WMAR (NBC) 11:00 PM News, October 16, 1983, 1983 World Series (Baltimore: movies, live in)

[sross1800]

Hi there! My name's Sean! I'm 26 years old, and I've got autism. Even though I don't live in Baltimore (I live near St. Louis with my grandparents), but since NBC is my all time favorite television network, and since I like the television shows and television commercials that originally aired on NBC from December 31, 1993 and before (before both "Friends" and "ER" both premiered on NBC in September of 1994) while Johnny Carson and Jay Leno were hosting "The Tonight Show" on NBC (before anybody even heard of Jimmy Fallon), where can I find a copy of the WMAR 11:00 PM News from October 16, 1983 after the Orioles won the 1983 World Series against the Phillies, when WMAR was an NBC television affiliate?

Thanks!
Sean

[MidValleyDad]

You might contact WMAR. They may still have it in their archives. The 11PM news is local not network programing.

[Borntoolate85]

Interestingly, I recently posted a video from WABC the night that the Mets won the World Series three years later (at least they didn't beat the O's that time). I myself even have found footage from WBAL's first stint with NBC (mostly from 1979 from a Best of SNL special featuring a young Stan Stovall on a couple 11 PM news promos) along with a short news clip. The oldest WMAR footage I've found is a five minute 11 PM news clip from 1980 (when it was a CBS affiliate at the time). I also have a morning newsbreak (taken during the Today show) from the day after the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion as well in which my parents recorded when I was a little baby. I'm surprised you used 1993 and not 1994 as the cutoff for "pre-network switch" footage, and some of the footage from '94 regarding the network switch may interest you, and most of the classic NBC finds for me are out-of-market.

I'm not familiar with archives of news footage in terms of when stations started to archive all their content (generally between the late '70s and early '90s depending on market size), but I'd imagine that WMAR may have saved their tape for an occasion like that.

Otherwise, your best bet is to look for blank videotapes (VHS and perhaps Beta) at a yard or garage sale, at a flea market, a family-owned thrift store (not Goodwill or Salvation Army), or on an online site like eBay where the seller is from Maryland. I like to collect classic commercials myself (hence part of the reason for my user name), and I'm still helping you out, though lately it seems that more and more have thrown out their old tapes and they are becoming harder to find now that its been a decade since videotapes were last sold at stores. That said, it helps if you research what designs were used on tapes to help you distinguish yourself from the '80s, '90s, and '00s styles.

[feck]

With TV studios, storage space is a premium
because of the constant addition of new programming
to store. Most of the silent era movies are gone because of
lack of storage space. A lot of TV studios simply erased previous
shows when they reused videotape. That is why only 33 episodes of
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson broadcast before 1972 exist.


As a previous
poster noted, a newscast after a World Series win may
have been a good reason to put it in an archive but
who knows if they did?