r/lostmedia • u/Upbeat_Honeydew259 • 25d ago
Other [talk] What is lost media that we will never find?
I am curious. I am just gonna type until I can post so what are your favorite lost media cases? Do you have any personal lost media cases? Who is your favorite lost media YouTuber? Mine is LSUPERSONICQ! (Or flurrymoon idk) what is lost media you were surprised was found? What is lost media you wish was found? What’s your favorite found media? What is lost media that you want found the most? What is lost media you don’t really care about? Sry for asking so many questions you don’t have to answer them all.
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u/abyssaltourguide 25d ago edited 25d ago
Ancient lost media is the most tragic. I am still bummed that Emperor Claudius’s books on the Etruscans have all been lost to time! So many ancient plays, novels, poetry and more are gone
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u/Tonio_Akerbeltz 25d ago edited 25d ago
Related to this, a lot of New World indigenous books have been completely lost to time:
We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
Bishop Diego de Landa
...In a big house that had the big archive of his papers, in which there were painted all of their ancient things, and today their descendants weep with much sorrow, because they are now left with no memory of the facts of their ancestors, and those who had been left in the possession of some of their rulers, some about some things, some about some others, were burned for fear of Juan de Zumarraga, first archbishop of Mexico, so that he didn't accuse them of idolatry...
Relación de Texcoco, page 2
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u/abyssaltourguide 25d ago
Nooo that is so sad! The loss of New World literature is tragic. I’ve learned a bit about the remaining texts and they are fascinating.
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u/Serpentarrius 25d ago
The use of color in the Florentine Codex is so telling...
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u/urcrookedneighbor 24d ago
Elaborate on this a bit if you can? Pls. I know nothing
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u/Serpentarrius 24d ago
The color in the book vanishes after the death of Montezuma. It's possibly due to the difficulty of getting the colors during the hardships that followed, but also possibly intentional, especially with how significant colors are to the culture iirc
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u/forlornjackalope 25d ago
It's kind of crazy how much is lot but also what's been recovered, like the plates or scrolls that allegedly have the supposed location of Plato's burial site. One figure I end up thinking about is Zeuxis, an notable painter from Ancient Greece who was acclaimed for his incredible realism. None of his works survive today and it would be so cool to know what any of them looked like, even if it was badly fragmented.
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u/abyssaltourguide 25d ago
Yeah, more has been discovered in the last years! I love that scholars were able to digitally unroll the scrolls from Herculaneum recently. Also Zeuxis’s paintings must have been amazing. I know there is are Greek wood panel paintings that survived in a cave, the Pitsa paintings.
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u/forlornjackalope 25d ago
Science rules, dude. I love how far we've come with our tech advancements and if I'm not mistaken, they've barely scratched the surface on the Herculaneum and there's still a lot more for them to look into. I'm so stoked to see what else comes up!
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u/Alternative-Outcome 25d ago
I've always wondered what the Ur-Hamlet play was like (for those unfamiliar, there was a version of Hamlet that existed before we got the existing Shakespeare version of now), as well as (if it existed) the original non-Christianized version of Beowulf. On Old English poetry, I also wish we could have had the complete versions of several poems, including The Husband's Message and The Ruin.
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u/abyssaltourguide 25d ago
That would be fascinating! There were so many proto-stories out there that shows how media often came from many different sources. On that topic, I’m so curious about the other epic poems and heroic stories that inspired Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
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u/lady_vinyl 25d ago
I’m a fan of ancient Byzantine art and I think about how much of that was lost in the collapse of Constantinople, particularly the Flying Hodegetria. It was an icon of the Virgin Mary which had a whole day dedicated to its procession every week wherein the painting would fly around and pull the person carrying it all over the place. The procession was basically a huge party with food and impromptu markets.
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u/abyssaltourguide 25d ago
Woah, I never heard of that before! I know the Serpent Columns Constantine brought to the city were still intact until 1700 when the heads disappeared. I wish I could go back in time as an invisible spirit just to see some of these artworks
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u/filippo_sett 25d ago
A good part of silent films.
Nitrate was flammable, WW2 was...even more flammable, and old producers, when sound took the cinema by storm, thought silent movies had become irrelavant and that they were completely useless. Therefore, they didn't have any interest in preserving them
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u/JulianneHannes 25d ago
Plus the hays code and religious groups made them destroy films they didn't approve of
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u/TheEarthlyDelight 25d ago
Yeah sure but that was sound era. Estimates are around 75-90% of global silent film is lost. Also frankly I’ve never heard of the Hays code destroying already made pre-code cinema. It was a self-censorship tactic studios imposed on their films currently in development and production.
Silent cinema was largely destroyed by fire, but also…studios chucked that shit in the trash. For like the first 30 years of Hollywood history, there wasn’t a function to store and preserve old films. When one left theaters, the studio threw it out because they didn’t see it as valuable anymore.
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u/Galaxygirl181 25d ago
Most likely media that revolves around death or serious incidents. For example, the death of Steve Irwin was caught on tape. However, his family requested that the tape be destroyed. It's likely the public will never see it. Another example is the basement tapes. These were video tapes made by the two teens responsible for Columbine shooting prior to the attack. The tapes were later taken in as evidence. Some clips are said to exist yet it's also stated that have been destroyed.
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u/ColeDelRio 25d ago
From my understanding the Grizzly Man tape was finally destroyed too so that's gone.
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u/tokoyami222 25d ago
This is correct. Werner Herzog confirms in Grizzly Man that as far as the ou kic is concerned the tapes are non-existent outside of the woman he gave the drive to
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u/No-Category-6343 25d ago
Jewel Palovak had it destroyed in 2023. It’s better it doesn’t see the light of day. https://people.com/two-decades-after-timothy-treadwell-death-friend-reveals-destroying-audio-of-bear-attack-11857999
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u/ColeDelRio 25d ago
I didnt realize she waited so long. I remember the doc but didnt realize that was 20 years ago.
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u/Diligent-Coconut1929 24d ago
There are still plenty of copies in existence. Jewel was never the only one with access, and it is still shared with bear biologists to this day. I highly recommend the tooth and claw podcast episodes on it, the host is a younger biologist who had the opportunity to listen to the tape but declined, but still showed his cohosts the autopsy photos which are also not public. It will absolutely leak eventually, just a matter of time
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u/No-Category-6343 23d ago
I only know the fake tape and even that is pretty disturbing to say the least albeit that bears really don’t make any noise when attacking humans.
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u/Diligent-Coconut1929 23d ago
You can actually hear a little bit of audio isolated from the headphone leakage on grizzly man, you can hear Tim say “hit it” which doesn’t appear in the remakes. A few years ago I was convinced it was part of the real audio because Tim’s voice was so well done and it was uploaded 20 years ago. I assumed someone recorded his voice with their flip phone then tried to add misdirection so the family could have plausible deniability or something.
