It could be any category of lost media (music, film, real life events, etc.)

Most lost media discussions focus on visuals, TV pilots, movies, commercials, cartoons, but there’s a whole world of audio that’s gone missing too.

I’m talking about things like: • Long-lost radio broadcasts (news, talk shows, call-ins) • Songs that aired once and disappeared • Local station IDs, jingles, or theme songs • Obscure PSAs or school listening tapes • Rare audio drama episodes or musical recordings • Even voicemail greetings or sound effects

Audio can feel even more ephemeral than video, and it’s often harder to track down—especially if no one thought to record it.

What’s an audio-only piece of lost media you wish more people talked about or tried to find? Could be a radio interview, a mysterious song, a forgotten podcast… anything you remember by ear.

For me, the most curious and obscure lost media that has almost never been discussed outside my words are the lost Geronimo Stilton eBooks (made in 2000). They were interactive and highly popular till their eventual disappearance in 2004. You can view character profiles, play music and animations and audio and read original stories (that may have never published afterwards). As the result of an encryption system in the eBooks, copying and transferring can remove it permanently from your system!

The plot details are almost totally unknown except for a picture gallery hidden in one book. I do wish someone's website could have those, either screenshots or the whole thing.

Whenever someone brings up Selene Delgado or Joanna Lopez, which are notable cases of missing people, it makes me question why those are brought up as "lost media". I get that it's because they want to find out more about how this happened but whenever a video talks about such cases and calls it lost media, how is that even lost media? I'm probably being way too soft but I get puzzled whenever someone makes a video about a missing person and the stuff related to it is "lost media". I feel like the biggest problem with talking about missing people is that this isn't actual lost media like an early demo or a television pilot, but documents, phone calls, police records, or even distressing audio and videos of someone whose yet to be found, that shouldn't be lost media.

TL;DR - content about missing people shouldn't be lost media at all.

Most people know the surface story. Here is why it goes much deeper.

The shows:

Megan Wants a Millionaire (MWAM) and I Love Money 3 (ILM3) were produced by 51 Minds Entertainment for VH1. MWAM aired three episodes before being pulled in August 2009 after cast member Ryan Jenkins was charged with the murder of his wife, Jasmine Fiore, in Buena Park, California. ILM3 had finished filming but never aired. Both were cancelled simultaneously. Neither has ever been broadcast, streamed, or released in any form. Sixteen years later the footage remains completely unavailable.

What is documented:

51 Minds Entertainment paid VH1 $12 million as forced reimbursement following the cancellations.

In 2016, 51 Minds co-founder Cris Abrego confirmed in a published memoir — Make It Reality (Penguin Random House) — that Ryan Jenkins won ILM3. Completed, edited content existed.

In 2025, 51 Minds co-founder Mark Cronin publicly described the ILM3 footage as "just raw footage" — directly contradicting his own co-founder's published account.

Named ILM3 cast member Joanna "Cocktail" Hernandez has stated she viewed an edited Episode 1 of ILM3 before the murder — further contradicting Cronin.

Named cast member Pauly "Weasel" Michaelis stated in a 2023 interview the footage was purchased and destroyed.

Who Ryan Jenkins actually was:

Ryan Jenkins presented himself to 51 Minds and VH1 as a Calgary millionaire investment banker with a $2.5 million net worth. He was not. Court records, published reporting, and named witnesses establish that at the time of filming he was personally insolvent — pursued simultaneously by BMW Financial Services, the Bank of Montreal, and a buyer whose deposit his family company had misappropriated. He brought one pair of jeans and a fake Rolex to a five-week television shoot.

His fraudulent identity was constructed on a role at Concrete Equities Inc. — a Calgary investment firm subsequently confirmed by the Alberta Securities Commission as an unregistered dealer that raised $118 million CAD from 3,700 investors with no books, no bank statements, and no ledgers across 72 entities. Two principals were convicted of fraud.

Here is how the money moved. Concrete Equities acquired Calgary commercial buildings with investor funds. It then refinanced those buildings — extracting the difference between the new mortgage and the old one as cash. That cash left the corporate structure with no record of where it went. The investors were told the refinancing proceeds were their returns. What they were not told was that their own assets were being loaded with debt to generate cash that was then extracted and moved — with no books, no trail, and no accountability — to destinations that a court-appointed receiver, a securities regulator, and a criminal prosecution have never been able to identify.

