The Frank Sinatra Show with Ella Fitzgerald

Rating:
Summary: From the "original broadcast tape," my foot.
Review: Five stars for the show itself--Sinatra & Fitzgerald are great, even Peter Lawford's tolerable, and it's amazing that they pulled this thing together in a short time after getting rained out. But don't believe for a second that this was remastered from the original tape, or even remastered. Instead, it was taken from a somewhat dirty kinescope, transferred to what looks like a beat-up 3/4" cassette master. Which is all the more tragic since the original 2" tape master exists, a rarity in this period (see "Sinatra Duets" for clips from the show in this format, looking and sounding great. So for the non-technically minded, in a nutshell: you'll enjoy the content, but the box copy is basically a lie.