I was wondering if anyone had recorded, even on cassette tape, any of David Copperfield or Doug Henning's live shows from the 1980's. 

There are several other music concert audio recordings by individuals from that time frame that can be found online.  I'd love to know if any exist of either David or Doug's shows. It would be great if some type of record of these shows, even just audio on cassette, existed for preservation and future generations. 

Please feel free to PM any thoughts/info as well.  Thanks.

They’re all on YouTube in mostly garbage quality. It’s frankly amazing that better VHS rips don’t exist. Or that Copperfield never put out any form of decent archive of his television work with the exception of the Illusion DVD, which was pretty much just the 25 Years of Magic special with Schiffer edited out.

Copperfield was very concerned about the theft of his show. So, he was reluctant to "put out" the shows.
At least that's what he told me in a Meet and Greet after a show in Orlando.

I've been asking them to remaster for years. They don't seem to publicly respond about this. Which is disappointing. The line that they give is they don't like to look back only forward.
Which is interesting considering that they have the museum honoring the legacy of other magicians and industry. Ask a teenager these days who DC is most won't be able to answer. Hoping they'll change their minds but as of this far it's a no go. There are licensing issues I'm guessing both with CBS but also music licensing that is going to be complex if they remaster and release the specials. Could be part of why they don't release them. Any insiders can shed some insight here?

There was a 15-20 minute segment of Doug Hennings show live.However it has been removed maybe 3 or 4
years ago.

I have all of them somewhere. I just have no idea if they’re still playable at this point. I know we had them on 3/4” tapes at the Castle but again, not sure they were ever remastered

Magic history recorded on video tape is slipping away.

I have to hope that David Copperfield has video masters of all of his television specials. I think most of Mark Wilson's television work is preserved and curated by Greg Wilson (but after Greg , who ?). Much of the magic broadcast on television during the 1970's -80's -90's seems to only be preserved by whoever recorded it on VHS tape at the time of the original broadcasts and have transferred their VHS tape recordings to digital format. The magic specials hosted by Dick Cavett, the Doug Henning specials, various other specials , who knows where the master recordings are? I wonder if Debby Henning has all of Doug's television work preserved ? However, the way Doug gave it all up and left magic behind at one point makes me wonder how much of his former life he cared to hold on to and preserve ? (although towards the end of his life he seems to have rediscovered his love for magic, so he may have made some efforts to archive his television work?)

The William McIlhany Film Archive is now owned by the Magicana organization (David Ben and Julie Eng). They announced in 2018 plans to digitize all of McIlhany's film material on 16mm , 8mm, and Super-8mm film, plus his video tape material, but since then I haven't heard anything about it. The McIlhany collection consists of 250 reels of 16mm film, nearly 100 reels of 8mm film, and over 75 cartons of videotapes. That's a lot to go through, catalog , and digitize professionally (very expensive), but I hope at some point the McIlhany collection will be seen by the magic community.

- David has all the masters are in his archives in Vegas. From what I understand most was shot on DIGIBeta. 15 years much of it was on Film.