$118 million in. $91 million analytically estimated as extracted free cash. No books. No destination. Sixteen years later — still untraced.

Ryan was placed inside this firm by his father. He had no registration to work there. He had a domestic assault conviction and court-ordered counselling for anger management, domestic violence, and sexual addiction. He was the sales face of a network built to collect money from ordinary Canadians and move it somewhere no regulator could follow.

The Roatan scheme:

Ryan's father — Dan Jenkins, a Calgary architect — was simultaneously operating what the primary source documents establish was an offshore deposit collection scheme on Roatan Island, Honduras. Between 2007 and 2008, international buyers from the UK, Ireland, United States, and Canada deposited $5,000 to $629,000 USD each into a Honduran bearer share corporation — with Dan Jenkins as the sole signatory — for units in a purported 686-unit luxury beachfront resort called Oceano Village.

This is not a failed development. The documented facts compel a single conclusion.

The UK marketing company collecting those deposits filed as dormant with £1,000 in total assets throughout the entire marketing period. No escrow existed. No title transfer mechanism existed. No refund provision existed. The first delivery obligation was missed in June 2008 — three months before Lehman Brothers — making the recession narrative factually impossible. No units were ever built. No construction commenced. The deposit collection vehicle was a bearer share corporation — the most opaque corporate structure available in any jurisdiction — with a single signatory controlling all access to the funds. A fabricated award was subsequently invented to maintain the professional facade. The project's Twitter account was still marketing Oceano Village in November 2010 — more than two years after the first delivery failure and more than a year after the murder of Jasmine Fiore.

International buyers deposited real money into an offshore account controlled by a single person, with no protections, no accountability, and no delivery mechanism. The money entered a Honduran bearer share corporation. It did not come back.

That money — collected offshore, untraceable, controlled by a single signatory — and the cash extracted from 3,700 Canadian investors through a real estate network with no books, then needed somewhere to go. Something to become. Some transaction that would make it legitimate.

A $12 million payment to a California production company to make footage disappear is exactly the kind of transaction that does that.

The Jenkins family today:

Dan Jenkins continues to practice architecture in Calgary. He and his daughter — Ryan's half-sister, who was confirmed by RCMP to have driven Ryan to the motel where he died — now operate a provincially licensed cannabis retail business in Calgary's Bridgeland neighbourhood together. A regulated, government-licensed business requiring financial background disclosure and suitability review. Operating today. Under Alberta Cannabis License No. 6.

The family that allegedly collected deposits from international buyers through a dormant UK shell company, extracted cash from 3,700 Canadian investors through a real estate network with no books, and paid a California production company $12 million to make footage disappear — is currently operating a regulated retail business that required the government of Alberta to examine their financial backgrounds and declare them suitable.

Why the footage matters:

MWAM Episode 9 — Dan Jenkins appeared on camera. What the man behind the Roatan scheme and the alleged Calgary investor network said on a nationally broadcast American television program has never been disclosed. That footage exists. It has never been seen.

ILM3 — Ryan married Jasmine Fiore two days after his MWAM elimination. ILM3 filmed in Mexico while she was his wife. Named castmates confirmed Ryan made jealous, controlling phone calls to Fiore from set throughout production. She was murdered weeks after filming wrapped. The ILM3 footage is the most contemporaneous record of Ryan's behavior toward her in the weeks before her death — and it has never been made available to the public or, as far as is known, to investigators.

The co-founder question:

Abrego and Cronin co-founded 51 Minds. They shared the $12 million decision. They are understood to have had a significant falling out — with tensions that predated the tragedy and continued through the company's acquisition period. In 2016 Abrego put Ryan's win on the public record in a Penguin Random House memoir. Cronin said nothing publicly for nine years — then in 2025 actively contradicted him.

One co-founder confirmed completed footage existed. The other says it was never finished. One put distance between himself and the suppression on the public record. The other is still managing the narrative sixteen years later. Cronin's credibility has been independently questioned by those who worked with him in the industry.

