How could media producers be so short sighted as to not preserve shows?

Cafe Society
1

Early in radio and television, it was possible to preserve either audio or video using disk recording, tape recording, film or video, even though many earliest shows were originally carried live. But many shows were not recorded or saved and have been lost to the ages.

I guess the concept of reruns and catalog had not yet been developed, and the worth of a week-old Steve Allen show was thought to be less than the cost of the videotape, so media was either tossed or reused.

Nowdays, some shows are created only for the rerun potential, as they plan to lose money on the first-run. That’s the exact opposite of decades ago, where 100% of the profit was expected up front.

How could people be so shortsighted? Could no one foresee that when the performers are gone, this is all that would be left? Was the concept of nostalgia something invented in 1970?

2

Tape is expensive, and storing it is even more expensive. Besides, who would want to watch an old episode of something when it’s up against new shows on the other two networks? Besides, what if it’s something like a soap opera or something with a continuing story? If you just show an episode out of order, everyone will be confused.

3

In the very early days, things were aired live, with maybe an archive copy on kinoscope, which wasn’t good enough quality to air. This was especially true for talk shows.

No one expected there to be any market for old shows; there were a limited number of stations in an area, so if a show did not become an immediate hit, it would never air again anyway. So why keep the tape?

The shows from the 50s that are available in complete form are those that were done on film.

Remember, before cable, New York city had six VHF channels and a few UHF ones, and that was the largest market in the US. The number of places that would want a syndicated shoe was limited, and the syndicators didn’t bother with anything that wasn’t a hit.

4

Kind of hand-in-hand with the storage expense, old tape technologies were relatively huge (especially since tape speeds had to be high to allow for decent quality video). Even if storage was cheap, it’d be a nightmare to store, catalog, and maintain.

A few other things:

Recording techniques sucked. If you were shooting episodic TV on film, you were okay, but pre-1956 tape, the only way to record live broadcasts was kinescope… basically, point a film camera at a monitor, which yielded film that was of a lower quality than the original broadcast. Video tape took years to reach a decent standard (and was often held to be inferior to kinescope); IMO mid-1970s for broadcast quality besting kinescope, and again IMO not until the mid-80s digital tapes did video tape become a potential archival format. And, as Captain Amazing mentions, all of the tape formats were expensive, which encouraged TV stations and networks to reuse old tape.

There’s also a little bit of a cultural approach to TV involved; in the US, TV was originally seen as an expansion of radio and an extension of the stage-- live performances were emphasized, with variety shows seen as a modern burlesque, dramas as mini-plays. Hollywood mostly shunned early TV, and the talent (writers, directors, actors) were drawn from the theater and radio fields. This led to the underlying feel that TV was a medium designed for live performance, that viewers wouldn’t accept filmed or pre-recorded content.

5

Except for Ed Sullivan, apparently. :slight_smile:

6

Along with the technical notes above, I’ll add that this is a holdover from theater conventions. The practical tradition is that a show is ephemeral. Once it’s done, its done, and trying to save things from the production (except for versatile props and costumes that can be re-used) is impractical. Everyone I’ve ever worked with in theater has a story of someone who’ll call five or ten years after a production and ask if they’ve saved some big piece of scenery. This almost always merits an eyeroll. The night the show closes, you strike the set. Everything’s gone; the alternative is that the playhouse quickly turns into an episode of Hoarders. I think that mentality carried over to the early days of television. Few producers could foresee that people would want to see those shows again (at least in numbers to make storing tapes economically feasible), so they did what stage managers had been doing for centuries: strike and re-use.

7

Even the audience considered the shows to be disposable. I remember running home from play, to watch *I Love Lucy *or *Twilight Zone. *We really had no idea we’d ever be able to watch them again.

8

One radio show which was saved and that I HIGHLY recommend is X Minus One. If you like classic Science Fiction stories, then you should totally check it out. I’m glad they did save the recordings of that show.

9

I get the technical reasons – kinescopes, relatively poor storage mediums, etc., but what gets me is they didn’t think there would ever be a market for old stuff. Yet 100 year old books were regularly reprinted.

