Apparently, in 1980, RSO sent this videotape to record retailers to play in-store to promote the soundtrack to Times Square. It features the two songs performed in the film, “Your Daughter Is One” and “Damn Dog.” The fact that the lyrics to “Your Daughter Is One” consist primarily of curse words and racial slurs guaranteed that it would never be played in any store for more than thirty seconds. The fact that nobody at RSO, from the tape’s conception to its distribution, realized that would happen, boggles the mind.
The middle portion of the tape is an edit of the dance the girls do along 42nd Street to “Life During Wartime” by Talking Heads. Much of this sequence is made up of shots that do not actually appear in the film; unfortunately here they’re only four or five frames long. Even more unfortunately, this digitization is at such low resolution that individual frames turn into pretty smears of color.
This video was originally digitized and uploaded on February 24 2012 by “PsychoticNorman”. I’ve offered to buy or borrow the tape to make a higher quality transfer, but have not received a reply. I have fixed the aspect ratio and brightened and sharpened the image a little. You can see PsychoticNorman’s original upload here. My file is technically at a higher resolution, but that’s an artifact of my editing software refusing to save at the small resolution of the original file. I’ve tried to make it easier to look at, but there isn’t really any more detail.
(video modified 25 December 2015 from the file digitized by PsychoticNorman at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S38UzHtkmeA)
Related Posts
Canadian Movie Poster
The movie poster for Times Square in Canada is almost identical to the U.S. poster. In fact, it is a U.S. poster, with two white stickers affixed to the bottom, one covering the American "R" rating barring under-17's without a parent or guardian, and the other adding the Canadian "R"…
The Mystery of the Double-Sided Poster, Side Two
Fully opening the two-sided poster reveals my favorite version of the image most associated with Times Square. As I mentioned last time, I find the red background more visually pleasing than the yellow used on the movie poster and soundtrack album cover. There are several other differences in this version,…
photoplay, Vol. 32 No. 4, April 1981
The Paul Wilson Column ("The man you want to read every month...") in the April 1981 photoplay contained a brief bit of publicity that was typical of the coverage Robin and Times Square was getting by now in Great Britain (where the movie had long since closed) and Australia:…