Originally published at: Strange TV moment when the film breaks during a Star Trek episode (video) - Boing Boing
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Hmmm. A remarkably unremarkable clip.
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I was whelmed.
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This happened during a screening of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds when I saw it at the local theater. It was right at the height of the scene where Tom C and his kids were in the basement of he home and a 747 crashes into the neighborhood. So the burn through on the film made a certain amount of contextual sense.
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1 it seems amazing to me that the picture before the film issue is so much better and the colours more pleasing than the hideous lurid still image they put on while the break is on
2 I now remember seeing this as if it happened when I saw it.
I do remember the telly stopping like that for technical faults though I don’t remember film going off the real/breaking/ burning - only in the cinema.
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Paradise 
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I wonder if the title card was a film slide rather than an electronically stored image. Since they were still broadcasting live from telecine instead of recording tapes for future use, I wonder if other practices were similarly old-fashioned.
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Really really shitty colours for a film slide though.
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Love the Shutterstock photo credit - did Willrow Hood take up photography after leaving Cloud City?!
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The perfect place to be: neither under- or over-.
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I guess I didn’t know how old TV worked, but I didn’t guess they were using literal film to do it.
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Notice that the issue occurred between scenes (where there would have been commercials in the US). Probs ly not broken film but a failure to switch to the next “projector” (film to video device). Based on the time required, they probably had to move the reel to another device.
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I am gruntled!
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In the 1970s, my local NBC affiliate in Albany, Georgia showed Trek at 4:00 most Saturday afternoons. That was the only way to watch Star Trek in my neck of the woods back then, and I was always bummed when they either preempted it or when I was traveling with my folks or whatever and missed it. I missed one Saturday’s show, and that Monday at school all my fellow nerds were talking about how the episode that weekend had been entirely dubbed in French. I really wish I’d seen that.
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They were all making it up to mess with your head.
And now they too remember it that way and nobody will ever know.
We had Trek on Saturday mornings when I was a kid and as a teen every day after school along with the Monkees. There was some odd stuff in later (last?) Monkees series.
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Jim, I’m a doctor, not an a/v guy.
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Believe me, I’ve considered that. I’m pretty sure it happened, as the guys talking about it weren’t in a group, but it came up at different times with a couple of different guys. If it was a gag, it was elaborate and very convincing for a bunch of middle schoolers.
It’s not hard to believe. Physical tapes of the show were flying around the world to thousands of broadcasters. It’s quite possible a mislabled French copy got into circulation stateside.
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Oh yeah. I was just messing with your head too.
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