Though the game footage was thought to be lost and gone forever, the NFL has recovered game tape from Super Bowl I and will show the game on TV for the first time in nearly 50 years. The NFL is set to air the recovered footage of Super Bowl I at 7pm on January 15th, a game that saw the Green Bay Packers defeat the Kansas City Chiefs by a score of 10-35 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. So what makes this so significant? The footage that the NFL will show on January 15th is the ONLY KNOWN FOOTAGE of Super Bowl I, a game that was thought to be lost and gone forever…until now.
The telecast of Super Bowl I, a broadcasting artifact, will be unveiled for the first time since its original airing thanks to the NFL Network.
The network will broadcast “Super Bowl I: The Lost Game,” a restitching of the inaugural Super Bowl between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs. It will air at 7 p.m. on Jan. 15, weeks before Super Bowl 50 will be played.
A tape of the game, which was televised by both NBC and CBS in 1967, has become a relic with tapes becoming either lost or erased.
According to the NFL, this reassembled version represents the “only known video footage of the entire action from Super Bowl 1.”“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 dozen disparate sources,” the league said in a statement. “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.”
The nearly 50-year-old game will have a bit of a new age feel to it with it getting modern broadcast graphics and even social media interaction.
In addition to the game, NFL will include features such as sound from legendary Packers coach Vince Lombardi and discussion on how the broadcast of Super Bowl I was lost and ultimately re-assembled.
You don’t need to be a Packers or a Chiefs fan to look forward to watching this. Given that the game hasn’t been seen in nearly 50 years on TV I’m going to go ahead and assume that maybe 1 out of our tens of millions of readers have ever seen this game, and it’s going to be a pretty fucking cool moment to see the game that launched the NFL’s Super Bowl Era, a game that was thought to be lost and gone forever.
For more details on the airing of Super Bowl I you can follow the link to head on over to KCTV5!