"Lost" television cartoons?

M

Milah

New member
I've read of some live-action TV shows from the earlier days of television being lost---such as the earliest "Dr. Who" episodes---thanks to lack of concern for long-term saving (or being aired live, etc.).

For cartoons, while there's probably plenty of examples of theatrical cartoons being lost (early silent or talkie efforts, say), I was wondering if there's any *TV* cartoons that're considered "lost"?

The only example I can think of or find:

Total Television's 1966 effort "The Beagles", a show about two dogs performing as musicians. Apparently the master elements are lost (some reports claiming someone working on the show died, and their widow threw them out), and all that remains are a few kinescope clips of the series from its CBS run (available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJB4sel2xA4 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9G7bMOxJQU ), as well as a now-rare LP album of the show's soundtrack.

Any other examples at all of lost TV cartoons?

-B.
 
By lost as in cant be found I have no idea, but lost as in dead and never to be seen anywhere ever again then i'd say Fantastic Max and Don Doyote.
 
By lost as in stuff that never will be seen again by anyone. While Fantastic Max is never shown now, the footage hasn't been destroyed and it's still possible for at least one person (one who has a hold of the tapes) to view the show.
 
True, but the chances of that are slim to none. The tapes for this show are most likely locked away in some archive somewhere with a good 5 inches worth of dust on it with at least 9 or 10 dead spiders who had spun their webs years ago covering it.
 
Some anime such as Astroboy and The Amazing Three had their English dub versions destroyed. Luckly, the good people at RightStuf were able to reconstruct all 104 dubbed episodes of Astroboy from less than perfect elements over a nearly 20 year period.

The Amazing Three's English dub however no longer exists in anything of higher quality than someone's home recordings of TV broadcasts from the 1970s. The original elements of the dub version were destroyed in the mid-1990s after the dub producer's widow didn't know what to do with them.
 
Actually I believe one of the Total Television producers (Joe Harris?) have color separation prints of the Beagles. It'd be too expensive to make digital transfers of THAT, however...

It's thought that majority of the "Colonel Bleep" (1957) episodes are lost, although Jerry Beck claims over at GAC that the original 16mm negatives survived at least until 1996. Streamline Pictures had them and released some of the eps on two VHS tapes, but the company has since then gone under.

To give an anime example, the 1973 Doraemon series are lost. When the studio went under they threw away their films and the show was no exception. However at least one fan managed to track down SOME episodes on 16mm and eventually uploaded the original opening and closing on the internet.

Oh, and about 1/3 of the Amazing 3 English masters survive. About a year back they were being sold for tons of $$$ on eBay.
 
Lemme shed some light on that Doctor Who stuff for ya, being a huge fan myself. First, understand that BBC is to the UK what PBS is to us here in the good ol' USA...and unfortunately, because of it their budget is ultra tight..doesn't make 'em the smartest folks, though.

Apparently, they were running out of tapes to record shows on, and figured even with a GROWING CULT STATUS FOR DOCTOR WHO, that no one would care to watch a lot of the stuff from the 1st and 2nd Doctor. Of course, it's the 2nd Doctor that took the majority of the hit( of course; just HAD to be one of my two favorite regenerations...the other being the 6th, who most people unfairly criticize for a disastrous period of writing in the '80s, but regardless....), and only about 10 storyarcs from the 2nd Doctor still exist....well, only 9 did before until they found one of them JUST about to be thrown out at a TV station in....Tokyo, Japan; I kid you not.

The depressing part about this for me is not just that I've tried to be helpful on Doctor Who forums and do everything in my power to try to help them find the old lost episodes with most fans offering very little input on how to go about it....but what's worse is most of the fans on the forums indirectly seem to be UNDERSTANDING about the BBC's reasoning! I've brought it up to them several times, and they just give me poor excuse after poor excuse after poor excuse.

Sad, I assure you.
 
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