Lost TV shows

GSN got its WML material legally and licensed from Goodson-Todman (or successors), and all G-T had was the BW kinescope films to the end of the series with Daly. It's possible that "collectors" may have a bit of color video, but I'm not aware of anything surviving in color of the Daly years. The color shows, of the last season, were originally (original first broadcast) sent out on the network in color, but individual local stations may still have broadcast them in BW.

 

As I understand it from THE COMEDIANS (terrific book), Meader not only had to deal with the backlash against Kennedy jokes post Nov '63 - but he also had to deal with the fact that he had literally no other act. He couldn't even try other stuff because he'd never been a working stand-up comic. He just kind of lucked into the Kennedy stuff.

 

One series that seems to be totally lost is Winchell-Mahoney Time, a 1965-1968 children's show. The Metromedia network maliciously destroyed the tapes of all the episodes. Paul Winchell sued Metromedia and eventually won $3.8 million for the value of the tapes and $14 million in punitive damages. Metromedia appealed that all the way to the Supreme Court, but the Court declined to hear it, basically affirming it by default. That case led to preserving most other programs in most cases.
Paul Winchell - Wikipedia

 

There's another reason, apart from storage costs, that videotaped programmes were often wiped, at least in terms of the UK. Actors in drama and comedy shows were paid a fee which covered an initial screening and one repeat. Anything on top of that had to be paid at the going rate at the time of the screening. Different arrangements are now in place. Music shows weren't considered to be worthy of preservation because "pop" was considered ephemeral. In some ways, it's probably quite a good thing that a lot of the programmes were wiped....some series considered to be gripping dramas now look funnier than a lot of the comedy shows of the same period. How often do we say, "Did we really watch THAT?"

 

One thing that the article does not mention is that Winchell himself went through some very hard times in the 1970s and early 1980s but kept busy doing voices for Saturday morning cartoons (and some Disney productions). He didn't actually get the $17 million settlement until 1986, because Metromedia fought so hard in court, and was actually living in difficult conditions in a mobile home at the time he finally got the money. For a lot of reasons, Winchell was a bitter and troubled man in the last 20 years of his life. If you read his autobiography, Winch, you'll get an idea of what went on in his head, and why none of his children were speaking to him at the time of his death.

He was particularly bitter that so many of the live TV shows he had done during his life had been cast aside, and that includes 99% of the kinescopes of the 1950s. The truth is that the syndication and rerun potential for these shows were just about nil, but I think it would've been possible to maybe do a 2-hour special that drew upon the best of all this material and present clips that way. But whole shows? No way. There's a thousand other live daily shows from that era that nobody wants to see, either.

In America, the union contracts stipulate that SAG-AFTRA actors have to get paid a certain fee (depending on when the show was made), Writers Guild people have to get a residual, as do the DGA, and then there's the music rights and payments to any musical performers in the AFM. Sometimes the shows are owned partly by the network or studio, partly by the production company, and partly by the distributor, and there have been cases where the three disagreed on how the money would be split, leaving the show in limbo. Something like this famously happened to the old Batman TV series, preventing it from being released to home video for nearly 40 years... and those were big hit shows that had a cult following.

The article on Videotape Wiping on Wikipedia has some harrowing stories about how and why certain shows have been lost forever, and it's a sobering tale. The American comic actor/writer Ernie Kovacs did about 300 hours of TV shows, and I think only about 20 hours actually survive in any form. His wife Edie Adams told me about 25 years ago how ABC had dumped all his DuMont shows into the East River in NYC, and even decades later, she was still extremely angry and upset about the loss of his legacy.

 

Hi Honey, I'm Home - I loved this show & would love to see it on DVD.

 

My mother was a huge EK fan in her 30's and when I told her about the lost footage many years ago, she was seriously bummed. She had hoped that some day, I would see what he was all about and agree with her.

 

Ernie Kovacs:

 

They had enough to do a series of Ernie Kovacs specials, maybe 5-6 hours' worth, but that's all.

 

At least I got to see 1 variation of the Nairobi Trio. Mom said there were so many variations she couldn't count.

 

Does that 300 number come from Edie Adams? You'd think he did more than that if you count his local Philly shows.

