In honor of Super Bowl LI this Sunday, we flash back to January 1978 when the Dallas Cowboys met the Denver Broncos in New Orleans for Super Bowl XII. In the first ever Super Bowl broadcast in prime time, the Cowboys defeated the Broncos 27-10. In this clip, Texas News reporter Karen Parfitt reports on the “super sales” of Dallas Cowboys merchandise in the DFW area. This story aired at 10 PM on January 12, 1978.

[News Clip: Super Sales (Super Bowl)] on The Portal to Texas History.

This video was recently transferred from the original 3/4 inch magnetic media (also called Umatic tape) that was used to record this segment. Video in the KXAS collection from 1977-1986 is particularly at risk due to the fragile nature of the Umatic format and the obsolescence of the equipment needed for playback and digitization. In this video you will see that the picture quality has significantly degraded. Although there has been loss to the image quality, we were able to successfully save this video before it was too late. As more time passes however, it will be harder and harder to recover videos like this.