It is pretty sad knowing that I will never see when my grandfather was on The Price Is Right. He rode the mail trains from Pittsburgh to New York, and frequently had to stay in New York. While he was there, he often went to game shows, and he was on several. I think his time on The Price Is Right was his most successful, as he won a nice (for that time) television set.
Consider the apparent current value of another crappy Youtube video. No one is seriously archiving the myriad videos of dogs wearing silly hats because to us, they have little financial value. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve heard of serious Web archivists trying to preserve snapshots of the Web at various times, and while many web designers probably keep old versions of websites, they’re not organized in any way and no one worries if the oldest copies are lost. They have no value; why would you ever want to look at an old version of site, when the current one is available? Still, there may eventually be value in this stuff (to historians if no one else) and so some people are trying to record it. However, the very oldest stuff from the web has already disappeared because no one bothered to save it.
Even the Library of Congress doesn’t save everything.
I doubt that this is true. I think you’re seriously underestimating how much it would have cost to preserve all those old TV shows.
Networks rarely owned the shows that appeared on the network. Saving all the prime shows would have gotten them next to nothing in return, no matter how valuable they could become in syndication.
NBC might have been in the best position. It owned the news and the various news/variety shows it made famous, from The Today Show in the morning to the Tonight Show in the evening. There was a noon show too, but it didn’t last long and I can’t remember the name.
At the time, though, these made even less sense to save than the other shows they weren’t saving. What’s more ephemeral than the Jan. 14, 1952 or Oct. 23, 1956 Today show? And why save the news? All it had was a guy reading a script in front of a cardboard graphic. If you wanted footage of famous events, you had to go elsewhere, like newsreels.
That did change a bit by the 60s, when the Kennedy assassination and the moonshots had tremendous coverage. The news programs tried to push coverage out into the field more, although live coverage was next to impossible. It was all on film, though, and that would have been considered more valuable than the couple of minutes of edited footage that made it onto television.
Putting the onus for not saving things they didn’t own and didn’t care about on the networks is missing the point about the way the whole industry was set up in those days. Production companies owned virtually all the shows. If they wanted to keep them, they’re the ones that should have done so. And most of the stuff the networks did own had other and better sources to turn to for historic reasons. You can’t blame them for living in a different world from us.
We forget the mentality of time before.
Just this week, on PBS, there were doing the Ebert Presents show and repeated an episode of Siskel and Ebert reviewing the best and the worst films of 1978. Was fun to watch, but an interesting comment from Siskel about a small film he liked was to go see this film soon, as you won’t be able to see it unless it is someday re-released in movie theaters again.
Back then, without the foresight of knowing about video or DVD’s, that was the way it worked - movies came, and then they were gone - with only a slight chance to catch them again in some film retrospective or in re-release if they were big hits and there was a summer lull in movie releases. I had totally forgetten about those days.
The Paley Center has some great media from bygone years that has been preserved - but yes, it was rare to get recordings from those old radio and tv shows, back before anyone considered them worth the effort and cost of saving.
(Geez, when I think about those comic books I tossed away when I was a kid, I could kick myself…but who knew they too would be worth more than the dime they cost?!)