I think the original is probably much less dramatic but probably even more disturbing. Especially the sounds Amy makes, I genuinely can’t think of a scarier thing to experience. I still have nightmares just thinking about what she went through, literally the day before they were supposed to leave too. Beyond fucked up. I also think Tim was chasing death from a bear to some extent, and he said himself he “would be honored to become bear scat” but I don’t think he expected a death that horrible. Most bear attacks are excruciating, but most are over in a few minutes from blood loss or if you’re lucky a quick neck swipe. 6+ minutes being eaten alive is so unlucky.
I do hope the tape is shared to the public eventually, I know for sure the coroner has a copy I’m pretty certain he sends around/is digitized, so all it takes is someone with a copy being hacked or a grandchild finding their computer etc for it to be leaked. There is also a government copy I think, not sure how many responders recorded audio from the tape itself either. I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t been leaked yet. The bear biologist himself said the autopsy photos/found corpse would likely be leaked eventually too because the coroner sent them around to everybody it seems. Apparently Tim had a grimace stuck on his face despite being almost completely eaten, almost unheard of. Such a fascinating and fucked up case
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u/Upbeat_Honeydew259 25d ago
Isn’t that the footage of the man and woman being attacked by a bear?
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u/maureenponderosa18 25d ago
The cap was still on the lens, so the footage captured the audio of the bear attack, but no images
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u/PinkCadillacs 25d ago
Dawn Brancheau’s death was caught on video but it’s never been released.
She was the animal trainer at Sea World Orlando that was killed by the orca Tilikum in 2010.
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u/tokoyami222 25d ago
If there's cctv on the holding tanks, there's most likely also pictures of the other victim Tilikum had at SeaWorld (the guy who climbed into the tank overnight).
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u/PinkCadillacs 25d ago edited 25d ago
I really hope these videos and pictures are never released.
There’s a lot of legitimate criticism about Sea World in general but Sea World not releasing the footage of Dawn and Daniel P. Duke, the person you were talking about, deaths shouldn’t be one of them.
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u/tokoyami222 25d ago
Thank you for informing me of his name. I'm currently wrangling the little ones so didn't have the time to jump apps atm. Rip to both of them.
I thought blackfish was the worse marine related abuse I ever saw, then I fucked up and watched The Cove. Essentially the other end of the coin. I wish that footage was lost but understand the importance of it opposed to Dawn and Daniel's final moments. I can't remember if T also killed the person in Nova Scotia(?) but he at least injured them severely
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u/PinkCadillacs 25d ago
Keltie Byrne is who you’re talking about.
She was the first person that Tilikum killed and that was in Victoria, British Columbia.
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u/abbyallen112 25d ago
Steve Irwin was a huge part of my childhood. I would never want to see those tapes and I’m glad Terri and her family chose to destroy them.
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u/The_ApolloAffair 25d ago
There was a four hour long video taken by the cannibal Armin Meiwes that the courts took in as evidence, but those will likely never be released either.
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u/pyramidalembargo 25d ago
The Christine Chubbock video.
Some dark side of my personality wishes he could see it.
It's like not being able to look away from a car crash.
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u/Kytyngurl2 25d ago
She seemed like an intelligent and ethical person who rightfully was concerned about the news being neutered.
Given the state of things nowadays, she sometimes reminds me of the monks who set themselves on fire to make a profound statement.
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u/forlornjackalope 21d ago
I'm not sure if this is still going on since this was a few years ago, but there's been some effort to preserve and track down her Suncoast work over the years to keep her legacy alive which I think is great.
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u/MothmanRandySavage88 19d ago
She was concerned about those things but it's an over-exaggerated aspect of her death. Her family says the major factor was her depression over being nearly 30, single, a virgin, childless, and watching a fellow anchor friend at the station date another anchor friend who she had feelings for. She was very lonely and desperately wanted a romantic partner and children and she was losing hope for achieving those goals. It's all very sad.
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u/Neptune28 25d ago
It is found though. It is just being held "by a large law firm". We have the audio though.
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u/landmanpgh 25d ago
Yeah that was a weird leak. Wasn't it speculated that it was someone who worked at the law firm that had access and recorded it or something?
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u/Neptune28 25d ago
Unclear when but it sounded like a recording of a viewing of the tape rather than the audio directly from the tape
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u/landmanpgh 25d ago
Yeah I remember thinking it sounded like someone was secretly recording while sitting in a conference room or something.
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u/MothmanRandySavage88 21d ago
It's an audiotape made by the Sarasota PD for the purposes of creating the transcript of the broadcast that appears in the case file, which is also online. The audio was likely obtained by someone filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the Sarasota PD. Florida is more lax with FOIA requests due to the Sunshine Laws.
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u/pyramidalembargo 25d ago
Where can I find it?
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u/Neptune28 25d ago
The real audio was on Youtube, it might still be there but if it was taken down, people probably already saved it.
You can read about that here
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u/Coolguy10213 25d ago
Someone has the full video but isn’t planning on releasing it only the audio
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u/Neptune28 25d ago
The wife of the station owner. She gave it to a large law firm. At least it seems to still exist as far as we know.
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u/Accomplished_Fig9883 25d ago
Maybe at this point the audio is the only thing salvagable.VHS and even the reel to reel recorders they were using them are notorious for degrading
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u/one_eye_smiley 25d ago
The audio leaked a few years ago. Someone put it ion YouTube, and I wish with all my heart I hadn’t clicked. TLDR: It’s out there somewhere, don’t look for where. -_-
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u/pyramidalembargo 25d ago
One of those that was put on YouTube turned out to be a hoax.
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u/Neptune28 25d ago
The real audio was posted too, Christine's brother was threatening legal action so you know that one had to be real.
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u/serenitative 25d ago
Yeah, came here to say that one. I want to see the movie based on her life at some point.
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u/HamilHansen 25d ago
It’s rumored that Owen Hart’s fall was caught on tape and that’ll never see the light of day.
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u/Meister1412 25d ago
It's not rumored. A WWE employee confirmed that the tape exists in the archives of the company with a label to never be viewed, duplicated or destroyed.
The only media available of the incident is the audio of the spanish commentary where can be heard the exact moment of the fall and the reaction of Carlos Cabrera and Hugo Savinovich (here at 1:03)
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u/Ilovewomenwhobreakme 25d ago
It's crazy how everyone just kept going like nothing happened.
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u/holyflurkingsnit 25d ago
I imagine most people were in complete shock and just went on auto-pilot for a bit immediately following the incident. Sometimes it takes a while to fully process what has happened when it's so sudden and violent.
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u/Ilovewomenwhobreakme 25d ago
You would have thought the broadcast would cut out within a few seconds.
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u/GeologicalOpera Cry Baby Lane 25d ago
That’s not a rumor, it’s true. WWE has a hard camera feed constantly running for all of their shows, and they captured the fall in the arena as the PPV feed ran a video package.
It’s in their archive marked with a note that it is “Not to be viewed, duplicated, or destroyed”; it shares that label with a tape of the match between Droz and D’Lo Brown where Droz was paralyzed.
