How about the infamous 1968 episodes of the soap opera “the Secret Storm” in which Joan Crawford (then in her late 50s) took over her daughter Christina’s role (a 28-year-old character)? While an audio recording exists, no video footage remains, nor any of Christina’s episode for that matter.
And while it was common for some of the networks to erase soap opera episodes after they’ve aired, quite a lot of footage of “the Secret Storm” dating back to at least as early as 1960 exists. And even the audio recording of it indicates the network made a VERY BIG deal of super-star “Hollywood Royalty” Joan appearing on their daytime drama.
You would think that if the network wanted to preserve something of the show for posterity, it would be the episodes with the biggest star appearance the show ever got…unless the powers that be realized how insipid the stunt casting was in the first place and went out of their way to get rid of them.
The problem with that version is that it’s the laserdisc transfer without digital anamorphic widescreen processing. So it’s hard to get it to look good on a modern 16:9 television. (It’s possible to use the zoom feature on the television to fill the screen without too much distortion or loss of picture, however.) It’s also 2.0 audio only.
More importantly, it is hard to find that limited edition from 10 years ago, and definitely not at the $20 price point I paid when I bought them. You can get it new on Amazon, but it’ll run you $57 for a copy.
Not sure if you are addressing both VHS and laser in your reply, but lasers (and other optical discs) can go bad no matter “how you use them and how you care for them.”
Obviously YMMV, but similarly, I have VHS cassettes that I purchased in 1984 that are still in good playing condition. And back in the day, I used to tape a crap-ton of stuff. 120-minute tapes held up quite well for years of repeated tapings. 160-minute tapes were almost as good.
But 180- and 200-minute tapes. One year, tops, and that was it.
OK, thanks. I’m not a huge Star Wars fan (or an A/V expert, for that matter) but I watched some of this last night and looked and sounded pretty decent to me. You’re right, though - I had to fiddle a bit with the aspect ratio to keep the picture from looking stretched.
Oh, well, I thought I might have been sitting on a goldmine with this thing.
Sure. That’s the nature of the problem. Somebody owns the copyright, but there is no way to pay.
I don’t know the details of this case: he was bitter about the withdrawal and destruction of the film, not the details of bankruptcy and administration. In Aus, private property eventually reverts to the government when no entity exists that holds title.
Joan isn’t in that video. She did not appear on The Secret Storm in 1960, her daughter wasn’t a cast member at that time for that matter. The episodes in questions were from 1968. There is no video of Joan on that show.
As Tamex pointed out above, Playboy has been microfilmed and is available at quite a few academic libraries. I remember looking up a Philip K. Dick short story during my graduate school days, and was amused to see that the microfilm included grainy, black-and-white centerfolds. As far as I know, this had no deleterious effects on the university’s credbility.
While the 1940 Swiss Family Robinson is the only film I know that was until recently “scrubbed” from public viewing (and is still not easy to get), I have to observe that lots of general-release movies were so little esteemed that they were never widely released in any video format, and are essentially just as scrubbed. These are the awful old movies that I started a thread on quite a while back:
Birds Do It – Soupy Sales’ only starring role. Even HE hated the movie
** Last of the Secret Agents** – Marty Allen and Steve Rossi’s 1966 Secret Agent flick. They were popular comedians, once
Fitzwilly – actually easily available on DVD, but you’d have to know to look for it. One of Dick Van Dyke’s attempts to break out of TV. It’s Barbara Feldon’s (Agent 99 from TV’s “Get Smart”) first big-screen role. (1967)
Speaking of Dick Van Dyke movies, he did a couple for Disney in the 1960s that are equally obscure, but not hard to obtain:
Lt. Robin Crusoe USN
Never a Dull Moment – This one has an interesting cast. Besides Van Dyke, it has Dorothy Provine, Ned Glass, Slim Pickens, … and Edward G. Robinson! It was directed by Jerry Paris, who played Dick Van Dyke’s neighbor, the dentist (and who directed several episodes of the show)
Ha, I remember that movie. I saw it when I was seven years old with my family at the Drive In!
As for Jerry Paris I have an episode of The Untouchables on as I type this. He appeared on this show a few years before TDVDS.
Paris directed a TON of TV shows, Happy Days, The Odd Couple, Laverne & Shirley, When Things Were Rotten, etc…
Those games were so overproduced (rumored to have made more than there were even systems to play them on, guess the expected people to buy multiples) they’re not even closed to scrubbed.
Not to mention it was only one distribution center out of many that was doing this, not all of Atari.
That article should be deleted, it’s so poorly sourced.
Disc rot is very rare outside of poorly made early CD’s and Laserdiscs. Almost every instance since then is actually something else, often by poor care.
Burned discs have a completely different issue that’s often confused with disc rot, but pressed discs don’t just go bad unless there was a fuckup at the factory or yes someone not taking care of them.
That’s the Special Edition, not the original. All of the movies on the bluray sets are tinkered with, even beyond the tinkering of the DVD releases which was beyond the VHS and theatrical special editions.
The only place you can get the unmolestered version is on VHS (and even then Lucas was tinkering a bit, far earlier than anyone seems to realize, nothing too major though), Laserdisc, and the two disc single movie released on DVD.
