https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/nov/11/lost-do...
[1]: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/ [2]: https://www.youtube.com/c/kinekovideo
This of course has various IP implications...
Taking these films back in the 60s might’ve been illegal, but has anyone actually been prosecuted for it in modern times? Haven’t other lost episodes been recovered from ‘illegitimate’ sources without issue?
If it’s a real risk, it also seems weird to me that it’s apparently known that some people have these. Like, if there was really appetite for prosecuting them wouldn’t that be enough to start an investigation?
Even without losses, they have a trackrecord of stockpiling a lot of old content but not making it available to the public. I doubt this would happen to Doctor Who but it would elsewhere. You would think with streaming that the BBC could make a lot of obscure old content available, but they don't.
You are so right.They are never gonna be released.
We knew who had them because (almost) all the people that stole these kinds of pieces ended up not being able to keep it to themselves and would mention it one day on a forum etc. The studio's lawyers sent letters which they ignored. In the end someone realized that the guy lived very close to the writer of the movie in LA, so we called them and had them knock the on the guy's door. That worked.
I just pray that we'll get to see a few more Troughton episodes. He's the doctor that set the standard that all future doctors followed, yet the least known because the moronic BBC wiped basically his entire run, and now we only have about half of it.
Tom Baker was "my Doctor" because he's the one who made me love the show when I was a kid, but Troughton (and Zoë and Jamie) are my favorite era.
edit: Zoë and Jamie are from way back when the companions were expected to be useful, before Sarah Jane. Zoë was better at math than the Doctor; imagine them doing anything like that now.
The Tom Baker doctor had the best companion in K9. I was disappointed as a kid at the time when it chose to stay with his other companion.
I largely stopped watching from the "Five Doctors" episode onwards. Didn't like the 6th and maybe watched only a few episodes of the 7th doctor before not watching much free-to-air TV at all after that.
There was the one companion where both elements happened at the same time; the last primarily useful companion, the first companion to be in love with the Doctor: Jo Grant, the UNIT agent with a certificate from an "Escapeology course," but would look up at the Doctor with puppydog eyes. She had suddenly replaced Liz Shaw, the super-competent UNIT scientist who sometimes seemed like she could barely tolerate him. They made Jo Grant a rookie and a klutz.
Up to Jo Grant, the companions were primarily there to do things, so the Doctor didn't have to be everything. Jo Grant was the one who would free them when they were tied up and locked in a storeroom; like how Zoë would make fun of how bad the Doctor was at driving the Tardis. Sarah Jane, by contrast, was as helpless as a fetus, constantly complaining, and hopelessly in love.
Leela, Romana, and Adric (although Adric was constantly humiliated, then killed) were still left to come, and Ace allowed the useful companions from the original series to go out with a bang(sorry), but in Nu Doctor Who it was to be strictly Sarah Janes forever.
People even thought Donna Noble was a breath of fresh air because even though she was useless and constantly complaining, at least she wasn't constantly simpering and crying over him. The absolute nadir of this trend was when Martha Jones, actually a medical doctor(!), was nearly suicidal with lust over him and he was just not into her at all. Doesn't like career women, I guess.
It's not you, Martha, it's me. Now I'm off to haunt a little girl's bedroom and cuck the sweet, perfect boyfriend who would be willing to wait 2,000 years for her. Maybe you should look up Mickey, that other guy whose fiancé I stole while I let him ride in the backseat. He's single; I ruined his girl for anyone else.
Just sort of a cynical calculation by somebody who thought of women as tasteful accessories.
The Brigadier got some great lines:
* (To other soldiers) "Chap with the wings - five rounds, rapid."
* "Most of their work's so secret, they don't know what they're doing themselves."
* "Look, just tell me this: Are you or are you not the Doctor that I met during the Yeti business and then later when the Cybermen invaded?"
The earliest episode to survive on its original videotape is Ambassadors of Death episode 1 from 1970. None of the original 60s tapes still survive, though I believe there is at least one tape that we know used to have Doctor Who on it but which now has another programme.
The earliest episode to survive in its original medium is possibly The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode 5 (The Waking Ally). That's because, while this was shot on electronic studio cameras as usual, there were no videotape machines available to record.
Instead the output of those cameras was telerecorded straight to 35mm film. AIUI the negative of that telerecording still exists.
Recording over another recording does not completely erase the other. I wonder if it could be recovered.
The US pushed a lot harder than Europe for videotape because kinescopes dropped frames off of American 60i frame rates, but worked really well for European 50i frame rates. Thus the BBC continued to use kinescopes for a long time.
I thought the creator of the Daleks was Davros?
Hope more are found sooner than another 13 years from now.
Lost Doctor Who episodes are one of them. Dad's Army also has lost black and white episodes (the colour ones have been repeated ad nauseam all my lifetime).
I can think of a few others. Scotch on the Rocks was a political hit piece written by Douglas Hurd showing an armed Scottish uprising along the lines of Northern Ireland. It was supposed to frighten people away from Scottish nationalism, but ended up causing copycat incidents. It vanished shortly after being broadcast probably because of its unintended effects.
The ultimate would be some of the pre-WW2 television broadcasts. Most of these were broadcast in the London area and practically nowhere else. Almost no one had recording equipment back then and they were often broadcast live.
The "Phonovision" recordings made by Baird (which were unplayable at the time) have been recovered:
There was probably a renaissance period when conversion equipment was being actively developed and available, but that time is probably gone. For example I think a good film scanner would be the Nikon Super Coolscan 8000 ED, but current state of the art falls far short. For film, vcr tapes and more we should be doing so much better.
I have old family super-8 films that are kind of convertible, but not the magnetic sound strip.
It sounds more like it was unavailable to the average person than lost.
wrong doctor
In the Hartnell era, the Doctor was a grandfather I think, looked old (although Hartnell was much younger than he appeared, thanks to the war etc) and seems to have been human.
Would you expect them to throw quotation marks around Anton Whom in a headline including his name?
> “It has to be worth it for the pleasure it’s brought me to see them,” Levine said. “Doctor Who runs all night in my bedroom, complete, nothing missing.”
