Dating a Tape With No Commercials

It ain't easy, it's a long process, but it's absolutely possible! Here's one of the methods I use.

Let's take a look at one of my Little Bear tapes. The only ads on here are a couple Face bumpers, a Little Bear promo (coincidentally enough), and a commercial for animal crackers.

First, let's make a note of the episodes on here:

Little Bear "Up All Night / Little Bear's Bath / Father Bear Comes Home"

Little Bear "Rafting on the River / Little Bear's Kite / Night of the Full Moon"

Little Bear "Little Bear Sing a Song / A House for Mitzi / Up a Tree"

Little Bear "Mother Nature / Dance Steps / Who Am I?"

Little Bear "Picnic on Pudding Hill / Little Bear's Walkabout / Secret Friend"

All right, that was simple enough. Now let's take a closer look at the episodes.

Right off the bat, we can tell from the Nick Jr. screenbug (logo) that this tape was recorded in 1999. At this point, Nick Jr. still used a temporary screenbug, and it wasn't until around September 20 that the screenbug stayed on screen throughout the program.

The screenbugs seen here are actually very important. From April 1997- September 1999, the shape of Nick Jr.'s screenbug depended on the time of the broadcast. The Nickstory Archives team and I have cataloged a majority of these, but for now we'll focus on one particular set...

We know that the screen
bug set represented above first appeared as early as February 17, 1999. Note that while a very similar set was used the previous year (with February 8, 1999 being the most recent usage I'm aware of), these versions added a cast shadow to the animal shapes. The "bears" screenbug was used at 9:00am and 12:00pm, and the "seals" screenbug appeared at 10:00am. Further supporting this are the times given at the end of the Little Bear promo on this tape.

So we've narrowed this tape down to days potentially ranging from February - September 1999.

Recently I compiled a list of all the times Little Bear aired in 1999, along with every known episode title. Most of my information was culled from hours of research in newspapers like the Burlington Times News, The Miami Herald, and The Daily Herald... as well as recordings I have from the actual broadcasts. We'll use this list to narrow down all the times these episodes aired in 1999.

Annnnnnd... presto!

It's important to note that at this time each episode ran once about every 34-36 days... once at 10:00am and once at 12:00pm. Going by the information we've already determined from the Nick Jr. screenbugs, we can conclude that every episode except "Rafting on the River / Little Bear's Kite / Night of the Full Moon" is a 10:00am airing, and the odd one out was recorded at 12:00pm.

Let's see how that affects our list...

The July 1999 airings of "Rafting on the River / Little Bear's Kite / Night of the Full Moon" and "Little Bear Sing a Song / A House for Mitzi / Up a Tree" happened in the opposite order they appear on the tape -- and none of the tape was recorded over later on (I checked), so we can eliminate those dates too.

We can also knock the May 20th and July 30th airings of "Up All Night / Little Bear's Bath / Father Bear Comes Home" off the list, because if "Rafting / Kite / Moon" aired on May 7th, then the former couldn't have appeared first on the tape.

This confirms the air dates for the first and third episodes on the tape, and also confirms the start date for this screenbug set! How about that? Since we know "Little Bear Sing a Song / A House for Mitzi / Up a Tree" is from May 10th, the previous episode obviously can't be from September. Let's knock that off the list.

Two more episodes to date! I actually have a recording of "Mother Nature / Dance Steps / Who Am I?" that I know is from July 23, 1999. Comparing the same scene from the two recordings, we can see that  there's no screenbug on the July 23rd recording, meaning the one from "Tape 050" could only be from May 11th.

July 23, 1999 recording

Tape 050

Okay, so the frames are slightly different, but you get the idea.

This leaves us with only the final episode, "Picnic on Pudding Hill / Little Bear's Walkabout / Secret Friend." Unfortunately, as of this writing I do not have any way to confirm when it was recorded. I'm leaning towards May 14th as the most likely date of the two, but considering how the tape jumps almost two months between the first two recordings, we can't rule out the possibility that the original taper did the same thing again on July 27th..

Such is common in the world of tape archiving. We don't always get all the answers, but 4 out of 5 ain't bad at all. The best we can do is rest confident in what we were able to determine and hold out hope that someday in the future, we'll discover a piece of evidence that will crack this mystery tape for good!

Think I'll celebrate with some animal crackers.