Lost TV shows

Could they not restore these episodes with colour recovery? They've used it on episodes of Doctor Who and Dad's Army with good results.

 

How much did those shows cost to produce? $100K an episode? More perhaps? So really, what are we talking about here? If you are going to spend $100K to produce an hour of television, is it really that sensible to look to save $300 and not keep a copy of it?

 

I've read that the first season of I Dream of Jeannie was shot in B&W b/c color would have cost an extra $600 per episode.

The B&W episodes were seldom shown in syndication. How many millions did that decision to save $18K eventually cost the studio? $5M? $10M?

 

The Beagles (TV series) - Wikipedia

According to Joe Harris, the editor of The Beagles died on the job and his widow threw out all the editing materials including the master negatives. The series was presumed lost; but the original negatives and tracks were found decades later in a warehouse owned by Golden Books. The films had apparently been shipped by mistake to Producers Associates of Television, General Mills' TV film subsidiary, which owned all of Total Television's other series, and were only discovered after Golden had bought P.A.T.'s interests.​

 

Glad to hear!!!

 

Back in 1966? I know that Star Trek was considered an extraordinarily expensive show for that time and it was over $250,000. I'm guessing an average variety show would be $100,000, maybe a little more. I also think that network people are often penny-pinching @@@holes -- remember NBC threw away a decade's worth of Tonight Shows because the storage fees were about $5000 a month, and they felt they could use that room for a couple of dozen offices instead. Carson later lamented he would've been glad to pay the $5000 a month out of his salary, even though he didn't own the shows (at the time).

 

What about Queen for a Day? Is it "lost" or simply not considered in good taste? I found that show over the top even as a child. Today- who is the most pathetic, judged by the applause meter? You win a washer/dryer and a set of luggage. Unbelievable.

 

The unaired one?

 

Yup. Not only Jeannie but Gilligans Island. Russel Johnson has said that everyone knew that Gilligan should have been in color from the beginning, the show was made for it.

 

There are a few factors involved. The quality of the B&W print is important. If the print isn't of good enough quality to capture the chroma dots, recovering the color information is very difficult. Secondly, it all depends on the time and effort that they are willing to spend on the effort. The Doctor Who color restorations were possible because the restoration team was comprised of fans of the program who were willing to work for rates below the industry norm. Unfortunately, other BBC programs don't always have such a dedicated fanbase within the industry to do extensive restoration work. Comparing the Doctor Who DVDs with DVDs of other program of the same vintage (e.g. 60s, 70s, and 80s), the difference in restoration quality is often striking.

 

I just had to buy a new washer and dryer. I would not have minded being queen for a day.

 

Around 25 episodes are known to exist.

 

I know most of the people on this forum aren't into sports at all, but I have a worse NBC story. They televised baseball and the World Series for decades, AFL & NFL football, NHL, etc. Very little of their sports was saved because they had to pay 25 cents a month for each tape they stored. So, for the grand total of $3 a year, many classic sports telecasts were tossed out. There's a reason why NBC stands for No Broadcaster Cheaper.

 

Well... in fairness to the network, they don't own the games -- they're owned by the leagues. I know for sure the NFL puts big copyright notices on all their shows and warns "This broadcast is the exclusive property of the National Football League, etc., etc.," so it's up to the league to save the tapes and not the networks.

I do agree that for something as important as the World Series and the Superbowls, there's no excuse not to save all of them.

 

thanks.

 

And at least the first season of the original Star Trek was distributed to affiliates and broadcast without a C notice-resulted in a case which ruled that under principles of 'limited publication,' and relationship w/ affiliates, there was no general publication, and hence, no loss of copyright for publication w/out notice. Maybe you knew that. Pretty basic copyright law in the area of limited publication/notice.

 

What about game show episodes? Did the production companies who owned them (i.e. Goodson-Todman) also had to pay 25 cents a month for each tape stored?

 

No idea. The person I talked to was just in charge of the NBC Sports tapes.

 

funny thing about NBC sports tapes... There is a partial of the 73 AFC playoff Bengals at Dolphins (1st half) and the complete 1973 AFC Championship Raiders at Dolphins. The source? CBS recorded off the satelite and saved it in their archives.