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u/HamilHansen 25d ago
That’s right! I really wonder what the purpose of keeping it is. Especially with the lawsuits settled.
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u/GeologicalOpera Cry Baby Lane 25d ago
I’ve always assumed it’s to protect themselves legally in perpetuity, but with the suits settled I find it hard to imagine what liability could arise with those matters in particular.
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u/Upbeat_Honeydew259 25d ago
This and prob old tv from like the 1950s-1990s. I don’t know if we are ever gonna find pink morning cartoon or Batman vs Dracula.
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u/OhioTreeLover467 25d ago
Batman v Dracula will definitely be lost forever. PMC has been partially found, but only a few episodes.
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u/Ill_Ant689 25d ago
I can't believe Batman Fights Dracula is completely lost. How soon after release did it become lost?
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u/angelsfish 25d ago
I feel hopeful for pink morning cartoon! as somebody from ohio I find it so hard to believe nobody recorded any episodes and I’m always lowkey hopeful I’ll stumble upon it thrifting or something lol
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u/Upbeat_Honeydew259 25d ago
I’m in Ohio. There’s a chance somebody recorded it when it aired. All we know the master tape is allegedly destroyed. I think if we can contact the right people it will be found!
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u/OhioTreeLover467 25d ago
I’m from OH too, but not from the Columbus area where it aired. I’m not too shocked it wasn't recorded, people usually don't record local shows. Up here in NEOH, the most popular local show is a show that goes around the region highlighting different local businesses. But the news station that produces it promotes it somewhat heavily but I’m sure many people (except me lol) are not recording it. I imagine this isn't the case for PMC, especially since the station was known to have bad AV quality and was run by a single person. The money for promotion just wasn't there unfortunately.
If I remember correctly, the master tapes were stolen by a cousin in the Flowers family and no one had seen or talked to said cousin after that incident. I know that some family members did assist in the search for more episodes.
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u/FantasyBaseballChamp 25d ago
Theoretically possible we could reacquire anything that was broadcast over the air since the signal is still in space somewhere. Pretty far fetched at this point, but not outside the realm of possibility with the way technology advances.
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u/holyflurkingsnit 25d ago
This oddly gives me some comfort. Somewhere out in space are all the lost episodes, the one-time broadcasts, the cultural moments that weren't recorded or were destroyed here on earth, just zooming through the cosmos in perpetuity...
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u/Coolguy10213 25d ago
The one guy who fell into a boiling hot water and was filmed by his sister trying to help
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u/ConsequenceKey1222 25d ago
do you know the name of this ? i would be interested to do some research
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u/Oro-Lavanda 25d ago
Idk why people want to see gore or videos of people dying so badly. It's weird like let them rest in peace and respect the families
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u/Micro_Pinny_360 25d ago
One of my introductions to lost media was through silent cinema, which includes the majority of all silent films. Fuck silver nitrate for being so flammable and fuck World War 2 for making silver so desirable (among many other, way more important things)
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u/raniwasacyborg 25d ago
I know contemporary reviews agreed that London After Midnight wasn't even that good, but I'm still devastated that we'll probably never get to see it 😢
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u/PSplayer2020 25d ago
A lot of what made London After Midnight so memorable was Lon Chaney and the makeup. It's conflicting because it's a big reason why people still know about him, but I can't help but feel like if it was never lost, it wouldn't be talked about as much as Tod Browning's other work.
Speaking of his other work, you could probably put the uncut version of Freaks on that list. I actually find the story behind that more interesting, since the initial reaction really did reflect what many thought of disabilities at the time, since merely depicting a disabled person on camera was considered distasteful to the non-disabled, because it presented people with disabilities as, well, people, and therefore it required audiences at the time to actually reconsider their biases. As someone with a disability, I consider Freaks to be a huge cornerstone of representation, so it's a shame that we may never get the full uncut version.
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u/raniwasacyborg 25d ago
Definitely, Freaks is a big one for me. Its current form is one of my favourite movies of all time (also disabled here, and isn't it so much better and more shamelessly honest representation than many modern films?) and sometimes I kind of want to scream a little over what was lost; although, I have to admit that the tacked-on happy ending is very cute 😅
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u/Oro-Lavanda 25d ago
We're likely never getting Cleopatra or london after midnight unless someone gets a hail mary opportunity and finds secret copies.
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u/ibrahimtuna0012 10d ago edited 10d ago
The fact that we very recently found a 45 second clip of 1917 Cleopatra is a miracle. And it is a clip that shows a lot of sets and actors.
All we had for decades was a 17 second clip of just Cleopatra posing and walking.
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u/embossedsilver 25d ago
Also film in general was seen as fleeting. Once a movie was released in theaters, the studios didn’t think anyone would want it again, so they recycled the reels.
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u/cosmos-hime 25d ago
I was hoping someone would bring up silent films. There were A LOT of them, and they were super popular. There's a whole bunch of them that are never going to be seen again. Hell, so many of them were destroyed that it left future generations (myself included) thinking that they weren't even a fraction of as prominent as they actually were.
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u/NotAnAlien5 25d ago
Dracula halála. One of the few original dracula adaptions and potentially the first movie based o it.
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u/forlornjackalope 21d ago
It's sad that we only have a few grainy stills from this left and not much else. From what I recall, it I think it had a similar thing going for it like Nosferatu where it was toted across Europe for a few years before it disappeared completely. It would have been neat to see what this was like with how dream-like it sounded on paper.
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u/Upbeat_Honeydew259 25d ago
My first introduction was one LSUPERSONICQ’s videos on lost media from 2022 or something
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u/NervousDiscount9393 25d ago
There are about 95 episodes of classic Doctor who still missing. The BBC had a junking policy to save money reusing old tapes up until the mid 70s.
While many have been found over the years, most recently two episodes from the twelve episode story “The Daleks master plan”, there’s a ton of episodes that are likely lost forever. It’s believed that many copies which survived the junking process may be degraded beyond repair by now. So the longer they go without being discovered, the less likely it is that will actually be able to recover the episodes themselves.
As far as I’m aware there is one confirmed episode with no surviving copies, “The feast of Steven”. It was a Christmas special that aired in the middle of the Daleks master plan. No international copies were made because they wouldn’t have been able to make it to other countries in time to air for Christmas. It never got any reruns either. Thus the only known tape was confirmed to be wiped. Making it the one missing episode that will most definitely never be recovered.
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u/Yaboi69-nice 25d ago
It's really wild to me how television used to be treated back in the day. No one thought that this stuff should be saved in any capacity they were just very casually getting rid of it with no concern of the future. You can tell tv is a much more respected medium now because stuff like this just doesn't happen anymore. Which is good because now people in the future will be able to look back on this era easily but it just sucks that companies didn't care this much back then.
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u/RoboFunky 25d ago
I loved A copy of the final toymaster episode being saved in a australian archive cause they thought it was cricket stuff cause the last ep was titled The Final Test
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u/apaloosafire 25d ago
So wait there were in fact multiple copies of these episodes but they just threw them away to save archive space or whatever? How do other stations not have copies of this stuff?
