America’s Oldest Home Video? You Decide…
Okay…I don’t have any way of proving this. But…there can’t have been many people with their own video decks at home in the 1970s. This was before VHS was taking off, and when the only affordable cameras were the kind you’d see in banks for closed-circuit television.
That’s what I used here. I plugged my little Hitachi HV-62 CCD into our Panasonic 3/4-inch deck, put a cheap lavalier on my 8-year-old brother, and let him do his spoof of a commercial for Sprite. Some how, references to Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry crept into his schtick, so it must have been the time it was first shown on Network TV. (Fall 1976)
And yes, I still have the book-sized Umatic cassette in my bookshelf.