If you watch The Flying Nun closely, you’ll see Sr. Bertrille sometimes showing home movies from before she entered the convent. Those home movies included scenes ofa slightly younger her surfing and getting into cute little types of happy teenager trouble.
Little Nemo is correct about reclaiming silver. According to Dr. Elizabeth Ezra in Georges Méliès: The Birth of the Auteur ((2000) Manchester University Press. p. 19.) “During the war (WWI), the French army confiscated over four hundred of Star Films original prints, melted them down to recover silver and celluloid, the latter of which the army made heels for shoes.”
George Mélies films to make heels for shoes, let that sink in for a minute. War is a huge culprit for lost culture like films.
Starting in 1935, the visionary Henri Langlois managed to save many silent-era films from all around the world mostly just picking them up for pennies in Paris flea markets. The Cinémathèque started in his parents’ bathtub where he stacked his finds.
In a great documentary by Edgardo Cozarinsky called Citizen Langlois (1994) we also learn that by 1938 Langlois had founded an International Federation of Film Archives with among others, Frank Hensel, the director of the Reichsfilmachiv. By a twist of fate, this same Frank Hensel who had been a Nazi since 1928 became a Major at the head of censorship in Paris during the occupation and allowed Langlois storage space in the basements of the Palais de Chaillot that had been requisioned by the occupying army. Many of the very verboten films Langlois stored were the last known by Jews such as Jean Epstein, and would certainly not have survived. Hensel warned Langlois with a smile never to tell him what he was storing.
By the end of WWII, Hensel’s own Reichsfilmachiv, which during the war had grown their archive to somehwere around 17,000 films through acquisitions both civilized and violent, also lost most of it to war.
Safe to say that the same gross disregard for the cultural value of television shows existed far after film preservation was established. I’m not even sure saving absolutely everything is the norm in the digital age. We sort of assume that because everything is digitized, it’s saved somewhere, but is it?
I must confess, I didn’t watch the show much when it was first on (I turned 11 in January 1966; ***Batman ***was my special birthday present). But I absolutely remember the episode where Gidget meets Daniel J Travanti on the beach. The scene that stuck in my mind was when he picked her up off the rock she was sitting on and said “Phew! You’ve gotta stop eating those triple-decker hamburgers!”
[VOICE OF OSCAR LEROY] Kids today, they just don’t know what’s good. Jackasses! :mad:
I like Larue too. Gidget is the girl I’d have lusted after in high school, but Larue is the one I’d probably end up with. :o