{"id":190816,"date":"2025-09-01T04:44:13","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T04:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/190816\/"},"modified":"2025-09-01T04:44:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T04:44:13","slug":"dallas-cowboys-documentary-how-wfaa-helped-make-the-netflix-series-a-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/190816\/","title":{"rendered":"Dallas Cowboys documentary | How WFAA helped make the Netflix series a reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

WFAA\u2019s decades of Cowboys coverage\u2014and one retired editor who dug it up\u2014helped shape Netflix\u2019s retelling of the team\u2019s dynasty.<\/p>\n

DALLAS \u2014 The newest Netflix documentary\u00a0<\/a>on the Dallas Cowboys<\/a>\u2019 dynasty of the 1990s is filled with images every fan recognizes. But ‘America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys’\u2014the touchdowns, the press conferences, the Jerry Jones gamble\u2014wouldn\u2019t look the same without someone quietly digging through decades of old file tape in Dallas.<\/p>\n

That someone, for WFAA, was Brian Hardcastle, the station’s former chief editor.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was chief editor here at WFAA for 18 years,\u201d he said. \u201cIn May of 2023, a production company called Nimea got in touch with me, wondering if I could pull a lot of file video of the Dallas Cowboys from the time that Jerry Jones bought them. No one here at WFAA had time for this massive list\u2026so they called me, and I was happy to come in and do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

WFAA wasn’t the only station that opened its archives. Fox 4, which was affiliated with CBS during the Cowboys’ heyday until 1995, and NBC 5 also provided mounds of footage for the documentary.\u00a0<\/p>\n


\n \"\"<\/p>\n

“Knowing the amount of video that I sent them, I imagine the other stations sent them just as much. They must have waded through hundreds and hundreds of hours of video,” Hardcastle said. “There’s a lot more corporate control now over footage these days, but back in the 80s and 90s stations had a lot more access.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

The work was anything but simple, Hardcastle said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey would send me a list, three or four single-space pages of things they were looking for\u2014specific dates, incidents, players,\u201d Hardcastle recalled. \u201cI\u2019d research on the computer, go to the tape library, find and pull the tapes, gather them all together, bring them back here to WFAA, and start digitizing them one by one, story by story.\u201d<\/p>\n

He scrubbed through miles of beta tape, which is basically a massive VHS tape, unlike today\u2019s digital archives. \u201cIt all had to be digitized first and then sent to New York. Put the tape in the machine, record it onto a server, and then edit it down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hardcastle wasn\u2019t surprised by the sheer amount of footage waiting on the shelves.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cDallas is a football town, and we have saved so much video from the Cowboys,\u201d he said. \u201cThere must be 40 tapes from the day that Jerry bought the team, just from the raw video alone. There\u2019s also raw video of every Cowboys game from the early \u201980s to today, sitting in the library.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes, he found gems that producers hadn\u2019t even requested.<\/p>\n


\n \"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cI found several things that they might want that they didn\u2019t ask for\u2014unusual stories, humorous stories, sad stories, tragic stories. Since I was watching them, I thought, \u2018Hey, why not send them this, too?\u2019 I think they incorporated a few of them into the documentary as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

One that stood out: a young Michael Irvin posing with a cardboard cutout of Tom Landry when he first came to the team. \u201cHe was saying, \u2018Hey, my new dad,\u2019\u201d Hardcastle laughed. \u201cThey used that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hardcastle admits the work could be time-consuming.\u00a0<\/p>\n


\n \"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was tedious,\u201d he said. \u201cBut like everything in television, as you\u2019re going through these archives, you find little diamonds in the rough and go, \u2018God, that is really interesting.\u2019 You\u2019re just like, I\u2019m amazed that I worked with such talented people.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the final product debuted, the pride set in.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the very first part of the documentary on, I was like, \u2018Hey, I pulled that. Hey, that went through me. Hey, that was WFAA,\u201d he said. \u201cAfter a while, I was like, all right, I\u2019m just going to sit back and enjoy it now. It\u2019s a very fascinating documentary, and I\u2019m enjoying it very much. I\u2019ve never been a Cowboys fan and never been a fan of Jerry Jones, but now, as a result of seeing the documentary, I have a lot more respect for Jerry, and I like the Cowboys a little bit more now.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n \"\"<\/p>\n

For Hardcastle, it all comes down to history\u2014saved and shared.<\/p>\n

\u201cI played a small part in pulling the video for this documentary,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it made me very proud to have worked with such talented people here at WFAA and all the amazing stories they\u2019ve told over the years. It\u2019s just wonderful to be a part of that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WFAA\u2019s decades of Cowboys coverage\u2014and one retired editor who dug it up\u2014helped shape Netflix\u2019s retelling of the team\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":190817,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5135],"tags":[5229,1596,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-190816","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-dallas","10":"tag-texas","11":"tag-tx","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115127220008714558","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190816\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}