When It Was New: NBC Saturday Night at the Movies, 02/18/1978 (KOA-TV4 Denver) · 10:59am Nov 17th, 2016
From NBC affiliated station KOA-TV4 Denver (presently CBS O&O KCNC-TV4) comes (purportedly) the true story of a Lockheed L-1011-1 Tristar jet that crashed into the Florida Everglades at 11:42 pm December 29, 1972, causing 101 fatalities (99 initial crash fatalities, two died shortly afterward). This film, titled THE GHOST OF FLIGHT 401, was based on a novel by John G. Fuller, which, per Eastern Air Lines CEO (and former Apollo astronaut) Frank Borman, was "garbage"; Eastern Air Lines sued the author as did the widow of one of the victims, Captain Bob Loft. On the plus side though, we get a pre-Mermaid Man Ernest Borgnine (very much between McHALE'S NAVY and SPONGEBOB, I'm guessing), a role played by Tom Clancy (and I believe that, yes, it's THAT Tom Clancy), and the original commercials intact (all except for one between the NBC Saturday Night at the Movies intro and the opening credits, which the OP assumes was removed so that whoever recorded this that night could tape a story about serial killer Ted Bundy getting captured in Florida; we'll hear about that well after the film finishes, at 1:57:25 of the video; the assumption is made because an SP-mode VHS tape [or for that matter, a Beta tape] could only run up to two hours at the time.)
KOA-TV was signed on December 24, 1953 by Metropolitan Broadcasting (partly owned by Bob Hope, whose presence on the station would be entirely obvious), owners of KOA radio (850 AM and 103.5 FM, now KRFX), channel 4 immediately assumed the NBC affiliation from KBTV (channel 9, now KUSA), due to KOA radio's longtime affiliation with and ownership by the NBC Red Network. In 1968, Metropolitan Broadcasting sold KOA-AM-FM-TV to General Electric for $10 million. GE sold the KOA radio stations to A. H. Belo Corporation in 1983 for $22 million, as part of the company's overall exit from broadcasting. GE retained channel 4, but was required to change the station's call letters to KCNC-TV (standing for "Colorado's News Channel"), which it officially adopted on August 12 of that year. In 1986, NBC became the owner of the station when GE bought out the network's long-time parent RCA.
In July 1994, CBS and Westinghouse Electric Corporation agreed to a long-term affiliation deal that would result in three of Westinghouse's television stations (WJZ-TV in Baltimore, KYW-TV in Philadelphia and WBZ-TV in Boston) become CBS affiliates, joining the company's two longtime CBS affiliates (KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh and KPIX-TV in San Francisco). However, CBS discovered that if it sold its longtime O&O in Philadelphia, WCAU, in order to affiliate with KYW-TV, it would have had to pay hefty capital gains taxes on the profit of the transaction. To solve this problem, in November 1994, NBC decided to swap ownership of KCNC-TV and Salt Lake City's KUTV (which NBC had acquired in October), along with the VHF channel 4 allocation and transmitter in Miami to CBS in exchange for WCAU, which for legal reasons made the deal an even trade. KCNC became Denver's CBS affiliate at 12:00 a.m. on September 10, 1995, as part of a three-way affiliation swap involving each of the market's "Big Three" network affiliates. Longtime CBS affiliate KMGH-TV (channel 7) switched its affiliation to ABC through a multi-station affiliation agreement with KMGH's owners at the time, McGraw-Hill, while longtime ABC affiliate KUSA took the NBC affiliation (although KUSA's owners, the Gannett Company, had already owned several NBC affiliates at the time, as is the case in the present day with successor company Tegna, Inc.). The final NBC program broadcast on the station on September 9 was a repeat episode of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE; NBC moved all of its programming locally to KUSA after the program ended. Under the terms of the CBS/Westinghouse deal, CBS a sold controlling ownership interest (55%) in KCNC to Westinghouse's broadcasting division Group W. The previous month on August 1, Westinghouse had acquired CBS for $5.4 billion; once the merger was finalized on November 24, 1995, KCNC-TV became (and remains) a CBS-owned-and-operated station, making it one of a handful of television stations that have been owned by two different networks at separate points in its history.