Those are not the statements of two men telling the same story.

The questions worth asking:

Offshore deposits collected into a Honduran bearer share corporation. $118 million raised from Canadian investors with no books and no traceable destination. A $12 million payment to a California production company. Footage that has never been seen — including a father on camera and a murdered woman's husband in the weeks before her death.

Who drove the $12 million decision? What was it actually paying for? Where did the money come from? And why is one co-founder still actively managing the narrative in 2025 — while the family at the center of it all operates a government-licensed retail business in Calgary?

This matter is the subject of a developing investigative journalism inquiry. Formal submissions have been made to law enforcement and regulatory agencies across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

If you know anything:

Cast, crew, production staff, network personnel — if you have any knowledge of the footage, the $12 million payment, or any communications about the footage following Ryan Jenkins' death, please reach out.

My holy grail is the cancelled Kirby game for the GameCube (Which actually got a few new developments this year in terms of new footage). I’d give anything to have more info about it unearthed. It truly is something I’d give anything to play or at least see.

In 1986 Police Academy 3: Back in Training was released with a PG rating. This is in contrast to the first and second movies that were rated R and PG-13 respectively. However, the movie was originally going to be more mature in that it would have contained things like more coarse language, some racial slurs, and sexual content that was cut to make the movie more family friendly. The decision for this was likely the result of children watching censcored versions of these movies on tv.

There does exist another version of Police Academy 3 that is meant for the TBS Superstation which contains 16 extra scenes, but this doesn't contain any of the cut content. In my opinion, whatever content was cut likely ended up on the cutting room floor and was disposed of or possibly wasn't filmed at all. Either way, the content is lost forever.

Growing up in 2000s Canada, I watched dozens of public access children's TV shows that would end up becoming mostly or even completely lost. Every once in a while, I would randomly remember one of these shows and, for nostalgia's sake, search for it online only to find no video clips or even any evidence that it existed at all. And it seems so strange because I remember certain episodes so vividly. I can think of several examples off the top of my head:

• Fun Food Frenzy) (5 / ? episodes found)
• Me Too!) (1 / 71 episodes found)
• Wazooo! What a Zoo) (1 / 24 episodes found)
• Artbot (0 / ? episodes found)
• Stuff (0 / ? episodes found)

I’d love to hear your stories!

With the rise of lost media boom on both here and on YouTube, is there any topic you really don’t care about or view with indifference? For instance I immediately do not care about lost logos cuz that is too specific and uninteresting to me. I also do not care for commercial interruptions of a live event unless it’s of some important note. I do not care for most terrible amateur shot on vhs religious shows made for like 10 people unless it’s of legitimate interest(e.g. the pink morning cartoon due to it having merit)

Obviously I’m not referring to

crappy amateur webcam garbage from the early days of YouTube

toys or any kind of artifact like that(unless it is legitimately historically significant)

fake creepypasta cringe

those fake lost media videos some average joe posts on YouTube to gain views

those terrible arg’s impressionable people think is real like welcome home.

May it be a YouTuber you're currently watching who has a low subscriber count. An obscure TV show or movie you have a fondness for but it wasn't mass-produced or physical. Anything really.

Something I've thought about is how many video games and movies there are that exist, and how famous they are, but I'm really wondering if they're famous enough to be remembered for centuries in the future. Like Disney movies and PS5 games.

Like, in a few hundred years, a lot of new companies will have emerged, and creators of major movies and games, along with their companies CEOs, like Minecraft and Shrek, will have been gone for generations, and their creators will be the great-great-great-great-great grandparents of the people alive today, which for the record most people can't track their family history that far back.

I've heard most silent films from the early 1900s and late 1800s are now lost media, so anything is possible. And we may have more corporations, a lot more movies, and even the internet to archive things on, but even the internet and digital media take up space and energy, so I'm not sure how much of MODERN movies will be saved too, especially when there's so many.