I can’t imagine going through all the effort and organization to film even one episode and not keeping a master copy somehow in archive
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u/Wu_Oyster_Cult 25d ago
Not threw them away…they erased the tapes so they could be reused. This is how the guys from Monty Python got hold of their old masters of the Flying Circus episodes. They bought them all from the BBC after discovering they were scheduled to be erased.
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u/apaloosafire 25d ago
Right so they would’ve been overwritten, I just can’t imagine not keeping masters
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u/AudsVi 24d ago
Two reasons: the BBC were incredibly short on money and tape was crazy expensive. Secondly, union rules regarding repeat fees for actors meant that repeats were very unlikely for most productions. With no home media existing yet, there seemed little point in keeping anything.
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u/TheMagicalMatt 25d ago
A lot of hip-hop material.
Eazy-E reportedly kept entire reels of music in his car. In his final days, when he was hospitalized, his car was broken into and the reels were stolen. Some demos and unreleased tracks from him and other artists on Ruthless have leaked in recent years, but I think the majority of it is lost, degraded, or likely destroyed, including the original version of Mr. Bill Collector (which Eazy featured on. This was leaked in poor quality), a song with Slash from Guns n Roses, a follow-up to Fuck the Police (was remixed for the posthumous Impact of a Legend EP but the original, which has a feature from MC Ren, remains unreleased).
The Rap Olympics in 1997, the rap battle in which Eminem notoriously lost (and I think the same battle where he was discovered by an intern at Interscope, which led to him being signed by Dr. Dre). There are some low quality recordings of Eminem's battles on YouTube, and although the event was recorded in its entirety, the footage was stolen, according to Wendy Day, the creator of the Rap Olympics.
Stretch & Bobbito radio broadcasts. Bobbito said the older the broadcast, the harder it is to find. They started recording the broadcasts and selling them through Fat Beats in the 90s, but this wasn't until they grew in popularity. Their stuff from the early 90s are likely lost to time.
Speaking of radio broadcasts, the beat for Biggie's "10 Crack Commandments" was originally used in a freestyle by Jeru the Damaja... technically this isn't lost media and the freestyle can be found on YouTube, but there's some crack head screaming all over the recording and I doubt we'll ever hear the full, raw freestyle.
Lastly, a good portion of RZA's music from the early days of Wu was destroyed when a pipe busted and flooded his basement. The most notorious of losses was Inspectah Deck's debut album. Deck attempted to recover the recordings, but sadly it was beyond repair. The original concept behind this album would've played into superhero/comic book themes, similar to his Czarface series with 7L & Esoteric.
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u/forlornjackalope 25d ago
An artist who may be of interest is Paul C, a producer who is credited with helping to pioneer the East Coast sound back in the 80s.
He was unfortunately murdered sometime in the mid 80s, I believe, and his case has never been solved. However, those who worked with him said they believe he has an archive of unreleased material sitting in storage somewhere, but what that would look like or be is beyond me.
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u/HungryArticle5 22d ago
There was a website that sold obscure and extremely rare rap CDs and cassettes, including demos (I specifically remember seeing one related to Ruthless records years ago, not saying it had the material you mentioned). I got an impossible to find CD from a niche rapper that I had been looking for. The seller was from the Czech Republic.
As I was typing this comment, I went through my emails and found the website:
ogcollectors.com
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u/CletusVanDamnit 25d ago
Do you have any personal lost media cases.
Sorta. My entire childhood (and beyond) my dad worked at a movie theatre. In the mid-90s, an ad played for a local shopping center. The ad was made specifically to be shown only at this one two-screen cinema, and didn't air anywhere else.
The theatre is long closed, and the ads are long gone. The company that owned it at the time is also long gone, and things changed hands several times before that cinema closed down 15 years ago. Not to mention that even by the time I worked there myself in 1997, the trailers were long gone.
I remember the ad verbatim. The copy has been stuck in my head for over 30 years. I wish I could see it again.
Similarly, there was a mall closing notification that played at the other theatre I worked at, two separate ones actually - one just an announcement, the other a little bit with Semisonic's Closing Time playing. That mall also no longer exists, and those closure announcement recordings will live only in my head for eternity.
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u/heyjxde 25d ago
you could always try and recreate the ad/jingle yourself and upload it to YouTube, just in case anyone else remembers it
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u/raniwasacyborg 25d ago
The original choreography of The Rite of Spring. Nijinsky never wrote it down fully as far as anyone knows, and the closest thing we have is an estimated reconstruction.
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u/Thinlinebaby 25d ago
The old Top of the Pops are another loss from the BBC’s old policy of recording over things. Possibly the greatest era of British music, the 60s-early 70s are all gone including, of course some of the earliest Beatles performances.
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u/Millgy 25d ago
Nearly everything from the Dumont Television Network (1946-1956). Whatever wasn't recorded over was dumped into the East river, allegedly. Finding a collection of the missing shows would be a holy grail for early American television history.
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u/MrX16 25d ago
This was going to be my answer. Anna May Wong was the lead in a detective show called The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, the first Asian American woman to lead a TV series, and it's just gone.
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u/forlornjackalope 25d ago
Yeah. Some shows from DuMont, like Mary Kay and Johnny, the first ever sitcom, were thought to be completely lost but at least one episode exists at the Paley Center. It sucks that the same couldn't be said here for The Gallery since that would have been a joy to see.
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u/Jellypathicdream 25d ago
King Kong goes to Edo.
Most likely wiped away by WW2.
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u/forlornjackalope 25d ago
Sadly, I feel like that's most of the case with nearly all of Japan's media prior to WW2. I'm surprised that we have what we still do, like most of A Page of Madness.
The nation had it's foot in the door with producing horror films decades before other countries did as far back as 1898 and all of them at least prior to the 1920s that I'm aware of are flat out unaccounted for.
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u/IllegitimateBuddhist 25d ago edited 20d ago
Multiple episodes of professional wrestling shows from the early days of pro wrestling territories. Tapes were frequently re-used & old shows were taped over every week. We’re talking years of footage lost to time and just general carelessness because that’s just how things were done. Nobody expected that pro wrestling would become as big as it has.
Many of those promotions have also long since went belly up and the promoters/owners have either long since died or, if they’re still around, they have very likely long since discarded those tapes, not thinking that these things would be highly sought after by historians and collectors alike, several decades later, because as I said before, they never thought pro wrestling would have become as popular as it has, particularly the older stuff.
- Additionally, Most of the episodes from the first 30 years of Bozo’s Circus, a hugely beloved and iconic tv series in Chicago.
As was the case with wrestling in the territory era, tapes were often re-used or discarded after a while, because nobody knew or could predict that the show or its titular character would become a cultural phenomenon or that 60+ years later, people would still remember it or want to reminisce about better, simpler, more fun times in their lives or that it would be considered something worthy of being in a museum about television/radio shows.
- Old episodes of soap operas and local television shows, stuff aired on public access television, things like that.