And some shows were recorded on transcription discs (16" 78RPM) and sent to radio stations to play. Afterwards, they threw them out with the trash. Luckily, some survived, but I’m sure not all. Here is an example of a recording medium where the original is the same quality as the preserved medium would be (it didn’t lose anything like a kinescope does).

So it isn’t entirely the quality of the medium but the mind-set, and this is what gets me. Very few thought archiving was of any value.

10

My father used to say that when he was growing up in the 1930s that by 1970 or so people would own an airplane or helicopter like they do with automobiles. People in the 1960s thought by 2000 we would have a moon base and manned flights to Mars. Maybe we should cut people some slack when their predictions of the future turn out wrong. Especially when it meant they would have had to spend money in the present (and I think it was more expensive to film and store a tv show).

11

The points about cost, and about the perception of the “live” medium are true of all kinds of things. Telecasts of World Series baseball games weren’t consistently saved until the mid-'70s (MLB now sells DVD collections of some that survived, and wishes they had more). Countless concerts by major musical performers went unrecorded, for what now looks like no good reason. I’m not up on theater history, but I imagine there were stage productions of immense historic and artistic value lost to us because it just didn’t occur to anybody that it would be worth the trouble and expense of filming them.

12

Only a small minority of 100-year-old books were reprinted. Penny dreadfuls/pulps/etc. are an obvious example of abundant books that no one bothered to preserve in most cases. The same view was probably taken of radio and TV shows. Maybe some people foresaw a market, but not enough of a market to warrant the expense of recording and preserving the shows, especially using the aforementioned marginal technologies.

And honestly, I’m not sure that wasn’t the right view. I don’t think anyone would be poorer decades from now if they couldn’t watch the entire run of Malcolm in the Middle. Most of the old shows were no more significant than your average contemporary sitcom or cop show, although their place at the start of a new medium makes them more interesting.

Weeding is a very important practice in library collections. Removing unused items from a collection makes it easier to find relevant information (apart from the storage issue, which is less relevant with contemporary electronic data). That’s been one of the biggest challenges of the information explosion that has accompanied the internet – the information you want is probably out there somewhere, but it can be challenging to find it. Improvements in search engines and developments like Wikipedia have helped mitigate the situation, but it’s still far from perfect. If every bit of old entertainment that could have been preserved actually was, we’d have an analogous glut of that form of information as well.

13

Analogous glut…you mean like the Internet? :slight_smile:

14

Yep. The signal-to-noise ratio on the net is lousy (from an information point of view, not a data transmission point of view), and that makes it difficult for many average users to find anything that’s even a little obscure. Now, obviously, with new technologies the better answer is probably to find better and better ways of finding info rather than getting rid of it. That option just didn’t exist in the early days of TV and radio, though. Storing and cataloging all those old shows would have been a huge undertaking for a relatively small payoff.

Even with all our spiffy search engines and cheap storage, not everything on the web should be preserved indefinitely. There is plenty of information that will be relevant to absolutely no one in a relatively short timeframe. There’s plenty more that will be relevant to so few that it’s more of a detriment than a benefit to keep it.

15

There was also the vaudeville mentality (which still exists in standup comedy) – a performer would spend years perfecting a routine, tour the country with it and then have to develop new material. Radio and TV effectively ended the careers of many performers because, once they played to an audience of 20 million, there was no new market for their old material anymore. Why bother to keep thousands of hours of programming just to hear the differences between a four-minute and seven-minute version of “Who’s on First”?

16

As mentioned, only a tiny fraction of books become classics, reprinted through the years.

Likewise, consider really old comics. The reason they’re so valuable is because most people considered them disposable entertainment and never dreamed that anyone would care about Superman seventy years later. I don’t think old radio shows and early TV was ever intended to be “classics” and still enjoyed many decades later. Prior to syndication, what value would a recording really have for the studio?

17

Pretty much, yes.

The world really changed around then. Previously art was durable: not just books, but music, painting, architecture, and other fine “high” art was preserved. Popular culture was instant, evanescent, and disposable.

