When I took that History and Appreciation of Motion Pictures course in 1968, one of the things the prof showed us was a film that featured three different edited versions of the same raw footage.

It was a short scene from the TV series Gunsmoke, and I was curious if it was available now that seemingly everything has been uploaded to YouTube.

Sure enough, it’s there. 

Alas, the copy isn’t very good, as there are some audio dropouts here and there, but it’s good enough to get the point across.

The film is about 28 minutes long, but for some reason the uploader left an extra trailing 12 minutes of a blank screen.

If you aren’t interested in viewing the opening part where the raw dailies footage is shown, the three different edited versions are at:

15:36 – Editor Michael R. McAdam (1910-1987)
19:07 – Editor Arthur H. Nadel (1921-1990)
23:05 – Editor Harry Coswick (1908-1982)

However, even if you don’t want to watch all the raw footage, you might want to take a look at a few minutes of it, simply to get an idea of how the director shot the various angles to deliver to the editor.

Note that the raw footage does not have the sound effects of the punches and other noises. Those are added in the editing process. Also, the third version is what was used in the televised episode, so it has the advantage of background music.

Each version is interesting in itself, but if I were selecting my favorite, I’d go with the second one.