This is a segment of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, recorded offtheair on TwoInch Quad Videotape on August 24, 1964 in the lowband monochrome mode.

This recording was unearthed by Retro Video of Glendale, California. http://www.retrovideo.com.

The exact location of where this tape was made is unknown but it was somewhere in Los Angeles County, California. Presented here is the open and monologue only. A majority of the program exists on this TwoInch Quad Videotape which was fully recovered and transferred in color on the Ampex AVR1 at DC Video, Burbank California. The source of the broadcast was KNBC channel 4 in Los Angeles and one can see the head switch on the right side of the screen (which probably means that the program played back on an Ampex VR1000 at NBC Burbank).

Note that Johnny Carson talks about it being Friday, presumably the Friday before the Monday in which this tape played. This TwoInch Quad Videotape had no labels, color bars, tone or slate. But it did have a portion of the local newscast before the show which mentions that evening's baseball scores. From that information it was determined to be an air date of 82464.

As of this today, this recording appears to be the oldest color videotape of the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in existence.

Update 1202021: A longtime consensus amongst my colleagues here in LA concludes that this recording may have been made at ABC Prospect. Why? NBC and CBS were making color recordings using the lowband color standard at that time. But this recording was made in the lowband black & white standard. Additionally, there were no bars or tone at the start of the tape, something the NBC or CBS engineers would have done. This Prospect(?) recording may have been just a test to see what a color recording would look like, even if it was made on a black & white record machine. They needed a color signal, thus channel 4 and The Tonight Show provided such an opportunity.