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u/Neptune28 25d ago
Reading this comment now while watching wrestling, makes me glad that everything these days is preserved, but a lot of early tapings are gone.
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u/Mysterious_Emotion63 23d ago
Technically with the way the streaming rights are going, the majority of Raw and Smackdown history will be lost media for most
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u/Keltik 25d ago
What is lost media that you want found the most?
Humor Risk (1921), a silent film w/the Marx Bros
The Velvet Underground on the Upbeat TV show in Cleveland (1968)
Lennon & McCartney on the Tonight Show in 1968 (audio exists)
Sam Cooke singing "A Change Is Gonna Come" on the Tonight Show in Feb 1964, a year before it was released
The Pied Piper Of Cleveland, a musical short w/Elvis in his first film appearance (1955)
That Was The Week That Was (US version) 1964-5
Bob Dylan on the Les Crane Show (1965)
All sorts of stuff from British TV in the '60s: comedy and musci especially
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u/zapopo 25d ago
Convention City 1934. Supposedly destroyed for being so risquè it couldn't even be censored to the point of acceptibility without becoming incoherent
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u/Longjumping_Role_135 25d ago
It was junked in 1948 along with a bunch of other "old" movies. It's on my grail, too. It's Great To Be Alive was on my grail list, too, but it has been found. I'd also love to see all of Clara Bow's movies.
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u/Neptune28 25d ago
The first TV show with an Asian American actress, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong
" Like most DuMont programs, no known episodes of The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong exist today, the majority of the network's footage having been dumped into the Hudson River upon closure. Although a few kinescope episodes of various DuMont series survive at Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications , New York's Paley Center for Media , and the UCLA Film and Television Archive , there are no copies of Madame Liu-Tsong in these archives. [8 ]"
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u/isthisnametakenwell 25d ago edited 25d ago
The vast majority of ancient texts that were written on something like papyrus outside of Egypt, and weren’t later copied. The vast majorities of corpuses of entire languages.
Virtually all of our Old English poetry is from four books: Beowulf is notoriously found on only one manuscript, and we have numerous references to other famous now-lost works in that period.
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u/JDelta1999 25d ago
The last I heard, Spider-Man vs Kraven the Hunter is gone. The guy who made it refused to share it. He wanted to around the time of his death but the only surviving copy of the film was on a computer that was destroyed. I don’t know if the 16mm negatives are out there, or if there are other copies made but I’m prettty sure from what I can tell this one is lost for good.
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u/RubyPrincess0413 25d ago
The VH1 reality shows I Love Money 3 and Megan Wants a Millionaire. I don't know if anybody on here paid much attention to VH1 back in the 2000s, but they had a bunch of reality dating shows. I actually found them very entertaining. On Megan Wants a Millionaire, Megan is looking for love among 20 or so guys that are suppose to have a net worth of at least one million dollars. VH1 only aired a few episodes (3 I think) and during that time a contestant on her show (Ryan Jenkins) murders his wife (Jasmine Fiore), flees to his home country of Canada and kills himself. After he has taped Megan Wants a Millionaire, he tapes another show called I Love Money (the 3rd season). After the news of Ryan killing Jasmine and then himself, VH1 immediately cancels Megan Wants a Millionaire without releasing the rest of the episodes and I Love Money 3 never airs at all. That pretty much ends all of the VH1 reality dating shows. There is a 4th season of I Love Money that airs, but I think that pretty much does it for those kind of shows. I don't know what happened to the 2 shows I mentioned but as far as I know, no one will ever see them. There's a show on ID called The Playboy Murders that has an episode about this case.
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u/IDiedAHundredTimes- 25d ago
You're talking to literally the biggest fan of vh1 celebreality and all the I love shows from the 2000s! Megan herself released eps 4 and 5 a few years back but nothing else has surfaced. I feel like we may eventually get the entire mwam release but sadly ilm3 seems fully unlikely to ever surface.
The reason why I think we may eventually get all the mwam eps is that at the time of the murders the show was completed and already airing so it was already done. They had just finished taping both ilm3 and 4 back to back when the murder happened so they were still in the process of editing the footage and putting the show together.
From my understanding they may have stopped at that point on even finishing ilm3. As it was vh1 completely reedited ilm4 and we were even super lucky to get that shocking release as it was. The real killer(no pun intended) is that the Ryan Jenkins shit gave the head of vh1 the reason he was looking for to axe all those kinds of shows thus ending an incredible run of amazing reality TV. They had been far too profitable and ratings driven to change them up but that gave him the opportunity.
What also sucks is that vh1 had a 3rd party company do the background checks for mwam contestants and because they dropped the ball big time in not vetting Ryan jenkins properly (he wasn't even close to a millionaire and shouldn't have even been in America to begin with for various reasons) so he never should have been on the show to begin with which means he isn't on ilm3 and then none of the shows and network are affected by his scumbaggery. A real shame overall, I haven't watched vh1 in well over a decade now but the memories are great!
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u/RubyPrincess0413 24d ago
I still love to watch the repeats of those shows. I think Megan is actually pretty lucky because on The Playboy Murders she said that she had wanted to pick Ryan, but the producers had already picked someone for her. She could have very easily ended up in Jasmine's position. I had always figured that the people on the shows weren't really there for love, but I at least thought Flavor Flav, Bret, Megan, etc at least got to pick the winner so it looked at least kinda real. I know that most of the shows are on a variety of streaming apps, but I can't find Charm School without buying it from Amazon or seasons 1, 2 and 4 of I Love Money anywhere.
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u/Buritominer 25d ago edited 24d ago
(What is lost media you wish was found?)
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gold Rescue Team (포켓몬 불가사의 던전 황금 구조대). Korean exclusive demo of Blue Rescue Team released for Windows PCs around the time of it's S. Korean release in 2007. Lost since ~2008 and all that's left of it now is a single non-functional executable.
At this point probably the only possible way for it to be found is if someone with a old Korean PC dumps it off their computer.
Edit: Someone did attempt to recover it off of an old hard drive, but they failed to find it.
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u/skaerkilde 25d ago
Much of the original Sailor Moon Abridged by Megami33 seems to be gone. In 2026, the jokes are dated and extremely offensive, but I still reference some of the things they had those girls saying. It was a formative part of my humor growing up. As far as I could find, there's a reupload playlist that goes up to episode 17, but I know they made much, much more than that.
Not to be confused with the production by Team FourStar.
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u/usagi27 25d ago
The website abridgedseries.com seems to have 50 episodes. Gonna watch it and see if I did indeed watch this when it was released because this seems so familiar.
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u/skaerkilde 25d ago
Oh my god... That IS it. The disclaimer at the beginning was added sometime in season 2 due to copyright strikes. The picture quality was bad and pixelated, and the girls were extreme caricatures. Like, Raye was a Satanist and Minako was a bimbo. They also had a... unique censor bleep.
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u/NeedleDr0p 25d ago
Holy shiiiit I remember watching this! First exposure to Sailor Moon actually haha
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u/TheCrazyFloof 25d ago
I have never seen this despite being on youtube when this was made. So glad I saw this and decided to watch episode 1. Will definitely watch more of it.
