You probably think you’ve already seen all you need to see about Super Bowl I. That’s mostly because of NFL Films and how ubiquitous its highlight shows are this time of year.
Saturday afternoon, however, inside the Paley Center Museum at 25 W. 52nd St., the actual CBS broadcast of Super Bowl I — or, as it was referred to at the start of the telecast, the “AFL-NFL World Championship” — will be shown, and it is a fascinating slice of three hours of American life from that third Sunday of January 1967.
Thanks to Martin Haupt, an engineer living in Scranton, Pa., who had the technology to record the game decades before the invention of VCRs or DVRs — and the foresight to save it, unlike CBS or NBC, both of which also simulcasted the game — the Paley Center is now the proud caretaker of this game, seen as it was 20,845 days earlier on WDAU-TV, Channel 22 in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.
In a high-definition world, the broadcast is jarring at first, but the eyes quickly adjust, especially if you own eyes that were raised on TV images that didn’t seem sharper than real life.
New York Post’s Mike Vaccaro has the full story here.