 

Around 1990 The Comedy Channel/Comedy Central ran a half hour series culled from various Kovacs shows, mainly his 1956 summer replacement series and his ABC Dutch Masters specials. I don't recall how many episodes were made.

As least one clip (w/Jean Shepherd) survives of EK hosting the Tonight Show c. 1956-7

 

Yes, Ms. Adams said she had something like 25-30 hours out of the 300+ hours of television her husband had done.

What I remember her saying is "more than 300 hours of kinescopes and videotapes," but the live stuff just went out into the ether and vanished. But so did a lot of television in the 1950s.

The Wikipedia entry on the DuMont network says:

DuMont produced more than 20,000 television episodes during the decade from 1946 to 1956. Because the shows were created prior to the launch of Ampex's electronic videotape recorder in late 1956, all of them were initially broadcast live in black and white, then recorded on film kinescope for reruns and for West Coast rebroadcasts. By the early 1970s, their vast library of 35mm and 16mm kinescopes eventually wound up in the hands of "a successor network," who reportedly disposed of all of them in New York City's East River to make room for more recent-vintage videotapes in a warehouse.

It was mainly the DuMont shows that Edie was angry about, but there were quite a few more recent shows that were lost or discarded as well.

 

The Outlaws...short lived time travel show.
Outlaws (TV Series 1986–1987) - IMDb

 

The Ernie Kovacs collection box includes 13 hours of material.
Next month Take A Good Look which is a game show he hosted will be out.
That runs 24 hours.
Still I could cry about all that lost footage.

 

A little-known TV series has just gotten an official release of its shorter second season. It's HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE, a black & white filmed sitcom from the late fifties that starred Barbara Eden as one of a trio of ladies trying each week to meet and marry money.

The first season was released back in the spring and the second season has been in the not-yet-released category at Amazon until this week. Now the second season is also out. Both are MOD sets from CBS through Amazon.



I thought this was surely a lost TV series - but not anymore.

 

That is awesome that CBS released that. What I would really like to see tho, is divisions formed in these media companies that release all this stuff as downloads for collectors. There are more out there than they think.

 

Yes! I would love this, even if a lot of the stuff isn't very good or translate well to a modern audience I would still love the option of having this. Download and burn what you want to keep, or even just stream. I would love this with a series like Make Room for Daddy or Burns and Allen.

 

Universal produced the show. A) Its safely put away in their vaults and B) VCRs were common by then and I'm sure tons of collectors who were diligent tapers would have it. Not lost in the least.

 

Only possible with series already transferred to tape. CBS, Universal, etc. are not going to go through the costs of transferring 35mm prints of shows in order to sell a couple of hundred copies. Unless you think those couple of hundred people would pay $1000 each for a series. MGM is the only company I know that had the brains to at least put all of their TV series on one-inch back in the 80s. The other studios have their obscure shows still sitting in the vaults on film or tape. At least thanks to Sci-Fi Channel and TV Land buying a bunch of rare shows back in the 90s, remastered tape transfers were made. But if a show hasn't been bought by any network in the last 35 years, forget about it.

 

perhaps, but it's lost to me...LOL.

 

He felt that all of his 50s TV work was live and therefore gone but at least he would have beautiful 2-inch color tapes of his Metromedia show as his legacy. Could anything have been done with it? Who knows. At least a DVD release would have been possible and I bet that if the tapes were available, some network would have picked it up. Jewish Life airs the Soupy Sales Show from Metromedia from the same years and I don't believe they have the tapes on those, just kinescopes. What about the 1966 color Milton Berle ABC show? Do those tapes exist or just crappy kines?

 

Meader had filmed an episode of the Joey Bishop Show shortly before the assassination and to the best of my knowledge, Joey had the show destroyed before it was ever edited.

 

I suspect that, like a lot of (very) unsuccessful shows, ABC wiped that 1966 variety show because it had zero rerun potential. Don't forget, back then videotape was about five bucks a minute... and that was at a time when $300 would be worth about $2000 today.

 

Reportedly, the master elements of Underdog, Tennessee Tuxedo, and other cartoons produced by Total Television were all trashed when the widow of the Company's head executive cleared out a storage unit. It is my understanding that any VHS or DVD releases of these shows come from surviving videotape copies that would have been supplied to TV stations that aired these shows in syndication. Some of the episodes must be lost, I would imagine.