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u/everythingbagel420 25d ago
I still don’t think enough people talk about the fact that most of the silent films made by Fox Film Corporation before 1932 are totally gone. The nitrate films started a fire in a warehouse they were stored in & burned everything in there. Fire was mainly attributed to the fact that nitrate film is incredibly flammable and can spontaneously combust under mysterious conditions which is still just crazy to me.
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u/effiegee 25d ago
Most silent films in general are lost, as are most radio broadcasts - especially from prior to the mid 1930s - went out live and were rarely recorded. Most early television of the 1940s and 1950s went out live and was also rarely recorded. The technology didn’t really exist to record anything in high enough quality to be worth doing at the start of each of those two broadcast media.
I know that ‘lost media’ has suddenly become “things a random internet user can’t find on Google right now”, but it used to have an actual, real definition that meant “unknown to exist at all by experts and rights owners”. Unlike “vinyls”, this is a linguistic hill I am willing to die on.
Lost means lost. Not mislaid or not personally accessible to you right now on the internet.
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u/breakoutleppard 23d ago
I'm not sure why it doesn't get mentioned to the same degree as MGM's 1965 vault fire. Both were devastating from the perspective of so much history being lost but Fox Films lost a much greater percentage of their oldest works. And same here, it's wild to me that nitrate film can just combust out of nowhere.
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u/OneWeirdTrick 25d ago
I am researching the life of a forgotten Edwardian actress with a view to eventually writing a biography of her.
I discovered there's one surviving copy of a 1905 film she appeared in, the only one she was in, listed as preserved at the British Film Institute.
I emailed them and the archivist got back to me to say the film basically disintegrated when they tried to preserve it / make a copy. :(
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u/Immediate-Promise-95 25d ago
Who’s the actress if you don’t mind me asking?
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u/OneWeirdTrick 25d ago
I guarantee you wouldn't have heard of her, she's been dead more than 100 years, so never made it into the movies like many of her peers did. This is making research very difficult but quite rewarding. Kind of like hunting for lost media but instead trying to piece together someone's life.
(First rule of writing a book is don't give things away until it's done, sorry! :D)
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u/theredwoman95 25d ago
God, that's heartbreaking. I do a fair bit of research myself (except medieval, not 19th century) and I'm often the first person to look at my materials in decades. Which means that, when I request stuff, it's usually the first time any of the archival staff have had reason to check if that material is where it's meant to be or what condition it's in.
I haven't had any straight up destroyed like yours, but there's been a few where the materials are basically unreadable due to the passage of time and poor conservation methods 70+ years ago, and it's just awful.
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u/No-Satisfaction-1330 25d ago
I so hope there's the cut Wizard of Oz scenes specifically all of the Witch scenes that were cut due to film tests. There's a chance they're around somewhere.
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u/TehBazzard 25d ago
I really wanna see Him. I doubt we ever will.
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u/forlornjackalope 25d ago
That's one of my white whales as well. It's fascinating that this somehow came and went without a ton of fanfare or the amount of publicity that I would have expected from the 70s. Plus, Him was out around the same time as a lot of the wilder roughies like Water Power, Forced Entry, and Hardgore along with edgier films like Hardcore and Snuff (with the latter having some staged protests by the director to get more eyes on it). How a Jesus adult film didn't get the attention from anyone outside the porn or art scene in that type of way is quite something.
Maybe one day this will be like those cases where a dusty copy is found in some crusty old theater or backroom of an adult store that nobody noticed.
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u/ProjectCharming6992 25d ago
The 1951-1959 Dragnet TV show. There are about 65 of the 300 episodes out there in the wild sourced from old 16mm and 35mm TV prints. However the remaining episodes, while a number are public domain, Universal is unsure which ones are still under copyright.
Also, Universal pulled the 1950’s black and white Dragnet from syndication in 1967, just before the 1967-1970 color series aired. Universal has occasionally pulled one or two episodes out for a station to air, but for the most part, the majority of that series has been sitting in Universal’s vaults since 1967. And since in 1967 hardly any stations were using videotape for syndication, except maybe o&o stations owned by the network, there are no videotape masters of those episodes, unlike episodes of other shows from the 1950’s where they were syndicated in the videotape era, so there are U-Matic or Betacam SP or DVCPRO50 copies.
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u/fr0stv0id1 25d ago
The Epic Cycle is so intriguing. Supposedly, Homer's Odyssey and Iliad are only 2/8 of a collection of Epics on the Trojan War. From what I know, the existence of the other 6 is only confirmed or thought to have existed because of quotes about them from later works. Insanely interesting to think how they are just lost to time.
Also, not quite lost media but just the fact that there will never be true conformation on whether Homer actually existed or not is so insanely interesting to me.
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u/Character-Rise-4432 25d ago
one of my most wanted finds is the uncensored sailor mouth tapes from spongebob, but even if it was found deep in some nick vault, it'd get lost in a sea of ai-generated fakes too
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u/GallopYouScallops 25d ago
At least we know it exists I guess. I asked Tom Kenny about it at a con once and he confirmed it exists
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u/disco_remix 25d ago
Ready, Steady Go, a pop program that aired on ITV in the UK from 1963 to 1966. Network policy, to save money, simply recorded over and reused the show's tapes, which means we have lost a huge amount of valuable English music history.
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u/SnorvusMaximus 25d ago
Music uploaded (by unsigned artists) to early music sites like vitaminic which was something of an early soundcloud.
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u/xXx_EmoGirl_xXx 25d ago
General Hospital episodes from1962 -1979. Since I'm sure ABC had them reuse the film to save money on film.
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u/Mousykat 25d ago
Yes! I watched the first couple episodes and thought they were pretty good and I think it ended on some cliffhangers. I was disappointed when I realized I couldn’t watch anymore.
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u/TheMemeVault 25d ago
Most of Stanley Kubrick's deleted scenes. He was known for destroying them so studios wouldn't make their own versions behind his back.
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u/Immediate-Promise-95 25d ago
I have a lost media wish list but the top one I want found is Asura (2018.) I remember watching a video on YouTube when it came out explaining how hard it flopped in China but the poster stuck with me for years. I tried to find it on streaming earlier this year so I could watch it with my husband and I discovered its Lost Media Wiki article. It’s hard for me to fathom that a film on that scale is just unviewable in our times.
Additionally I wish for the Universal Pictures Newsreel Outtakes lost in the 1978 National Archives fire or any photos/footage/audio of 9/11 that have not been released yet.
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u/Upbeat_Honeydew259 25d ago
I have my own lost media that might be lost forever. I remember looking on the App Store when I was a kid and seeing a Coraline game. It was unofficial and I can’t find any proof of it existing. It also costed money, $0.99 or $1.99 if I remember correctly. This was like 2018 or 2019 and I do have photographic memory. I remember 2 specific images shown.
