'Hit The Lights, Breezy'

Back before the National Football League decided it needed to stretch its schedule into February, Labor Day weekend marked the opening of the regular season.

Now, with rosters being finalized by Friday night, the football junkie only has a couple of options for the holiday – college blowouts and YouTube.

How anyone finds the former remotely interesting is kind of beyond me. There are plenty of gems to find on the latter, though. Like the following segment of the highlight reel from the Buffalo Bills’ inaugural season.

Back in the days before cable television, much less internet-ready mobile devices, these films were used to market the team in the community. Team officials and players would make the rounds of local Kiwanis Club and volunteer fire department meetings during the offseason, trying to sell tickets for the following year.

Around this time, NFL Films started filming games on its own, sending out cameramen to intimately document the action, rather than relying on the static, far-away angles that made up network broadcasts. 

They set the resulting footage to music, and wrote ominously lyrical scripts narrated by the late John Facenda, known to anyone who has ever seen an NFL Films highlight package made between the 1960s and ‘80s as The Voice of God.

What follows is not one of those films.

This reel is pretty washed out in places (looks like it may have been recorded via video camera off a TV screen), but worth a look for a few select elements:

-The opening commercial for Marine Trust, youthfully narrated by Van Miller, which shows that corporate propaganda has been part of the Bills’ mission since Day One.

-The careful telling of the franchise’s origin story, including a meeting between handsome young tycoon Ralph Wilson Jr. and cigarette-smoking Buffalo officials, as well as mundane details regarding laundry and equipment.

-The brutally honest selection of highlights, the first few involving injuries to key Buffalo players and several showing New York Titans quarterback Al Dorow confounding the Bills’ defense. Soon, NFL Films would take over the production of such team highlight reels, and pioneer the art form of making even the most hapless football team into a collection of inspiring warrior-patriots and the crummiest Super Bowls into epic morality plays, if only for a half-hour. The ’60 Bills get no such treatment.

-Buster Ramsey’s narration, which ranges from let’s-get-this-over-with contempt to barely contained hostility. Buffalo’s first head coach was known to get down in a stance, with no pads, and battle is fully equipped linemen in practice. In a few spots here, he looks like he would rather put a shoulder under the cameraman’s chin than read the next cue card.

 

(Note: We Want Marangi is in possession of the first 49 years’ worth of Bills’ season highlights, which will be posted as soon as our videography department figures out how to do so.)