You've also got to remember, up until the early 60's, many programs went out live and were simply never recorded, this is why so few pre-1961 Benny Hill show's still exist.
Forgive me if it's been mentioned before, but I thought the union agreement was along the lines of "original broadcast plus one repeat". After that it wasn't commercially viable to renegotiate actors' fees etc. So apart from overseas sales they were of no value. Things may have been different in the US.
Precisely....that's why much was "junked". Only in retrospect is it strange....at the time it made perfect commercial sense to wipe the tapes.
Right. Dr. Who was recorded on video tape, then transferred to film for distribution. Once the transfer was done, they would eventually recycle the tape. For this reason, alone, do we have any B&W episodes at all.
I've never been clear on why we have B&W copies of some Pertwee episodes that originally aired in colour. Maybe I'd heard they made B&W dubs for markets that weren't yet broadcasting in colour?
Well, they had tapes of the Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, but wiped most of the New York episodes. But, yes, until the advent of video cassettes tv was live, and you'd be lucky to have a kinescope copy. I think it was Desi Arnes' decision to film the I Love Lucy show, which is why it was around to rake in so much $ in years of syndication, and why it looks so much better than other period shows.
"No value" is a matter of opinion, because to me, they have important cultural value (if nothing else). But as time has proven, the union agreements and commercial viability of these recordings DID change and they eventually became (commercially) valuable once again. When planning for the future, one must assume that that way we do things today isn't necessarily the way we're going to be doing things tomorrow.
They were filmed (as were the earlier B&W episodes) for countries that did not air their programs in color.
You are correct. Many foreign stations were still broadcasting in B&W, so they still received 16mm B&W prints. (Certain countries capable of color broadcasting did receive color videotapes, however.) Those 16mm film prints were made from the color videotapes, so color information (in the form of chroma dots) did get recorded on those B&W prints. That allowed the use of color recovery techniques to be applied to these film prints in instances where a color videotape did not exist. This video shows the process applied to recover the color information.
The color recovery technique is a miracle that was only very recently discovered. Amazing story......
From its inception in the late 1950s through the 1960s, video tape was a very costly and exclusive format both in terms of tape and equipment. In the beginning, we're talking costs like the equiv. ~$2,000 per tape, each recorder costing more than a house and all operations requiring a specially trained technical staff to operate the literal wall full of gear. So the machines were very few, made to order for a handful of broadcasters in LA, NY, London and... that's about it. Video tape became a lot more affordable, manageable and common by the early 1970s; by the mid 1970s, many foreign broadcasters were in the game and of course even home video was beginning to emerge. The archive of the Pertwee era of Who reflects the transitions. The formats for overseas sales transitioned from 16mm b&w telerecording film to copies of the color video tape and the BBC finally started archiving in 1978, before all of the Pertwee film and original color video tapes had been discarded. Therefore some exist on their original film or color video tape masters, some exist as color video tape copies from overseas sales (or even home recordings of same) and some exist only as 16mm b&w telerecording film.
That's essentially true. It was a more convoluted process though. The video tape masters weren't recycled right after transfer; some were held for years (the last was erased in '74) and were transferred multiple times (for legal, for production viewing and for overseas sales, sometimes many times over for the latter for different sales arrangements or early ones being upgraded from suppressed to stored field). An example is The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964?); even on the DVD after restoration, there are a few places one can see it had been played many times before that telerecording was done, yet it had only aired once. It seems there's no evident pattern for how long they would be kept and it's not very clear who exactly gave the order to erase rather than retain or why.
As far as Jon Pertwee's go, which ones are we now officially missing? Is it only two (a high quality copy of Invasion Of The Dinosaurs 1, which has a weak color signal; and The Mind Of Evil 1, which was hand-colored for the DVD)?
And it does. But I'm waiting on the chicken and potatos to bake and simply must, as they say, "waffle on"!
There are many American TV shows that were telecast in color in the 1960s but only B&W kinescopes survive. In rare cases, color kinescopes may also survive, but the tapes are long gone. Crap happens. Yep, the same is true with American networks. In some cases, the East coast vault made a decision to erase or junk lots of videotapes, and in other cases, the West coast vault did it. Often, different managers ran each department and made different (stupid) decisions. Note that once color came in, the older acetate-based videotapes did not hold up well, so a lot of those were junked in favor of the newer hotter-oxide polyester videotapes, which did record color just fine. This was all around 1967-1968 or so. It's amazing that some shows survived at all. In some cases, that happened because the networks just forgot that they stored certain shows at outside facilities, and somebody kept cutting the check for storage for decades and decades. Now that computer storage is cheap and easy, it's trivial to push a button and put 100 hours of shows on $500' worth of hard drives. But in the 1960s, imagine the dilemma if 100 hours' of tape fill a wall and take up $50,000' worth of blank tape! And if it's a show that has very little rerun value, like a daily soap opera, a game show, or a kids TV show, the value is even less -- to the network. I think we're at the point where far more shows have been thrown away than have been saved. You can make a good argument that probably 2/3 of those were worthless, but the problem are the 1/3 that might've been good to save. I read an interview recently where Edie Adams talked about how her husband Ernie Kovacs' Dumont TV shows were all destroyed in 1972, ten years after her husband died. She was frantic about it, because she gladly would have paid the few hundred dollars storage fees... but lawyers got in the way: http://www.dumonthistory.tv/5.html
The primary example for this is Dark Shadows, where a few dozen episodes exist only as kinescopes. Surprisingly, only one episode out of 1200+ didn't survive.
I was thinking of that one. It's amazing ABC wound up keeping that one. Dan Curtis was a very loud, obnoxious, over-the-top producer, so I'd bet he browbeat the network into holding onto it. I don't think Dark Shadows was a great show, but I recognize (like Dr. Who) it's a cult show that has crazed, dedicated fans, and it's worth saving just for that reason.
By the end of the show's run, at least, Curtis owned Dark Shadows outright, so his own company stored the tapes. I'd argue a number of the show's flaws were Curtis' own fault, but he did have the foresight to hold on to the tapes because he knew the series had syndication and foreign sales potential. (A couple episodes only surivived in color as Spanish dubs for Latin America. For home video release, they simply combined the color footage with the English audio from surviving b&w kinescopes of those episodes).
Pardon a semi-digression. These recently posted photos tell the sad fate of the only known copy of episode 2 of that staple of British TV, Morecambe and Wise - The notes may be of interest as well. It was recovered from a broadcast facility in Cyprus - far too late.
Apparently Phil Morris, the man behind TIEA, has left a message on a Doctor Who forum (Outpost Skaro) that he believes he has another copy of this episode as part of his recoveries. I'm not on Outpost Skaro, so I can't give the exact wording of his reply, but it sounds hopeful that this particular episode may still survive. I believe he also said this was the worst of the films he recovered. One might surmise that the poor condition of this particular film was also due to the fact the film case was broken and the film was more vulnerable to changes in humidity. You can see that the film has an oily-like surface and has already deposited black residue on the inside of the new film can it's being stored in.
