I wrote a couple of months ago about the odd and (usually rightfully) obscure movies that we got in the AFRTS shipments of programming back in the day that I was a lowly airman, working the night shift in the TV control room at FEN-Misawa. Indeed, we received many an odd selection of movies in the weekly package of TV programming.

In the first year or so of my service, the weekly TV program package came on half-hour long film reels, and then on Umatic ¾ videotape cassettes, which were a lot less messy to deal with – but still had their own challenges, mostly because the cassettes were held together with about thirty teeny metal screws, which had the dismaying tendency to come loose in transit – and then drop into the innards of the playback machine, necessitating much swearing by our engineering staff and possibly damage to the delicate machinery itself. As our experience developed with that format, a small Phillips-head screwdriver was routinely chained to the rack where the daily programs were pulled from their metal traveling cases and lined up the night before by the on-duty operator. Yes, part of that duty was to tighten ALL the screws holding each and every tape case together, the rollers, and the little metal flange that was supposed to protect the tape itself. In some cases, we went to the extent of opening and carefully rethreading the tape through the various rollers and take-up reels. Yes, we probably weren’t supposed to be doing this, but … whatever. The program had to air, especially if it were a very popular one. We all got very good at administering first aid to ailing Umatic cassette tapes.

Anyway – the movies. Many of the movies in the package were … grade C. The bottom of a double feature in a dollar theater in the bad part of town. Or so old and/or low rent that they were aired late at night back at home, interspersed with commercials for shady used car lots. It was a bafflement for years – why did AFRTS generally seemed to get the absolute dregs when it came to movies? We kind of got it that the military post-Vietnam was about as popular as a case of herpes with the Hollywood set, and perhaps that was the reason. We shrugged and moved on.

In the fullness of time, I finished the tour in Japan, whiled away a pleasant year in the Public Affairs office at (now closed) Mather AFB. After that, I did a tour at Sondrestrom AB, Greenland, of which it was often said, “Not the end of the world – but you can see it from there!” Sondrestrom was thirty miles north of the Arctic Circle and saved from complete and total isolation by also being the main international airport for all of Greenland.

During WWII the US Army Air Corps, after careful consideration, sited a transit airfield on that exact spot, because of usually favorable local weather conditions, as opposed to the generally unwelcoming weather conditions practically everywhere else on that continent. For an isolated military base, Sondrestrom AB hosted a constant trickle of international travelers on the Danish side of the base where the international airport terminal and hotel complex was situated –  separated from the American military side by nothing more than a narrow road around the top end of the landing strip.

(The runway had been built half on hard ground and half on fill blasted out from the hills and dumped into the end of a 40-mile-long fjord. It bent downhill in the middle. Only very experienced pilots of large aircraft were permitted to land and take off from Sondrestrom, situated as it was at the end of a 40-long, straight-as-a-die fjord with tall mountains lining either side.)

Anyway, there had long been an Air Force broadcasting squadron detachment at Sondrestrom. For exactly how long, I didn’t know; the very oldest discs in the library of AFRTS-Radio releases in the record library there (specifically in limited issue to AFRTS-Radio outlets only, beginning with #1 sometime in the early 40’s) were on enormous 16-inch records, and numbered in the 600s.

There was also – because this was an Air Force establishment, a range of recreational venues, all catering to the Air Force personnel, the Danish and American contract employees, Danish staff of the Royal Greenlandic Trading Co., and the airport. This included NCO and officer clubs, a small indoor swimming pool (said to be the only such in Greenland) and the BX movie theater, which usually showed first-run movies about six months after said movies opened Stateside. The co-location of the BX theater, and the international airport and hotel in such a remote site had a strange and incidental bearing on the lack of good movies in the AFRTS weekly packages, for a reason that I didn’t hear about until a decade later.

I did a year-long tour in Greenland and departed for a follow-on to Greece – my choice as a reward for a year in a place that couldn’t possibly be any more remote unless it was the Antarctic. Eventually I finished out my overseas assignments in Korea, at AIG-Yongsan, in the heart of downtown Seoul. In a conversation with an older NCO, who had knocked around military broadcasting for some years longer than I had and had a wider repertoire of stories about that specialty and some of the very odd characters in it. When I mentioned that I had done a tour in Greenland, he told me how our broadcast detachment there was the direct cause of movies in AFRTS-TV weekly packages being routinely so third- or fourth-rate for decades.

I honestly do not know if the story he told me was true or not. I am certain that it was technologically and in practice possible. Being in such isolated location, with only the semi-weekly transport aircraft from the States, and international flights taking a northerly route as a lifeline to the larger world – military personnel stationed there get very, very bored. It’s always dangerous when intelligent people in an isolated situation get bored. Because they do creative things to alleviate that boredom, especially when there is no one around to advise against the most … er, creative diversions.

What is supposed to have happened is that whoever was in charge of the BX movie theater got together with someone at the broadcast station.

(It may have been the same person, actually. It was a small base, and a lot of personnel doubled up on extra jobs. The year I was at Sondrestrom, the NCOIC of the Security Police unit was also the senior enlisted advisor, and manager of the BX theater.)

That person, or persons enabled the almost-new movie releases intended to be shown at the base theater to be taken to the station – and broadcast. This spectacularly violated a pair of iron-clad rules, the first being that only TV and radio programs provided by the AFRTS programming center can be aired by stations worldwide. The other larger rule violated – and the one with major outside-the-military implications – was that the movies to be shown in the base theater had not been released for broadcast in any form. That those movies were being illegally broadcast at a dinky military TV station with a total reach of maybe five miles in any direction, thirty miles north of the Arctic Circle made no difference. It violated the rights of the various movie copyright holders – yet it might have passed unnoticed.

But it didn’t. Apparently, according to my acquaintance, a fairly prominent studio executive happened to be passing through the international airport. Stuck in the airport hotel for a night or two, he turned on the TV in his room … and saw one of his studio’s new releases being broadcast. Illegally. When that executive got back to the States, the word went out from him, and just about every other movie production house that AFRTS was henceforward on the bad books; from then on, only used-up movie dregs were released to the AFRTS TV programming center.

I really don’t know if this occurred as my informant told me, as it was a story passed along like a game of telephone. But I – and anyone who ever tuned into AFRTS during the last quarter of last century can truthfully testify that, yeah – the movies broadcast on military TV stations were a very odd and generally low-rent collection.