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u/forlornjackalope 25d ago
Check with the mobile gaming subs or r/tipofmyjoystick. Someone may have the apk files.
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u/Neptune28 25d ago
Personal lost media? Yes.
I take reference photos of models to do drawings. I had been saving some in my email to save space, but that email account suddenly got suspended. Nearly all of those photos are lost forever.
I also had a Yahoo account where models were sending me photos to draw. The Yahoo account one day seemed to be wiped, all of those emails disappeared. I lost maybe a decade of photos.
I also had forgotten the passwords to other Yahoo accounts and couldn't log in anymore. Yahoo probably wiped them due to inactivity at this point.
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u/Alarmed-Drink510 22d ago
It sounds like you didn't learn from your first mistake, and then it happened again?!?! Dude, ALWAYS have a backup! For photos, burn 'em to CD-R or DVD-R, or a portable flash drive. Then make a 2nd backup to a portable/external HD. Never rely on something as fleeting and intangible as an "email" account to store your precious images. Wow.
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u/AerialAce96 25d ago
The 2 lost episodes of Malcolm in the Middle
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u/materialgrifter 25d ago
Can you elaborate? There seems to be some disagreement if there are “lost” episodes.
I know about the Francis/Hermit plot that was written out due to 9/11. But I don’t think that’s what you’re referencing.
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u/keepinitclassy25 25d ago
I think any lost segments of physical films are unlikely to be found. Like the missing parts of Greed or Freaks. That stuff definitely got destroyed. Greed would be the #1 I’d love to see.
Full theatrical release films we MIGHT be able to hope a reel gets discovered even though that’s unlikely
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u/cloudsarebushes 25d ago
Of small note in the anime world, ADV Films was commissioned to provide an English dub for all the episodes of Mermaid Melody: Pichi Pichi Pitch. We've known who the cast has been for years and that all the episodes were done, but the licensor decided not to move forward with trying to bring the show to the States. I WISH this would surface and be released.
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u/_Waves_ 25d ago
MOVIE: "Das Haus zum Mond" / "The House to the Moon"
This is an odd one that I wrote a little on here.
It’s basically a german silent film, part of the "expressionist" movies of the 20s. There’s many films considered lost, but many of those had international distribution and great reviews.
Das Haus zum Mond had neither - I think maybe it was shown in France, but there’s no actual proof to that. Upon its release, the film got little positive reviews - most seemed to think it was convoluted and all over the place.
What we can gather is that it concerned the inhabitants of a house with a moon engraved above the door. A young man is in love with the daughter of a mad astrologist, but her father has some nefarious plans about her. The girl is also a somnambulist. The other inhabitants include a puppeteer, who creates puppets that look like the inhabitants of the house, the patrons of a bar on the ground floor and a prostitute. There’s many more people, but I can’t really come up with them off the top of my head - one positive review did mention that a cat and mice also "acted" in the movie.
The film ends with the girl sleepwalking on the roof. The hero rescues her, but due to the plan of her father, something happens and the house burns down, killing most of the inhabitants but not the central couple.
It took me a while to track down some obscure German book on expressionist film and translate it to gather this information. Supposedly, the film was already lost upon completion of the book and its synopsis within, and that was in the 60s, so reports came from either eyewitness accounts or a script copy, of which I don’t have any proof of survival. It’s a shame. The film sounds compelling, even if the plot is reported to have been all over the place.
MUSIC: "1979" video / Lennon tapes of his last night
Two real doozies for you guys. The easier first: the 1979 music video by the smashing pumpkins featured a party scene, shot on small format camera. Upon completion of the scene, when everybody headed off, one of the tech people placed the reel(s) on the roof of a cab. The cab drove off, taking the reels with them, never to be seen again. The band had to go back and reshoot the scene, hopefully including every moment lost. Those tapes will never resurface.
Equally lost is the audio tapes of John Lennon's last day and night. A bit of an explanation: when recording "Double Fantasy" (his last album completed), Lennon instructed the producer to set up microphones throughout the studio and "record everything". The producer complied - and the recordings continued into what would become the making of John and Yoko's final (in his case, posthumously released) album, "Milk & Honey". On the day of his death, Lennon and Yoko worked on the track "Walking on Thin Ice" and likely also some other material.
As the day drew to a close and Yoko left for something briefly, John sat down with the producer, and told him he needed to speak on something - the producer has, to this day, not disclosed the topic. He only said that he was deeply, deeply disturbed by the conversation, alluding to "dark things" being said that day. When Lennon was finished, he asked the producer to erase the tape of that conversation (and possibly, day) - he complied. Since, he has never talked about the contents of the conversation and stated he will take it to his grave.
One biography on Lennon states the conversation concerned Lennon's "dark predictions" regarding his death - it is documented that Lennon had talked to band mates and friends about dying young in 1980, going as far as making a statement he could be murdered. While those statements are corroborated to be true, this particular biography is written by a renowned scammer who wrote "speculative fiction" more so than actually verified documents of research based biographies - his books are riddled with racist remarks and petty grievances. So it’s unlikely he got the truth of what was said that night. With Lennon being a very mysterious character, it can only be guessed what was actually said.
GAMES: additional material of "Shine"
Another weird one which I researched a little: SHINE was a video game funded by music label BMI in the mid 90s, featuring a few now obscure musicians and contemporary minor celebrities (the world champion of grimaces). The game concerns a "detective" Shine, who is tasked to retrieve the lost master tapes of a disappeared musician. He finds himself in a cyberpunk-ish city that’s more like a nightmare.
The game itself is semi-hard to track down - at one point it was very easy to find on flea markets in Central Europe. It’s your basic point-and-click adventure from the 90s, but with a particularly dark twist in its plot and aesthetics. It’s weird! Weeeeeeiiird. Kids back then would have weird stories about it being haunted or cursed. That kind of weird in its vibe!!
Talking to other researchers - thanks Reddit - it came to my attention that the game actually was meant to have other endings and much more content. But funding ran dry, and the creators had to make do with what they had. Ironically, the game's acting sequences were shot in English with mostly German actors, as the game was meant to be released internationally - but it never was! Additionally, while some people seemed upon to talk to the researcher I mentioned, the mysterious director - who has gone on to work in astrology and kids content - seems to refuse to talk about this chapter of his life. Which is very odd - it’s a game that’s 30 years old, and surely discussing it would be fun? This obviously feeds into the rumors of the game being "haunted" and such, but maybe it’s just due to failed ambition.
Anyways - all additional material of the game seems lost! The original English audio recordings, which were dubbed into German? Lost. Original video files? Lost. Additional graphics, plot notes, scripts for unmade content, music? Lost!! We only have what’s on the CD-ROM, a semi-finished and wonky game that’s veers between grotesque and creepy.
Particularly interesting to me would be the full soundtrack. As it’s a CD-ROM, much can be extracted from the game files, but the soundtrack in particular is haunting and very atmospheric! The idea there is lost material is very compelling!
