Silly Symphonies.
Knew I’d remember.
Yeah me!
Ishtar has been pretty thoroughly buried by the company that made it, and for good reason. It did well on pre-release screenings, and was #1 its first week out, so the pulled out all the stops and released it big-time, and it tanked the same way.
Speaking of Star Wars, I’m surprised nobody mentioned yet the Star Wars Holiday Special. Not a movie, but a film-length TV program. Shown once and then buried as deeply as humanly possible. So bad that the actors involved would deny it existed or that they had been in it.
There’s an episode of Pokemon that was aired only once and never made it to home video on account that it induced seizures in epileptic children. Funnily enough, the strobe effect was caused by de facto mascot Pikachu but the blame was placed on the much less marketable Porygon which had been conspicuously absent from the show ever since.
It’s available on Blu-ray and streaming on Amazon.
The closest thing to the OP’s criteria would probably be “Jud Suss”, the infamous anti-Semitic propaganda film released in Germany in 1940. In 1954, what was asssumed to be the only copy left was destroyed by a German court order. Somehow extra copies leaked out, but any screening or sale of the film (except for very narrow educational purposes that must be pre-approved) in Germany is illegal. I don’t know what German law is about vintage ads or other promotional items of “Jud Suss”; of course, in most other Western countries none of these prohibitions apply.
Hedy Lamarr’s first husband (a count, IIRC) tried to buy and destroy all copies of Ecstasy, which had her scampering around nude and, in one legendary scene, clearly having an orgasm.
He failed.
If we’re including episodes of TV series, then there’s the infamous autoerotic asphyxiation episode (titled “Bored, She Hung Herself”) of the original Jack Lord incarnation of Hawaii Five-O. It aired once, was never shown in re-runs, and has never been released in any home video format. I recall trying to watch a copy on some skeevy Internet site but the audio and video quality was so bad I couldn’t finish. Unlike in the purported case of Shazaam, nobody denies the existence of the epiosde.
Moved to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
It’s urban legend time.
According to the story I heard (which I do NOT attest as actually being factual) in the 1950s a certain former major league ballplayer who was trying to become an actor made a stag film (as it was known in those days.)
A couple of years later, the athlete actually became a successful TV star, and tried to buy up all the existing prints of the film. That’s not as stupid as it sounds, because stag films were often rented rather than sold, and the TV star was able to obtain and destroy the negative and prints from the distributor.
Of course, the legend says, he got the negative but not all the prints, and poor quality (but still recognizable) duplicates from those prints continued to circulate.
You can replace “former ballplayer who became a TV star” with “young actress who became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars” and fill in a dozen names for the same rumor.
I rented it from Netflix a couple of years ago, never having seen it. It can be purchased on Amazon.
The full-length version is available on youtube. I only recently heard of it and watched it a month ago. It’s listed on Amazon, but is “currently unavailable.”
Saw it on Netflix not too too long ago.
It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t as bad as it’s made out to be.
Not scrubbed by design exactly but there are movies that have never been given a home video release (or a very low volume VHS release and nothing more) and will never be shown in theaters again (if their prints even still exist) so for all intents and purposes they have been scrubbed unless a cable channel has a print to show.
Her movies were available in Europe after the revelation.
It’s available on a number of other sites, and on youtube under its original name in an abbreviated version.
This… sorta… actually is a thing but much more recent. The player, Kazuhito Tadano, was a top Japanese college player and made a gay porn film while in college. He was never drafted in the Japanese leagues despite having the talent to be a top draft pick because of the porn scandal and was somewhat of a pariah in his home country. He signed with the Indians and eventually played in the Bigs for them for a couple of years. Japan apparently got over it as he eventually played for a half dozen years in the Nippon Leagues after being released from the majors here in the states.
I seem to remember there being an attempt to whitewash the porn movie, very unsuccessfully, after signing with Cleveland.
There have been cases of movies that bombed in theaters and simply never came out on any home media thus making them practically impossible to acquire since the only way to see if is to somehow have an in with the company.
There has been a case of this for a major release as recent as 2007, the anime film “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood” was shown in theaters in Japan but got such a negative reception from fans that it was quickly taken out of theaters and never ever shown again in public. Apparently the most you can see of it now is somebody uploaded the first fifteen minutes to youtube since whoever uploaded it had a connection to the animation studio but that still means out of a 90 minute film only 1/6th of it is available to anyone.
I watched BOTN a few years ago on a Netflix DVD, and in 2015, C-SPAN 2 aired it on the 100th anniversary of its release.
There’s an Oscar-winning film which is considered lost; only about 5 minutes are known to be extant.
Apparently it is lost to Wikipedia too. However, that isn’t unusual (here is a better link). Countless early TV shows are permanently lost because studios reused the tapes if they even recorded them at all in the case of live shows.
Full coverage of the first Superbowl in 1967 was believed to be non-existent for the longest time as well until an incomplete copy was discovered in Pennsylvania in 2005 but that copy still isn’t available for viewing because of legal entanglements with the NFL. Known coverage has been spliced together by studio archives but it is extremely likely that the original coverage of the game does not exist anywhere and never will.
There were also 106 long-lost episodes of Dr. Who from the 1960’s discovered in Ethiopia in 2010 that were previously believed to be lost for good.
There are countless TV shows from the 1940’s and 50’s that were not recorded or archived because the technology just wasn’t up to it on a mass scale or people didn’t realize that they might have some value in the future.