About twenty years ago, I was working as the managing editor of the web site for the NBC affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama. At the time, it was NBC's smallest owned-and-operated station, which meant that everyone at the network usually ignored us. Although we were still expected to deliver all the content and video projects they were attempting in New York City, Chicago and Dallas-Ft. Worth.
There was a talented mix of people at the station. Old hands who had worked in the market for 30 years and a fresh-faced crew of relative newcomers (including Brooke Smith, who was the runner-up on season two of The Bachelor). The TV station won awards and our web site won a Regional Murrow for best news web site.
But my favorite memories from that period are hanging out with this editor named Kyle Clark. He was an exceptionally good at editing news footage, but he was also a hard-core TV fan. Especially of the great detective/police action shows of the 1970s and 1980s. If Stephen Cannell had a super fan, Kyle was the guy.
He spent every spare minute at home working on video projects. Playing around with equipment that was old twenty years ago and at a time when YouTube wasn't an option for what is now known as "creators."
I recently found this old clip of Kyle in which he had digitally replaced Jan-Michael Vincent with himself in a scene from the TV series Airwolf.
It looks cheesy now, but twenty years ago, this was a quite impressive effort coming for a guy using analog technology with no budget.
And as a fellow action TV fanatic, I appreciated this inside joke:
