Today is Feb 1st and it's the 40 year anniversary of the original broadcast of Animalympics Winter Games TV Special.

This was supposed to be the first of 2 specials for NBC's Olympics coverage and NBC was betting a lot on the ratings for the Olympics that year.

NBC has struggled for several years being almost in 4th place out of 3 networks, they were in very bad shape. Things were looking good but sports and politics were about to collide in a big way. As the summer games were being held in Russia who had invaded Afghanistan.

Calls to Boycott the Olympics where being thrown around and even NBC had their coverage insured by Lloyd's of London as a financial backup.

Lisberger Studios had a lot riding on these specials but they were about to hit a dead end and the Summer Games never got broadcast.

To save what they could Lisberger had Animalympics smooshed into movie form and tried to sell it theatrically but only managed to get it on pay TV.

Sysable had recorded the broadcast of the Winter Games and once he got his paws on the movie version he had a crazy idea....

The Winter Games had the Winter Games title card and the Movie said Summer Games .... so let's re-create the TV special and with the help of an edit bay produced a separated TV special version.

This was shown at furry parties and conventions refereed to as the CF/O Cut.

This slowly became “the Rocky Horror of Furry Fandom” with people reciting lines and jokes during screenings. They wore the hell out of those tapes and by the 2010s those tapes were essentially unplayable. The original recording of the Winter Games were fine and got digitized.

For the 35 year anniversary we used a DVD copy of the film to reproduce the Summer Games special and had a showing at Califur with guest Michael Fremer who was in town for a trade Show. He did various voices and co-wrote Anymallympics, as well as being the music editor.

For the 40th we recently sat down and did the work again but with a more recent transfer and other sources for missing footage and reproduced the Summer Games special again.

With a newly cleaned up recording of the Winter Games (Which includes footage not seen in the movie version); we give you this remastered CF/O cut of Animalympics as it would have looked at those early furry parties.

Before they did Animalympics Lisberger did animated commercials for Bubblicious with so much late 70s animated aesthetics.

As a later note on this thread: The video posted was taken down for copyright reasons.