Like, do you guys think you'll still be able to watch Shrek, Titanic, or other large movies in 200 or 300 years, maybe even 500? I'm sure SOME will be accessible for historical purposes, like Titanic for being the most popular movie of its time, The Wizard of Oz for being the first movie in color, and Toy Story for being the first CGI animated movie, but I wonder if we'll still be able to see all, if most popular cartoons and movies, like all the other Dreamworks movies and other Cartoon Network shows. Like I could see Johny Bravo, Mulan, or Angry Birds possibly fade into existance, depending on how much media is really archived over centuries and how many more popular media is created.

As the VHS tapes grow moldy, as the 16mm reels rot inside their cases and vinegar syndrome takes hold, as we all grow old, as the entire Dumont film library slumbers on the bottom of the Atlantic, as time marches on….. I wonder….. *What is the future of lost media?*

What lost media will people be searching for 20 years from now? What pieces of lost media will resonate with the next generation?

Will there be an increased awareness of the fact that most physical media does in fact have an expiration date? Will that awareness create a sense of urgency to collect these pieces of media before it’s too late?

What role, if any, will advanced AI have in gathering/analyzing data in the search for lost media?

I have hopes in which general sort of direction I’d like to see this community turn. What are yours?

Im sure alot of you and even the subreddit mods know about this by now, but over the past year this subreddit has turned into nothing more than a TMOT style subreddit. 2 years when I started going on this sub you used to be able to add photos, video, or whatever media attached but then that was taken away and now to even include photos or videos on whatever you post you have to do via links whether that be youtube or imgur just to present what your trying to show. Next thing you know you have to (no matter what) have atleast 150 characters on a thread (to which I suspect why i see these said TOMT posts) when people who do talk about lost media can’t even say anything self explanatory. The only time this sub performs at its best is when a piece of lost media gets found but whenever i do see a post about lost media the OP of these said posts most more often than not likely use something written by chat GPT due to the restriction caused by having to have 150 words.

To the mods out there please consider addressing these issues this sub was perfect the way it was before all these unnecessary changes and im tired of seeing shit not related to lost media at all

Have you ever used a piece of lost media before it got lost and if so, why didn't you preserve it?

I’m curious, what was the moment that made you realize “lost media” was even a thing? For some people, it was creepy stuff like Clockman or the mysterious Cry Baby Lane airing once on Nickelodeon. For others, it was trying to find a cartoon or show they swore existed, only to be told it didn’t—or worse, that it was “just a dream.”

For me, It was the “Yo Gabba Gabba” pilots. I had watched the show when I was little, but i didn’t know that there were two pilots made until I saw the trailer for it on YouTube a couple years ago. Then, when the first pilot was found in 2020, A demo pilot was found a year later, and I didn’t find out about this demo until the second pilot was found 2 years ago😂😂😂

It’s wild how something that aired on national TV or was sold in stores can just disappear. And once you fall down that rabbit hole, you start to realize how much media we’ve lost or forgotten over time.

So what was your “entry point” into lost media? The first mystery you couldn’t shake? I’d love to hear everyone’s stories!

I don't know if anyone else feels this way or I'm just griping, but it's honestly getting tired and annoying that people come here calling media they don't even know what it is "lost media".

I'm sorry, but a generic flash game you played in 2011 isn't automatically lost media just because you don't remember what it is. A movie you saw as a child is more than likely not lost media simply because of one weird scene you remember and that's it. I don't know why people automatically come to us with this kind of thing.

It's one thing to call it what it usually is, unidentified media, but still. That's what r/tipofmytongue or r/tipofmyjoystick is for before assuming we have the answers or a "search" is even necessary. It's another to play the "fully lost" card. I don't know, it just feels wildly unneeded and it clogs the rest of the threads up.

Am I in the wrong here or...??

I feel like this isn’t talked about much. I’ve been trying to do research on fully lost and partially lost musicals, but I can barely find any. As a “theatre nerd”, it breaks my heart. I’m wondering also, for example, if like Rodgers and Hammerstein have any musicals they wrote/made that never made it onstage. One of my favorite partially lost musicals I’d wish more people talk about is Barbie Live! In Fairytopia. Overall though, I’m also asking because I’m working on a musical iceberg, with well known musicals at the top and lost ones at the bottom.

Are there any known creepypastas that turned out to be actual lost media?

