Eagle Dealership Video - Anyone seen it?

[MIPS]

I stumbled on it by accident last spring and it was an interactive videodisc for training AMC dealers. The end of the video started to drop out because of disc rot but it was otherwise all there.
I didn't think to download it for safekeeping and now that I need to check something about it the video and another near identical one that faired a bit better for quality have vanished. All I can find now are small portions of the disc like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcaseePns-g

I'd love to find and buy the disc if someone here has it (it's embedded with a very old and very special data encoding that only the first few laserdisc players support) but even if someone knows where the ripped video went I can work with that too. Please tell me I was not the only one who saw it.

[djm3452004]

You are definitely not the only one that saw it on YT.  I was wondering where it went as well a couple weeks ago when I went searching for it again.  It was a cool video.  I believe it had the "greased incline" demonstrations/ comparisons of the Eagle VC 4-wheel drive system vs. either Subaru or Toyota.

As I have no laserdisc player, I'd love to get a digital version of the video as well if it ever turns-up.

"More Tough Action from American Motors" -- a delightfully '80s Marlboro-man-esque, tough-guy motto.  I know you can hear the guy's voice as you read those words... 

David

[MIPS]

Yep, That's the one. There was a section demonstrating how the Eagle could climb a greased incline with the rear wheels spinning and another where they demonstrated no wheel hop.

I am swimming in laserdisc players right now and hoping to get access to a project in the next 6 to 8 months that lets me rip laserdiscs by extracting the signal coming off the laser before it gets turned into a video signal, which would give you the highest possible quality video. It's a big project that a few of my more nerdy friend have been watching get developed  for a few years - https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978

[MIPS]

I think I found it.
There is someone on ebay right now selling small lots of AMC/Renault training discs and one of them included the disc for the 1985 model year Eagle. The price was very steep but considering the original video I was referring to in this thread has never resurfaced I might as well grab it and hope it will dump without rot issues. It should arrive in the mail within a week or so.

[MIPS]

After three months of work the discs have arrived.



I don't immediately see classic disc rot but I do see the aluminized reflective layer is speckling so it's been reacting with the glue. I'll need to pull out one of my VP-1000's after a few other projects are dealt with and try dumping it.

[MIPS]

Initial tests look good. The disc has some rot but unlike the last disc uploaded online I can get a full capture of the entire disc!


(ignore the red stripe. It's a bad LCD but the display itself is $800)

[MIPS]

It's digitized and the sleeve images are now processed. I'm just running into a few weird issues with the upload and then I can post the link here.

Edited: Youtube is absolutely not being happy with "I'm so Excited" playing over a compilation video Renault added near the end. The plan is I'll upload the video in raw dump and alternately trimmed and deinterlaced, plus both sides of the sleeve and the supplement letter that comes with the disc kit on the Internet Archive, then try to make an edited version go on Youtube that doesn't make ContentID so unhappy. You might of briefly seen it pop up last night with a link then vanish this morning. For some reason it processed weirdly and was generating random extra files, so it was deleted. I'll try and get it back up tonight.

[vangremlin]

Very cool!  Thanks!

[Taylor]

Very cool video, thank you for sharing. Hopefully I’ll get to watch the rest this afternoon.
Haven’t used my last disk player in at least 10 years. Good to see someone else has a collection of antique electric equipment.
Since my internet connection usually stinks, I finally got the video to work. It was a very capable vehicle for the day. Still is in my opinion. Only vehicle I ever had that was better in deep snow was a big lifted dodge 4X4 pickup.

So apparently I only saw the intro yesterday.

[MIPS]

Okay, after a false start, it's live.

https://archive.org/details/amc-124-a-85_202307

You get a photo of the disc, the sleeve front and back, the supplement document AMC shipped with it and two versions of the disc: The original as I digitized it in an interlaced video format (it's a 6gb file) and a "retouched" video that I have trimmed the start to frame 1, deinterlaced and compressed it (down to just 1gb)
The digital noise you hear in the right audio channel was to "program" the videodisc player so the dealership could control the interactive menus from the remote without any additional hardware.

I have digitized the other discs seen in the above lot and I'll try to get them up in the next few weeks but they are all directed at Renault products, which I don't think we care for here.
Oh yeah, AMC it seems had all their dealership and training discs manufactured by Technidisc. In the early to mid 80's they were famous for very poor quality discs that "rot". The video distortion and popping in the audio is a result of that and the Eagle's disc was surprisingly the best of the four discs I purchased. One of them was so bad I had to pull out a second player because the laser could not lock-in.

[djm3452004]

Thank you so much for your efforts!  This is amazing work, as the preservation of this media for our chosen hobby vehicles is critical to the understanding of how the Eagle fit in with the evolving AMC sales situation in the mid-to-late 80's, even as it increasingly became an anachronism.

David

[MIPS]

The last of the discs I have went up last night. They are all from 1985/1986 mind you but people really want too much money for these discs online to justify buying every disc I see.

https://archive.org/details/ajr-129-85 - Selling Practices
https://archive.org/details/ren-122-85 - 1985 Renault Products
https://archive.org/details/ren-128-85 - Renault Encore & Alliance
https://archive.org/details/8981-321-171 - Fuel Injection
https://archive.org/details/8981-321-181 - Wet Sleeve Engines

Each link contains both sides of the disc, photographs of both sides of the disc, both sides of the sleeve the disc is stored in and scans of any other documentation that might of been included.

[djm3452004]

Absolute gold.  Thank you for your work to get these available for everyone!

David