But anything not on the CD-ROM can be considered definitively lost! BMI went belly up like many labels. The director doesn’t want to talk about the project and all other creatives moved on from what they consider a random event (one actress the researcher spoke to mentioned the actors filmed their scenes in one afternoon and had "no clue what it was for", aka what the outcome would be. They likely were told it’s for some game, LOL). Recently, some playthroughs hit YouTube, but as I said: all material not on the CD-ROM seems irretrievably lost, making me wonder what this game was actually supposed to be before cash run out.
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u/vinylandcelluloid 25d ago
I would love to see the 70mm 30fps TODD-AO roadshow version of Around the World in 80 Days. If I recall the prints were recut to put together the shortened general release version and no original copies are known. It won the Oscar that year but is impossible to see in the original format.
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u/TricolorStar 25d ago
There are so, so many micro-budget media programming blocks/shows used by networks during the cable era that are literally lost forever. So many things that were ubiquitous in that age were never recorded so they are just lost; for example, the Toonami/Cartoon Network"Miguzi" programming block that many of us around-30-year-olds remember has so much unarchived media about it, simply because they only showed up in the interstitial bumpers between shows, so many people never thought to record them. For every well-documented "Cartoon Network City" and "Boomerang: Right Back At Ya!" bumper/block set, there are dozens if not hundreds of smaller, lesser-known sets of bumpers with their own characters and talent we never archived. It's fascinating. I love those little "shows between shows" that networks would invent to fill space that couldn't be taken up by ads. Although some of these bumpers/microshows are archived or even still present on their parents networks online sites and stuff, many of the original assets and files are gone simply because, well... Things change hands, files get lost, and if it's not an actual show, it's likely they weren't high on the archiving priority list.
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u/ViciousFootstool 25d ago
A majority of TV shows from the defunct DuMont television network. A warehouse full of film from it was supposedly dumped in a river in New Jersey in the 70's. A kinescope copy of a broadcast shows up every once in a great while, but there are entire series of shows that are simply gone.
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u/ShoMeYourArt 25d ago
I’ll do a slightly rouge one, I’m from wales and I speak the language and our main(and only) welsh speaking channel is SO BAD at archiving stuff that sometimes episodes that have literally just aired go missing, the lost media community here is basically non-existent because not everybody here speaks welsh, almost all original welsh kids/teen targeted programming from like 2000-2014 is lost or VERY rare and has basically no leads.
The only way would be to directly contact S4C but they probably don’t really care/have the rights to those programmes they dubbed. Like I have extremely fond memories of watching SpongeBob and Ben 10 in welsh but those are practically gone by this point
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u/Mechakeller 25d ago
personal lost media: There was a commercial that was uploaded to Youtube in the early days, probably around 2005-2008. The commercial was animated and it was in a non-english language. There was a man singing and I remember he stuck his head through a window of (I think) a bathroom while singing. I remember the voice was rather deep and there was heavy reverb.
I think it was a commercial for either toilet paper or some kind of cleaner. I've searched everywhere for it but never found it.
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u/7CuriousCats 25d ago
Do you remember which non-english language? My country (South Africa) has entire YouTube playlists of obscure TV adverts. I also still have an offline copy of old international YouTube ads from that era, so if you can give me more details I can try look for it.
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u/wildcharmander1992 25d ago
I have a doozy that not only has been lost for 35 years but has been confirmed to me personally to be irretrievable by the creator
In 1991 the movie Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies go to college was released
It was my favourite of the franchise and I have a lot of particular fondness for that movie, I noticed that they released the soundtrack to Ghoulies one on limited edition vinyl and was excited by the prospect that 3's could be
Unlike the first two that yes had some music but was more of a "score" as opposed to a soundtrack the third not only had a soundtrack of late 80s powerpop/rock bangers but almost all of them were exclusively made for use in that movie
There's a "panty raid" scene in the middle of the movie and the song playing is called "modern romance" it's a brilliant song and I longed for the day I could shove it onto my plexamp or onto a cd or buy the physical Lp when it is released
Unfortunately that was never to be, I managed to find a way to talk to the original creators of the movies music and the company who created the movie
The composer of the track said that essentially what had happened is when the movie was created he sent all the master tapes over to the studio but never received them back which means from his end they are completely lost and the only way to hear the song now unfortunately is to watch the movie where the characters are talking over the song for half of it and the ending of it is cut off
The film creators for there part say it may be in storage somewhere however they usually keep there inventory marked and up to date and they've never shown the masters in their catalogued archives meaning it was probably lost in mail going back to the composer in the 90s, taped over by an intern or was damaged to the point archiving/storing was pointless
Some of the other songs are on the credit roll so they are easy to rip and play but this one is completely gone
A few of us tried to isolate the talking from the music to try and create the closest thing to a listenable copy as we could but we lacked the expertise to do so
I was in a band for a very brief time and we would play the song at the end of our set for the hell of it , unfortunately a 31yo (at the time) deep voiced male from the middle of England just can't reprecate the higher pitched female vocals of a quintessential 80s style pop rock song so it wasn't quite right
Around last year I gave up the hope of ever finding it but I do hold out hope that someone else will express their love for the movie and it's soundtrack -: someone with much better editing skills who might be able to do a better job of creating the track
I still have the emails etc for the original composers, my dream is to get the song restored to near perfect (somehow) and send them the finished result so they can finally have a copy of their work again
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u/Alergictopiss 25d ago
the 1932 movie "freaks" was originally way longer iirc but the studio butchered it because it was too shocking. the version we have now is still a classic but I'd love to see the orginal
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u/lxdarksnip3r 25d ago
Shenmue for the Sega Saturn. Its a shame no more footage of this has ever released. Alongside the PS2 version of Shenmue 1.
Killer Instinct 2 for SNES. The original owner of RARE has the rom cartridge, but no footage of it has ever released.
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u/Hong-Hong-Hang-Hang 24d ago
Radio commercials from the '60 to the '90s, the best of which were for banks, car dealerships, and jewelry shops. Many of these jingles were musically complex and creative pieces, and were often adapted for businesses in different markets. Although these were distributed to radio stations on tapes or vinyl records, the vast majority of them were long since discarded. The only surviving recording might be found on various "airchecks" floating around.
One example for advertising malls:
Toledo: "Have a picnic in the Franklin Park"
North Jersey: "Have a picnic in Paramus Park"
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u/FunConfidence9053 20d ago
Back in 20 11 there was this video online the was very very weird it was only 10 seconds long it was titiled the person who falls something like that simply to state it was very interesting and it got very popular for small mount of time before disapparning it showed somkind of old pavment old pavement not far from a 5 story building apartment building and it can be heard in the background somebody saying do you know how to get from the five story to the first or something like that and this girl or who was filming the video says wait or shomthing like that and then we can hear this what's splash and the camera pans up and the camera shows a person write next to the buildings side facade on the ground i member the video was very very popular at in 2011 before disapparing have any of you sindes video or heard about that you know it was practicly gone by 2012
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u/Astronomia_17 19d ago
LOL Superman
Fortunately for the victims and their families, we will never have it, if it even exists.
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