What’s On This Tape
The tape opens with WCMH-4’s evening news. The Ohio State Fair dominates the broadcast. Bungee jumping at the fair cost $65 a jump. Dan Quayle said he wasn’t going to try it. There’s a feature on Ravi Shankar and a segment about chlorine levels at Windsor Terrace. Standard local news stuff, except nobody saved local news in 1992.
From there it cuts to NBC’s Barcelona Olympics coverage. Night 14. Steffi Graf versus Jennifer Capriati in tennis. Capriati wins. USA versus Brazil in volleyball. Bob Costas hosting. Then it moves to the RCA Hardcourt Championships out of Indianapolis (Courier vs Sampras) and ESPN’s Volvo International (Edberg vs Lendl). Four different tennis events on one tape.
The middle section is a full block of General Hospital on WSYX-6 with an enormous run of daytime commercial breaks. This is where the tape gets wild. The volume of ads is staggering.
Near the end, there’s a brief channel-surfing segment where the recorder flipped through the Columbus channel landscape, including a stop on C-SPAN. Then it finishes with 1992 Wimbledon coverage: Agassi versus Ivanisevic. Ivanisevic threw his racket. Viewers faxed in questions through something called Xerox Sports Fax, a pre-internet audience interaction system that has essentially vanished from the historical record.
The Commercial Inventory
This tape has over 100 commercials. Here are the highlights:
- Ricart Ford – Basketball-themed car commercial, pure Columbus
- Meijer School Days – Back-to-school supplies ad
- Tom Raper RVs – Campers, RVs, and mobile homes
- TrueValue Carnival of Values – Features a clown
- Burlington Coat Factory – Back-to-school clothing
- Lazarus – The Columbus department store
- Taco Bell Supreme – Back when they had green onions
- Reebok – Short film-style football commercial
- BP Research – Boats, planes, race cars indoors
- Lexus LS400 – Early luxury car marketing
- RCA CinemaScreen – A 16:9 CRT television ad during tennis coverage
- Patrick Stewart narrating – An RCA home theater commercial
- IBM Touch Screens – Yes, in 1992
- Nike Tennis – Flaming podium ad
- Ziploc Bags – Bags with drawn-on finger faces
- Betty Crocker – Cookbook and recipe sauces
- Kroger – Red ripe watermelon ad with nothing but aggressive sound effects
- Sunny Delight – Before it was called Sunny D
- FDS Feminine Deodorant Spray – A product of its time
- Sleepinal – Sleeping pill commercial
- 1-900-820-SOAP – A soap opera phone line
- Bud Dry – The beer that disappeared
Why This Tape Matters
Columbus local television from 1992 was never systematically preserved. Stations didn’t archive their own broadcasts. The WCMH-4 news with Ohio State Fair coverage, the WSYX-6 daytime commercial breaks, the local station promos, the Xerox Sports Fax segment during Wimbledon… none of this exists in any known public archive.
The tape was streamed live across two sessions due to its six-hour runtime. The commercial breaks during General Hospital alone could fill their own highlight reel.
This tape is filed as VHS-2026-334 in the 90s Craig archive. Veratron brand. High Fidelity grade. Six hours of EP mode recording. Every minute of it is 1992 Columbus.
Catch tapes like this one live on twitch.tv/90sCraig