 

Crazy enough, I have actually seen this show. However, it was a heck of a long time ago. For a few years WFLD-Channel 32 in Chicago would do a 1950s "Festival Of Television" in the summer time with a different lineup of two sitcoms each weeknight. I watched a lot of this during the summer of 1978, mainly because it led into the Three Stooges, which was running in late night for the first time. The shows they ran were: Jack Benny; My Hero (with Bob Cummings); Topper; The Gale Storm Show (Oh, Susanna); How To Marry A Millionaire; Love That Bob (also with Cummings); The People's Choice; The Great Gildersleeve; December Bride; and Bachelor Father. So all these shows were still in syndication as of 1978. It was a different TV landscape then. By the way, even though this only ran in the summer months, they did run episodes of How To Marry A Millionaire with the first girl and the replacement. I don't know if it ran the previous year and they just picked up where they left off or what.

 

You mean the c-in-circle symbol ©. Actually, they filed the paperwork back in 1966-1967, so they were officially copyrighted... but when Desilu sold out to Gulf & Western, the attorneys were supposed to refile the paperwork under the new name, but forgot. Copyright law changed quite a bit in 1976, but films and shows made prior to that year were subject to a few "gotchas" like that.

The principle of limited publication didn't exist in 1966 (nor did the 1989 Berne Copyright Conventon), but luckily for Paramount, they were still protected because of underlying copyrights on music, plus the Star Trek® logo, plus the image of the Enterprise, which they had copyrighted for toy purposes. What I was told by the head of Paramount's TV distribution in 1984 was, "we told the public domain companies you can release all the old Star Trek shows you want on VHS as long as it has no music, you remove any shot of The Enterprise, and the word 'Star Trek' does not appear anywhere on the packaging." Once they heard that, everybody gave up and bailed, since it would pretty much be impossible to do.

BTW, speaking of lost TV shows, I think a whole bunch of the original Star Trek 35mm 3-track magnetic master sound recordings were lost, and in quite a few cases all we had were comp tracks for the shows remastered in the 1980s. (I think this applied to about 20 or 30 episodes.) I'm not sure what they did in order to remix the shows to surround, but I'm not a fan of the new surround mixes. There's a whole bunch of sad studio stories where original soundtracks were tossed or damaged or burned or flooded, though the picture survived just fine.

 

Here's a coincidence... I just saw a commercial for upcoming shows in October on the DECADES tv channel. Starting in October (Daily and Weekends) is "LOST TV"- looks like a lot of public domain titles: Annie Oakley, Decoy (with Beverly Garland), The Mickey Rooney Show and Life With Elizabeth (with Betty White.) If you've not seen LIFE WITH ELIZABETH- I highly recommend it! A very early sitcom and Betty is a delight. It's done in a style where the show is 3 separate mini episodes. (Like LIFE IN PIECES on modern CBS- Nothing is new!)

DECADES is a great channel for vintage TV. They have been showing ROWAN AND MARTIN'S LAUGH IN weekdays for several months now. And vintage "live" 50s shows like STUDIO ONE (Now on in the wee hours- 5am.) They just started THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW (Choppy clips shows- but better than nothing!) Much more...

I couldn't seem to google much more information on the LOST TV showings. http://www.decades.com

 

All these amazing loss shows, yet every episode of “Hee Haw” seems to have survived.

 

You and i need to have a long talk offline. One of the cases that articulated limited publication under US law involved a play by the same playwright who wrote the one performed at Ford's Theater that fateful night and was decided in the late 19th century. The Star Trek case is Paramount Pictures v. Rubinowitz (E.D.N.Y. 1981), and as I remember it, dealt with the omission of the (c) notice by holding that the distribution of copies to affiliates under a restrictive contract amounted to a limited publication. I'll go back and read the case again if I can find it on a public website. (Since I retired, I don't have access to law databases, and in any case must disclaim providing legal advice here).
Agree that the 1976 Act changes a lot, but some of the gotcha's, including the omission of (c) notice from publicly distributed copies still remained an issue until we acceded to the Berne Convention in 1989, eliminating the requirement of (c) notice for works first published after the Berne Amendment (i.e., prospective only, omission of (c) notice occurring under the 1909 or 1976 Acts are still dealt with in accordance with the provisions of the law applicable at the time of the publication at issue).
regards, my filmed friend,
bill

 

How about Love on a Rooftop with Pete Duel from Gidget. Such a great actor. RIP.