You start to see the change after WWII mostly because you suddenly start seeing the entire intellectual establishment railing against popular culture being put even with high art. They hated popular culture because it was low class, and they hated “middlebrow” culture even more, because that’s what the emerging middle classes liked and put all their money behind. Middlebrow is extremely hard to define, since it was mostly whatever the critics pointed to when they disliked something. I’ll try to make a respectable case for that side. Take the Book of the Month Club. People bought these non-intellectual books because a panel of “experts” told them they should. Sometimes the titles were displayed rather than read because that impressed others. Hollywood was a failed venture that could have been good but by the 50s was drowning in mediocrity. Television, the most popular medium, was vaudeville revived. Popular music was meaningless crooning except for that rock ‘n’ roll, which was barbarism. Nobody cared about high art, real artists couldn’t make a living unless they sold out, anti-intellectualism was the fashion of the decade.

The most important work in all of this was Dwight MacDonald’s “Midcult and Masscult,” which appeared in Partisan Review, a “little magazine” for intellectuals, in 1960. It appeared in a collection in 1962, the last moment of the past world.

Why? For one thing, every popular art got better in the 60s. Novels, tv to an extent, film, science fiction, and popular music above everything, had “new waves” where great young writers threw off the old worlds and old restrictions and gleefully embraced the popular. Popular culture not only overturned high art, it almost eliminated it except where it assimilated it. Suddenly classical music was no more than a small cult; painting was in the hands of the barbarians; modernistic architecture had destroyed downtowns; and Playboy, Esquire, New York, and Rolling Stone drove the magazine business and The New Yorker looked catatonic.

If popular art was that good, it was worth hearing or seeing or reading over and over again. People loved seeing favorite old movies and movie stars on television. The new medium of video tape allowed television shows to be showed repeatedly at the original level of quality. Oldies stations started playing songs only a decade old. Intellectuals adopted hipster irony as their default stance on popular art: I love it but I look it more deeply than you do.

And nobody in my generation cared at all what people in Dwight MacDonald’s generation thought about anything at all. Just the opposite. If they thought “a” then “a” must be wrong. All the intellectuals had disgraced themselves in the 50s by running screaming away from their principles in fear of McCarthyism and so they had no moral weight left. And they were for Vietnam. Until they weren’t, a little too late.

The world changed with The Beatles. I’ve said it before, and it works on a dozen different levels. The Beatles gave everybody leave to say it’s good, as good as any of your music, and it’s not going away. BTW, Here are 50 more groups just as good. And so are all these other things we love. We want them and we’re going to keep them, always.

That had never been done before. All the 60s rock groups thought they would have five year careers at best. Today retro is so completely normal that a backlash is forming to it. See this odd article at Slate. Retro is not nostalgia, but something new. We don’t long for a vanished past; we keep the past as alive as the present, a feat made possible by new technologies. Never been anything like it. And no adult could see it until it was all around them.

18

TV in its infancy had a lot of crap that no one imagined anyone would want to see a second time. Who knew Gunsmoke or I Love Lucy would last more than a season or two, or that TV itself would remain popular longer than lawn darts or Colorforms? In 1952, the vast majority of Americans did not own a TV set or have serious plans to buy one. The medium had few writers of notable merit, and the earliest ones didn’t pop up until pretty late in the decade (Rod Serling, Paddy Chayevsky).

Seriously, how many MTV “reality” shows do you keep archival tapes of just in case the future may have need of them? That was the position TV’s pioneers were in.

19

In some instances they ***were ***taped, but the tapes ended up in a dustbin when somebody didn’t like them or decided to clean the place up. Luckily some were saved, either by someone from the band’s organization or by some dumpster diver who later made a killing selling it back to them.

20

Fans will be horrified to hear that the BBC planned on wiping all the Monty Python’s Flying Circus shows once they were broadcast and re-using the tapes.

The only reason they didn’t was because Terry Gilliam heard about it and offered to buy them new videotapes if they’d sell him the tapes of the show. The BBC normally would have refused but they wanted the performers to come back for more shows so they decided to humor him.