Some 3,300 hours of Johnny Carson’s reign on The Tonight Show has been digitally transferred and made available at JohnnyCarson.com, which has just opened up a searchable content database for industry types looking to license the perfect Carson clip for their period piece. For everyone else, you can watch a few remastered highlights like a 1980 appearance from Steve Martin, a 1974 interview with The Jackson Five, Albert Brooks doing a comedy routine with a Speak & Spell, or that one Burt Reynolds interview with the whipped cream. The restoration of the clips—which had spent the last couple of decades in storage at a Kansas salt mine, guarded by a shotgun-toting Walter Brennan and his faithful hound dog, if only in our fantasies—precedes a planned set of new Carson DVD collections. [THR]
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