Lost TV shows

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by JozefK, Apr 7, 2017.

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  1. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Dixie
    I don't mean shows that are obscure or unavailiable. I mean stuff that is really lost.

    I was reading the Wiki article on Joey Bishop's sitcom from the '60s when I saw this:

    The Joey Bishop Show (sitcom) - Wikipedia

    One Season 3 episode of The Joey Bishop Show is now considered lost. The episode, known only as #85, was filmed on November 15, 1963 and guest starred comedian and impressionist Vaughn Meader. Meader rose to fame in the early 1960s for his impersonation of then-President John F. Kennedy featured on the popular comedy album The First Family. The episode centered around Meader performing his Kennedy impersonation in routines opposite Joey Bishop. A week after filming, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. President Kennedy's death promptly ended Meader's career – his club bookings and television appearances were quickly canceled and his albums were pulled from stores. The episode featuring Meader was scheduled to air in February 1964, but was pulled by NBC. The episode never aired and was reportedly destroyed.​

    If it was only a week after filming, one has to wonder if the episode was even edited and scored.
     
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  2. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    Could have went another season.
     
  3. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Wow, that's a great story. I know the Joey Bishop Show negatives exist -- I've actually handled them -- but that was a show that bounced around on several networks and I think (at least 20 years ago) there were some legal clouds over the show as to who exactly owned it. If they destroyed the negatives and all the work prints and tracks, I'd say it would definitely be gone.
     
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  4. drmark7

    drmark7 Forum Resident

    Did you know that THE JOEY BISHOP SHOW is now airing on ANTENNA-TV? Previously there was one DVD set (Season 2?) in color. Plus THE PILOT. This ANTENNA TV run is supposed to be the entire run. Including the B&W seasons. "Remastered" for the first time in many years. Can't attest to whether the Vaughn Meader episode is accounted for. They have shown the episode where DON KNOTTS appears in character as Barney Fife! I am surprised the odd palette of the color episodes (a lot or ORANGE AND GREEN) has not been mentioned. Also the 1st B&W season has the unusual casting of Madge Blake (Previously Larry Mondellos mom on LEAVE IT TO BEAVER and the future Aunt Harriet on BATMAN) as Joey's mom, and what must be the first series appearance of a young MARLO THOMAS as Joey's sister! I'm surprised they don't really tout that in advertising for the show. And quite a bunch of guest stars: Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Barbara Stanwyck, Jack Parr, Jack Benny, Ed McMahon, Zsa Zsa Gabor. Many more
     
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  5. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Dixie
    I believe she did a Zane Grey Theatre w/her father, and she also has a small role (pre-nose job) in an early Thriller w/IIRC Robert Vaughn.
    The only JBS I really know about is the one w/legendary misanthrope Oscar Levant, clips of which were shown in an A&E Biography. I wonder if Levant wrote some of his own dialogue? I don't know who should get the credit for this classic: "Yesterday I was going to throw myself off the Empire State Building, but the street was crowded with pedestrians and I hate bumping into new people."
     
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  6. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Dixie
    I very, very vaguely recall seeing this when I was a wee tot home sick from school.

    The Girl In My Life
    was an American daytime television show spotlighting women who made a difference in people's lives. The show was hosted by Fred Holliday and the announcers were Bob Warren and John Harlan. The program aired on ABC during the 1973-1974 TV season.​

    [​IMG]

    Each day on the show featured three to four vignettes of women. The people whose lives they touched would offer a testimonial statement about their special woman, always ending with the phrase "My name is _____, and the girl in my life is ____." The woman would come out on stage and be interviewed by Holliday, and then would receive a modest prize package or an item of special meaning to the woman.

    The show's format was spoofed in an episode of The Carol Burnett Show, using the knockoff title "The Girl That We Like".

    The series was not rerun after its original network run and is believed lost. ​
     
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  7. torcan

    torcan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    A LOT of game shows unfortunately seem gone forever. Shows like "Celebrity Sweepstakes", ABC "Password", the original "Split Second" (save for a few episodes), "Sale of the Century", the first several years of "$10,000 Pyramid"; "Money Maze"; and a pile of others.

    Many talk shows (several years of "Tonight Show") and daytime soaps as well, plus sporting events.

    When I was a kid I always thought networks would keep copies of everything they ever aired and were sitting in a vault someplace. When GSN first went on the air in 1994 I realized the truth. In some of their early "Club AM" and "Prime Games" segments they talked a bit about shows that were wiped. It's unfortunate.
     
  8. BradOlson

    BradOlson Country/Christian Music Maven

    A huge chunk of the Dumont vault is gone forever, the reruns of the Jimmy Dean Show that air on RFD-TV are sourced from kinescopes and there are episodes that are truly lost.
     
  9. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Dixie
    There are some Passwords on YT. I don't know which network ran them.

    As a tiny tot I actually preferred Split Second to Jeopardy

    Goodson-Todman seems to have been quite quite conscientious in this regard: a whole lot of WML, IGAS, and TTT survives

    There's a story (probably apocryphal; in any event I'm sure Vidiot we'll be here to give us the scoop) that the company which owned the rights to Hollywood Squares got tired of paying storage fees and threw out out most of the videotapes they owned. Shortly afterward GSN started up, creating a market for what they'd just thrown away...
     
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  10. jtiner

    jtiner Forum Resident

    Location:
    Maine
    I've always wondered how much (if any) Captain Kangaroo survives. My guess is that being a VT show (which would have meant saving/storing all those quads), it was probably wiped after a short period and the tapes reused. I've asked about it in a thread here at some point, but nobody ever really responded with any good info one way or another. Presumably most of the 60's Carson shows are wiped as well. It's unfortunate, but understandable. VT was reusable, expensive, and took up a good deal of shelf space. For many programs, we'd have nothing at all if film recordings wouldn't have been made at the time.
     
