It sounds like his copy involved a film transfer. Standard 16mm movie film has a frame rate of 24 fps, though I understand that special 30 fps film cameras were used in a lot of US TV production until digital took over.
When 24 fps film is converted to NTSC 30 fps video, the difference in frame rates is handled with a method called "3:2 pulldown". NTSC TV actually consists of 60 "fields" per second, with two fields forming the odd and even numbered scan lines of each frame. (This is called "interlacing". It's obsolete with modern digital cameras and displays but due to past history it persists in digital TV, causing many headaches.) A given 16 mm frame is scanned for three fields (1.5 frames), then the next frame is scanned for 2 fields (1 frame), and so on. Since 5/60 = 2/24, the two rates are now matched. This creates significant artifacts when still-framing the resulting video, as some of the frames consist of fields from two different film frames exposed at different times. Anything that's moving will appear to rapidly "vibrate" when the still frame is displayed.
All this is unique to countries (like the US, Canada, Mexico and Japan) that use 30 fps video, this number being one half of the local power line frequency. Australia, like most of Europe, uses 50 Hz power so they settled on a 25 fps TV frame rate for both PAL and SECAM. 3:2 pulldown is not done in those countries; I understand they simply show 24 fps film at 25 fps and hope nobody will notice. So it's entirely possible that the Blunder, despite his supposed expertise with video, has never really seen 3:2 pulldown artifacts before.