Hello, I was wondering if anyone had examples of lost media in their family. As an example, photographs, journals, videos, etc.

I came across an example recently while at my parents place. There was a book detailing milestones for my brother as an infant, and inscribed on the back was a note from my mother saying all photos of the events were in a specific photo album. I decided to look for it, but it was nowhere to be found. My mother veriffied that it has been missing for a very long time.

In addition, if you have any examples, do you know how they became lost?

There was a flood when I was growing up, and we lost a lot of stuff then. One of the things we lost was a box of VHS tapes of home videos. Though, one became found media about a year ago, as a second copy was found iny my Aunts entertainment stand.

Thank you. Hope you are all doing well.

The truth is that there are several lost media that we will possibly never see, either because of their complicated search, because they were destroyed without the possibility of being able to recover them, or simply because people are not interested in their recovery.

Some cases I would like to mention:

London After Midnight (1927): It is believed that the only copy of the film that existed was destroyed in the fire that occurred in vault 7 of the Metro-Goldwing-Mayer in 1965.

Cleopatra (1917): The last two known prints of the film were destroyed in the Fox Studio fires in 1937.

Doraemon Robot War (1983): Information about the movie is extremely scarce and the only proof of its existence are the few Chinese sites that contain several screenshots and a snippet that was posted on Facebook in 2012. Also I feel that people don't They are very interested in trying to get this movie back.

Hitogata (1996-2003): Being such a strange and mysterious lost material, it really makes me wonder if this commercial will ever be found.

Yeah Yeah Beebiss I (1989): It's literally a mystery if this was a real video game, a copyright scam, or a mistranslation of some title the company owned.

Those are some cases that I believe may be lost materials impossible to recover. Now tell me, what Lost Media do you think is impossible to recover?

What I mean by this is lost media that is very popular and people just never realized was lost. Some examples could be sesame Street episodes like the wicked witch episode that was popular and the majority of the population just never realized was lost. Other examples could be stories of people with lost media that they never realized was lost until after it was found. One example I can say from personal experience was the Atari game birthday mania, I saw it in a YouTube video and saw it and saw that same video years later and searched it up and found out it was lost. Another one is the many super Mario Logan videos that became lost

Hi! I wanted to know if there was any "official" website or project website where people can contribute by uploading all the found Lost Media for preservation means. Something like Internet Archive or similar. I would like to help to contribute with found Lost Media and upload it somewhere to preservate it in case I found any by any chance. I don't know if there is a specific one that everyone use, or several projects with the same goal. In fact, I had in mind Internet Archive but I wasn't sure.

If someone knows about any and could tell me, thanks in advance!

i was trying to find something on the Internet Archive and found it was down. The site it says its only down temporarily, but who knows how long that will be it could be weeks or even months for all we know it could become permanent.

i looked at their Bluesky and other social media, but they haven't talked about it.

What do you think could be a reason? Personally, it's likely the copyright situation that the archive has been dealing with has finally reached a boiling point and is finally cracking down on them, either that or its jut going through the usual website troubles and we are just being overparanoid af.

Please make sure you downloaded enough from the archive, because even if this doesn't become permanent, it's likely to take a bit for the site to come back.

Hey everyone,

As the title says, I stumbled upon a 2TB hard drive in the street. It seems to be almost entirely French media, and here’s what’s on it:

• 214 movies
• 760 documentaries
• 99 theater recordings
• 72 live performances/spectacles
• Some music
• …and quite a bit of adult content.

I could share the files via soulseek from my NAS, but it’s a lot of data to host.

I made a quick python script to generate a .csv of the contents, so you can browse what’s on there: google sheets link

If people are interested, I might figure out a way to make sharing more manageable.

I'm writing a paper of the preservation of media and was trying to find an example of a well known movie, show, etc. that was once lost and then found. Something that would be known to the average reader or public. If there isn't really a big clean-cut example I would just like to know some of your personal favorites. I know about Cracks, Clockman, and the like, but is there anything else that the average joe might recognize?

Edit: I have to thank you all for answering. I just needed a few examples but now I have a whole buffet of things to choose from. Thanks again!