WFAA’s decades of Cowboys coverage—and one retired editor who dug it up—helped shape Netflix’s retelling of the team’s dynasty.
DALLAS — The newest Netflix documentary on the Dallas Cowboys’ dynasty of the 1990s is filled with images every fan recognizes. But ‘America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys’—the touchdowns, the press conferences, the Jerry Jones gamble—wouldn’t look the same without someone quietly digging through decades of old file tape in Dallas.
That someone, for WFAA, was Brian Hardcastle, the station’s former chief editor.
“I was chief editor here at WFAA for 18 years,” he said. “In 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…so they called me, and I was happy to come in and do it.”
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.
“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.”
The work was anything but simple, Hardcastle said.
“They would send me a list, three or four single-space pages of things they were looking for—specific dates, incidents, players,” Hardcastle recalled. “I’d 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.”
He scrubbed through miles of beta tape, which is basically a massive VHS tape, unlike today’s digital archives. “It 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.”
Hardcastle wasn’t surprised by the sheer amount of footage waiting on the shelves.
“Dallas is a football town, and we have saved so much video from the Cowboys,” he said. “There must be 40 tapes from the day that Jerry bought the team, just from the raw video alone. There’s also raw video of every Cowboys game from the early ’80s to today, sitting in the library.”
Sometimes, he found gems that producers hadn’t even requested.
“I found several things that they might want that they didn’t ask for—unusual stories, humorous stories, sad stories, tragic stories. Since I was watching them, I thought, ‘Hey, why not send them this, too?’ I think they incorporated a few of them into the documentary as well.”
One that stood out: a young Michael Irvin posing with a cardboard cutout of Tom Landry when he first came to the team. “He was saying, ‘Hey, my new dad,’” Hardcastle laughed. “They used that.”
Hardcastle admits the work could be time-consuming.
“It was tedious,” he said. “But like everything in television, as you’re going through these archives, you find little diamonds in the rough and go, ‘God, that is really interesting.’ You’re just like, I’m amazed that I worked with such talented people.”
When the final product debuted, the pride set in.
“From the very first part of the documentary on, I was like, ‘Hey, I pulled that. Hey, that went through me. Hey, that was WFAA,” he said. “After a while, I was like, all right, I’m just going to sit back and enjoy it now. It’s a very fascinating documentary, and I’m enjoying it very much. I’ve 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.”
For Hardcastle, it all comes down to history—saved and shared.
“I played a small part in pulling the video for this documentary,” he said. “But it made me very proud to have worked with such talented people here at WFAA and all the amazing stories they’ve told over the years. It’s just wonderful to be a part of that.”