There are a number of old TV shows on Netflix that have been scanned in HD and they look and sound great. Basically, anything that was shot on film can be transferred to HD. Twilight Zone, The Andy Griffith Show, the original Star Trek, Leave it to Beaver etc...

Probably shot on film, a lot of episodic TV series were until quite recently e.g. House.
Going back to the original camera negative, rescanning it and cleaning it up can yield pretty impressive results.

Bob.

We get all the old shows on the "ME" network. They are all very good quality.
JJK

ME's awesome. I get to watch shows that were (for the most part) off the air by the time I was in kindergarten. :)

The local NBC affiliate does the same kind of thing on their -2 sub channel. Neither run the same shows. The local ME affiliate is ran out of a local (not to me) mall, has an in-mall studio & does some local shows. Very neat.

Gunsmoke was shot in 35mm iirc, and they used great lighting. Something to take note of.

Gunsmoke was the "gold standard" for episodic television, great writing, great acting and impeccable production values.

Shows how short sighted TV companies here (UK) were at the time, shooting in video. :-(

I still remember getting to tour the Gunsmoke lot when I was nine or ten.
The TV series ran for 20 seasons and 635 episodes, still a record.
Apparently, there was some reluctance to bringing it to television from radio, fearing the series would lose "character."

The series was likely shot in 35mm.

Not to get OT, but..
Actor James Arness' brother is ____ ______?
Anyone who grew up in the 50-60s would likely know this.

Mission Impossible.
JJK

Airplane! ("Roger, Roger. What's our vector, Victor?")

...Jerry

Actor James Arness' brother is Peter Graves.

James Arness played the monster in the original ' Thing ', a bw flick made in 1951.

I've been watching reruns of Gunsmoke and "Marshall Dillon" (the early 30 minute episodes) on the Encore Westerns Channel.

Like you, I'm amazed at the decent quality of this old footage, though I'm not sure it's in HD. SD or HD, they're great to watch!

A month ago I got one of those DirecTV "Genie" upgrades and have been recording every episode of Gunsmoke and Marshall Dillon since. Whoever is restoring these things is doing a great job!

The only thing that's a bit of a downer for me is that I'm old enough to remember when some of those old "Marshall Dillon" episodes were first shown on TV.

There are a lot of old Western series that have been restored to similar quality on the Encore Westerns Channel: Have Gun Will Travel, Bonanza, Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, The Lawman, Gene Autry, Rawhide, Wagon Train, etc. Good stuff.

Sometimes at the end of a Westerns Channel series episode there's a paragraph saying something about "film restoration performed by...." with the name of a studio. I suspect that much of it is done digitally, using some kind of high end video editors. That's a SWAG though - I don't really know how they do it, I just appreciate the results.

Happy viewing,
Ben Nash

And for you sailors out there, James Arness was an avid sailor who didn't mind doing things a bit differently. He commissioned the naval architects CSK to design and build a great big catamaran. He named it "Seasmoke" and it was, I believe, fifty feet in length. A great big thing with tons of room below.

As with all cats, it was very fast. On one occasion they raced to Hawaii and in the final hours of the race, with consistent reaching winds, they pulled a water skier.

I would very much have liked to have seen that on YouTube. Alas, 30 years too early.

Hey, who knows. Someone may dredge up old footage of it, or it may appear in some video bio for James. Keep searching! Now that you've told me about it, I certainly will.

The Wikipedia article on James Arness has some great things to say about his personality and interests. It's all sourced with references, so you can explore those links as well. Sounds like he was a remarkable person.

James Arness - Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_arness

Enjoy,
"Small" Ben

Don't have time to read all the responses.
But many TV shows were recorded on kinescope, grainy and low quality back in the day.
CRT to film.
Think "The Honeymooners".

A reminder that content is king, quality often secondary.
Who is funnier than Art Carney and Jackie Gleason?
Even if you can't say "Bang zoom, up to the moon Alice".
I sometimes lock myself in a closet and scream the phrase from a sock-filled mouth, using the name of my lovely wife of 36 years.
Good therapy.
Harmless safety valve.

Just did a very brief Google search. Seasmoke was actually 58 feet loa and this link says it was designed to be the fastest cat in the world.

Now it's available for charter but with a much smaller rig and certified for 49 (!) passengers.

And I also notice that the recordings don't have those big 13 or so video tape (shaded color) horizontal lines that were broadcast for years with me wondering why.
JJK

You mean the broad bands?

The first video tape recorders used 2" wide tape, with a spinning series of 4 heads that recorded at right angles to the direction of tape motion (i.e. straight across). It took 16 head passes to record one field of video, so I would imagine if the four heads weren't precisely matched one would get the banding.

Even so, quad tape was a giant leap forward as it was the first successful VTR. I recall reading that it was first used to delay broadcasts from NYC to the West Coast. I think it was an Ampex invention.

Film, of course, was a far superior recording mechanism but it took time to process.

The visual banding on 2" Quad playback was caused by a mismatch in the gain of the heads of the machine. Each head has a separate preamp and it had to be calibrated with a waveform monitor for playback of each tape, preferably using color bars.