Last night I transferred off my copy of On the Double, with Danny Kaye playing two parts, that of hapless American private Ernest Williams (who has one bad eye and is "...on a salt-free, fat-free, high protein, low calorie, low cholesterol diet") and also British general Lawrence MacKenzie-Smith (a swaggering pompous philanderer). MacKenzie-Smith is on the D-Day planning group, so while he's off on a secret mission, Pvt. Williams (in lieu of being courtmartialed for imitating the general) is pressed into service to be a decoy. What he doesn't know and what the general's wife (the lovely Dana Wynter) swiftly informs him of, he's marked for death. It's the usual Kaye melange of music (although there's only two songs), slapstick, and romance and although it's not as good as The Court Jester, it's amusing and engaging.

I discovered my AMC copy (the real American Movie Classics, before they Darth Vader'd themselves) is pretty sad, but this Kaye classic is, surprisingly, not even on videotape. So I'm glad I have a copy of whatever quality.

This afternoon I'm trying a new trick. Several months ago I was copying off all my episodes of Disney's "Gallegher," based on the Richard Harding Davis story about a newspaper copyboy. Unfortunately, when I tried to dub off the final story, "The Mystery of Edward Sims," which I didn't record off the Disney Channel myself but someone sent me a copy of, I had a problem. The Panasonic recorder is programmed to shut off immediately if you try to copy off a copyguarded tape. The "Edward Sims" story had a signal dropout about 22 minutes into it, direct from the cable, and when the picture finally returns to its clear state, it has a sort of shimmy in it for a few minutes. The unit apparently interprets this as a copyguard signal and shuts off the unit, scolding you for trying to clone a copyguarded tape.

We have a Sharp VCR we were ready to cart off to Goodwill; it still works fine but I prefer Panasonic and the Sharp has quirks that annoy me. It occurred to me that perhaps it's the Panasonic VCR that has the copyguard sensing in it and is signalling the DVD recorder to stop. Perhaps if I plugged the Sharp into the Line Port and tried to record from that unit, it might not pick up that signal and would record straight through.

I tried it on the DVD-RAM and it seemed to tape through the part where it shut off the first time, so I'm hoping the whole thing will be okay. If it works, I might be able to dub off my America tapes as well.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 2:30:00 PM

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