At one time, the most popular Children’s program on the air, producing more than 1500 episodes over a period of five years, Captain Video was a cultural phenomenon. Today, there are 5 episodes in circulation, and a further 20 in the UCLA Film and Television archive vaults.
Since the show was a live broadcast, the only remaining copies are kinescopes. The kinescope process can produce very watchable footage, but it will only ever be as good as the television from which it was filmed, and then it will be limited by the quality of the telecine transfer used to convert it back to video.
