Thanks to Jimmy Walker for sending me this link to an interesting article about the Jimmy Dean TV show on which Jim Reeves appeared shortly before his death. While I am glad the shows are being released, note that they are working from kinescopes. These were an old-fashioned method of pointing a film camera at a TV monitor to make a copy of a live show, before the days of videotape. However, what is baffling is that Jimmy Dean's program WAS VIDEOTAPED. So what happened to those tapes? Mary Reeves might have offered me a clue. She tried in vain to convince the owners of the show to sell her a copy of the program that Jim was on, but they refused to do so. She was very upset by that and found it unfeeling, greedy and inexplicable, as do I. Eventually she got a copy of the kinescope but it's outrageous that the videotapes have disappeared because they would be of such better quality. To read about the restoration of this show from the kinescopes, click the link below.
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