". Yeah, right. Walt Disney was well familiar with the Japanese man who created this and other classic cartoons, such as the Astroboy entry below)

Astroboy Open (anyone remember this?)

Mannix - Open, from first season - from 16MM transfer on VHS

Mannix - Open, bump, close from last season (the best open IMO)

See Kris Trexler's excellent website containing historic network material and information:
http://www.kingoftheroad.net/KARD_html/kard4.html

HBO

HBO CLASSIC OPEN - 11.4MB mpeg-1, high quality and data rate (from Jermains Schex!!!)

HBO CURRENT OPEN - 7.5 MB mpeg-1, high quality and data rate (source credit is "bugged" on the video)

 

Hey - an actual new posting 8-23-05

CBS Movie Open Theme "So Old, So Young" - 48KHz mp3 - recorded 1971