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  11. O Don Piano

    O Don Piano Senior Member

    And ALL the Family Feud episodes can be seen on BUZZR, because that's pretty much the ONLY game show they air!
    Oh and Match Game. Too bad- they used to show a lot more.....

    Sorry to hijack! It makes me :realmad::realmad:!
     
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  12. O Don Piano

    O Don Piano Senior Member

    How about the BBC shows now lost forever?
    Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about this can chime in. Incredible music shows; variety shows....all lost because of recycled video tapes.
    Like a previous poster above, I do understand why, but still.....
    Luckily Terry Jones of Monty Python managed to stop the BBC from wiping their shows!
     
  13. Solitaire1

    Solitaire1 Carpenters Fan

    From what I understand, the only reason the BBC didn't wipe the first series of Monty Python's Flying Circus (MPFC) is that Terry Jones offered to buy the replacement video tapes for the ones that MPFC were recorded on. But for that, they would have been lost.

    A related one is Doctor Who. In the early 1980s there were 125 lost episodes (to use a comparison it was like 25% of the Star Trek episodes were lost). Over the years some of the missing episodes have been recovered due to a world-wide call out for missing episodes. It is also likely that some of the early color episodes have been lost as well (I remember watching early The Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) episodes that were in black and white).
     
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  14. jtiner

    jtiner Forum Resident

    Location:
    Maine
    Yupp... we're fortunate to have some survivors from great dramas, serials, and music performances due to film recordings that survive, but many are lost forever. There are a few occasional finds of programs that were believed lost that still happen occasionally like a Top of the Pops or the first season Avengers episode found a while back and latest Doctor Who serials found 4 or 5 years back.
    It seems as though here in the states there was more of an effort to save original VT or make Kinescopes for some programs for archival purposes. For the British stuff, I think it was more a necessity to make the film recordings for distribution. They had to send programming all over the world, and 16mm film was certainly easier to distribute than VT, especially with varying television standards.
     
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  15. beccabear67

    beccabear67 Musical omnivore.

    Location:
    Victoria, Canada
    A lot of local N.American shows were never recorded at all, a lot of news, kiddie shows and music shows only shown once live on one station, there was just no need seen at the time. Sometimes an example, or special in some way, show was kept for posterity. By the '70s there were a fair number home recorders, though expensive.

    Yes, while many/most British shows were on video tape, the tapes were wiped and reused. A lot of the copies we do still have are from the film copies made for overseas use.
     
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  16. Mylene

    Mylene Senior Member

    There was an Aussie comedy series called The Off Show that was axed and erased before it went to air. Another alleged Aussie comedy was Our Man in Canberra in which a cast member looked like an Aussie politician so was never aired then wiped to avoid a libel suit.
     
  17. jtiner

    jtiner Forum Resident

    Location:
    Maine
    We can thank our Canadian friends for the return of several Jon Pertwee Dr. Who stories... TV Ontario still held the color NTSC 2" copies of several stories after the BBC wiped the PAL originals. The BBC only held B&W 16mm film copies.
     
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  18. misterjones

    misterjones Smarter than the average bear.

    Location:
    New York, NY
    I believe a lot of the early Soupy Sales shows are lost.
     
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  19. BradOlson

    BradOlson Country/Christian Music Maven

    The Adventures of Sir Lancelot on the legitimate British DVDs are all B&W, even those made in color, while the US issued DVDs, which came from US copy prints of everything include all of the color episodes in color.
     
  20. Commander Lucius Emery

    Commander Lucius Emery Forum Resident

    I remember seeing an article in the late 1970s on University of Michigan athletic director Don Canham telling us how smart he was, saying that they had saved every U-M football game telecast since 1971. Whether that stuff is available I don't know. But I am always surprised how little of big games in sports was saved from the 1960s and 1970s. I understand in Canada for hockey what things they have found are in smaller cities; you'd think the larger cities like Toronto or Montreal would have them. But the famous "Bobby Orr" flying goal in 1969 wasn't saved by a Canadian broadcast it was saved by CBS in the States.
     
  21. Mirrorblade.1

    Mirrorblade.1 Forum Resident

    It's real shame how Hollywood and Tv basically black balled him.
    The real problem the media put Kennedy on a big pedestal ..
    And seems no polictal satire of him was allowed.. :sigh:
    Not very long time.. taking his comedy record off the shelfs was a bit overkill..

    And Life With Lucy.. the big.. bad ..hidden.. secret tv show..
     
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  22. torcan

    torcan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    Yes, Goodson-Todman, Barry-Enright and Chuck Barris seem to have been the best at saving shows. For the other major game-show producers, there are much bigger chunks of their catalogs that no longer survive.
     
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  23. James Slattery

    James Slattery Forum Resident

    Location:
    Long Island
    From what I've been told, the episode had not been edited and they prints were ordered destroyed.
     
  24. James Slattery

    James Slattery Forum Resident

    Location:
    Long Island
    It really depended on who was airing the shows. 60s Match Game and Say When are two examples of G-T shows where under ten episodes survive. No episodes exist of Snap Judgment for instance, and there are quite a few of their other shows which were wiped and either none or maybe one episode survive.
     
  25. Solitaire1

    Solitaire1 Carpenters Fan

    My Living Doll

    Some of the episodes have been released on DVD (the Volume 1 Collection contains 10 episodes). Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia, the rest of the episodes have been lost (including the episodes after Bob Cummings left the series).
     
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