David Letterman 'Late Show' Clips Are Gone From YouTube, But...

Ken Tucker
·Critic-at-Large, Yahoo Entertainment
Updated
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If you’re looking for a David Letterman Late Show fix on YouTube, you’re going to have to search a little harder.

As BuzzFeed reported yesterday, the official CBS Late Show With David Letterman YouTube page has been scrubbed free of content. A CBS spokesperson explains: “Now that the show has ended, these digital rights revert back to the show’s copyright owner, Worldwide Pants.” In other words, until Letterman’s own production company acts, official Late Show clips will not pop up. True, there is a lot of Late Show material posted by citizen-fans, but the quality is not good.

But take heart: There is a heck of a lot of great Letterman material still to be seen… of the older, NBC Late Night shows. Take this one, from 1985. It features a then-typically unpredictable, show-long stunt: Letterman did the entire hour from backstage, in the NBC offices.

The guests are Teri Garr (then a Letterman mainstay and a great reactor to Letterman’s needling) and Richard Lewis (jumpy and morosely funny as usual). In between, there’s a fun segment in which Letterman shows you footage of Stupid Pet Tricks that never made it onto the air. The fact that he has to insert big ol’ Betamax tapes into the machine to play them only adds to the charm.

I would also recommend a 1987 episode broadcast from Las Vegas. Letterman interviews Sammy Davis, Jr., and Letterman goes into a casino to play the slots with an Elvis impersonator.

Letterman lives on forever.