In the “Old Tonight Show,” thread, it’s mentioned that pre-1972 Tonight Shows are pretty much gone – the tapes were never saved, and although individual moments are certainly archived, countless hours of TV simply can’t ever be seen again.
But all that can change; I’ve been improving my time machine in my basement workroom, and I now have the capability to reach back into time and pick up broadcast TV signals from any era, and record them to my handy DVR.
Since the flux capacitor will wear out at some point, we must be judicious in our use of this resource. What lost TV moments should we absolutely reach back and capture?
There’s a lot of old Doctor Who episodes that have been lost. The audio exists for every episode ever broadcast (due to home hobbyists in the pre-video-recorder age) but the pictures are gone probably. There’s some hope that episodes the BBC sent to a couple of African broadcasters may still exist somewhere.
I’ve read that there are no tape recordings of CBS’ and NBC’s broadcast of the NFL-AFL Championship Game of January 1967 (aka Super Bowl 1) between the Packers and the Chiefs. I’m not talking about the NFL Films production, I’m talking about the actual game footage from the two networks that telecast the game. That’d be interesting to see.
Staying on a sports theme, I’d like to see an early 1960s game between the Celtics and the Philadelphia Warriors, to see Russell vs. Chamberlain in their respective primes.
Several early TV shows from the 1940s – there were lots of broadcasts, but not many sets, so many people didn’t see them, and almost none were recorded. I’ve always been curious about them.
I’d also like to see some of the broadcasts from Hugo Gernsback’s experimental RV station back in the 1930s (and, I think, even the late 1920s). The Electrical magazine editor later branched out into science fiction (the “Hugo” award is named after him), and for both reasons felt he should provide a TV broadcast for hobbyists to tune in on. (And long before the Hitler broadcast Carl Sagan writes about in “Contact” – the aliens shoulda sent back a carrier wave with Hugo’s signals on it. That’s appropriate for an SF novel.) There were other such hobbyist broadcasts, too. It’d be interesting to see that broadcast of the Felix the Cat doll.
In the early '90s, a Baltimore-area PBS station aired every single episode of St. Elsewhere, in order, without commercials. I was in college at the time but my mom taped them all for me; I still have the collection. So far only Season 1 has been released on DVD, and I would love to have all of those commercial-free episodes digitally!
Hancocks’s Half Hour, many episodes missing.
*
The Avengers* was supposedly a run of the mill crime drama in its first season, but it would be nice to have it back.
At Last, The 1948 Show!, forerunner of Monty Python, about half episodes missing.
The 1st season (KTML?) of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 when it was on public access. As I understand it, the first few episodes have never been located.
So I’d have to move in on more obscure stuff. The missing early seasons of Ace of Wands, for example. The mostly missing second season of Adam Adamant Lives! … Doomwatch … Counterstrike …
And, besides The Quatermass Experiment, there’s other bits of Nigel Kneale’s stuff missing from the archives. The Road, for example. Or - even better - the missing colour version of The Year of the Sex Olympics. (OK, we have a B&W archive copy, but who wouldn’t want to see these outfits in glorious living colour?)
I’d go record every episode of The State before those MTV dillweeds screwed up the copyright issues, and then I’d record all the episodes of Eek! Stravaganza, because Mrs. Fresh and I seem to be the only people on earth who’ve heard of this show much less like it enough to want it on DVD.
TRU- starring Robert Morse as Capote, a one man show broadcast on PBS in the mid 1990s and never released on DVD.
Lots of live news broadcasts from the 50s and 60s come to mind.
There was a show that aired in the 40s and 50s called “Authors and Critics” on which authors basically had to defend their works against a critic. None of the episodes were preserved, but the authors included a young Gore Vidal, an aging Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Mark Twain’s daughter, and others (many probably forgotten). I’d love to see this.
There’s only one known surviving video recording of Flannery O’Connor and it was from this same era from a literary show called, ironically, The Schlitz Playhouse. Authors of novels, plays and short-stories would be interviewed by a lit professor or critic (in Flannery’s case at least, one of the world’s most pompous conversation hogging self impressed Ivy League lit professors you can imagine- think William F. Buckley meets Larry King in terms of “God but I love my own voice” meets “Interview skills interview smills I’ll wing it”- I’m not sure if he was the usual host). This was interspliced with actors performing an adaptation from the author’s work (in Flannery’s Case the short story The Life You Save May Be Your Own). I understand that some famous actors had one of their earliest screentime on the show. (Also you learn from the tape that Flannery had one of the deepest/twangiest/most indecipherable southern drawls ever heard [on those rare occasions when the host let her speak].)
I’d also like to see episodes of YOU ARE THERE!, which I’ve never seen an episode of and know only from references on other shows. It was a “news show” in which a modern television journalist covered historical events from ancient times to the pre-1950s with actors portraying characters being interviewed as if the even that was being reported (whether the Battle of Chaeronea or the Battle of Gettysburg) was happening. (I understand that there was a parody of this in England in the 1960s that Terry Jones wrote for and that featured such events as the locker room interviews after the Battle of Hastings.) I’ve always thought an update of it, if done well, could work on The History Channel or even perhaps CNN if done with the right combo (and this would be the hard part) of seriousness and tongue-in-cheek.
