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Two Lost Doctor Who Episodes Found
First time accepted submitter crow writes "Two episodes of Doctor Who from the 1960s, thought to have been destroyed in the 1970s, have been found. Both were in the hands of a private collector who didn't know what he had. Like most episodes of the time, these were half-hour shows, part of a four-part story, and portions of both stories are still missing."
We're still going to need a TARDIS to put the whole series together.
just time-shifted. Get your facts straight, DW fans!
It always amazes me how things like these can be lost.
Theres a list of missing episodes on this website but it hasn't yet been updated to include the new discoveries. With the finding of "The Underwater Menace" part 2, we now have a new "earliest surviving episode to feature Patrick Troughton." Hopefully the BBC can do their usual magic to restore these episode...there are apparently bits missing.
"Fresh scans of the missing material have been made by the National Archives of Australia and will be incorporated into the restored episodes ahead of a DVD release."
If they're missing, how can the National Archives of Australia be scanning them?
Man, that doctor who series is so damn expensive. I have a complete known collection of stargate, sanctuary, star wars, and others I can't think at the moment, but when I walk past the movie isle at frys, and I see the price and size of DR WHO, I just keep walking every time. That's the fucking truth.
Fan groups and the BBC have released reconstructions of missing episodes, matching photographs from the episodes with the soundtracks. Two episodes of The Invasion were reconstructed using animation and released with the surviving episodes of that serial on DVD. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes)
The primary mission of the very first FTL flight should be to fly exactly the distance required to record the remaining missing episodes! :-)
Because writers are sloppy and occasionally omit the word "previously", as in "previously missing material".
But yes... ha ha. Aussies will apparently make fresh scans of nothing. *guffaw*
This news is really cool! I always thought some tv stations (eg pbs in malta) still had some lost episodes stored somewhere.....
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I believe they recovered scenes from a lot of lost episodes from Australia. What happened is that the censors were quite strict in Australia, but as part of censoring episodes, they kept the clips that they cut.
All the lost episodes have fan-made recreations, using the original soundtracks (people recorded them when they broadcast), still photos taken during the filming, and recovered scenes. Some of them are pretty good, though most are painful to watch.
"Fresh scans of the missing material have been made by the National Archives of Australia and will be incorporated into the restored episodes ahead of a DVD release."
If they're missing, how can the National Archives of Australia be scanning them?
They were previously missing and now have a better version.
There have also been some of the old missing episodes available online, using photo stills and audio tape recordings of episodes, as opposed to the original broadcast.
The recovered episodes are broadcast versions from Australia, which had bits censored out of them. The Australian censorship board was very diligent about filing the sections they snipped out, however, so those segments still exist, we just didn't have the rest of the episodes until now. Now they can rejoin the edited version + copies of the censored sections and have two completed episodes.
http://www.rimmell.com/bbc/news.htm
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... at which point, they had always existed.
Check your premises.
In October 1996, Australian Doctor Who fans Damian Shanahan and Ellen Parry discovered a collection of the censored clips – several from missing episodes which do not exist in their entirety – in the records of the National Archives of Australia.[12] The clips had been sent by the Commonwealth Film Censorship Board (now the Office of Film and Literature Classification) to the Archives as evidence of the required edits having been made.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes#Censor_clips
Burning mod points here, but I apologize... that was a hoax. I suspected when I saw the original note and it was dated April 1st.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
is that the same industry demands 100 year copyrights and complete control (DRM) of the works they sell, but they'll still lose the stuff that they produce that is soooo valuable, they MUST get government to crack down on it...
We demand you produce the one called McNeal.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They almost never used photos from the filming, they used telesnaps which were made from the film copies in the BBC Archives (distinct from the mag tape copes the BBC mentions in the article). Two copies were supposed to be kept of every program broadcast over a period of time, after that period the Archives would retain the film copy and the BBC would reuse its tape.
The only episode never to have been transferred onto tape was Feat of Stephen from Dalek Masterplan.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Great, so now space is saying "We don't want your junk. Take it back!"
Damn keyboard, that's Feast of Stephen.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Now that's irony! Thanks to the censorship board, those censored moments will; live forever!
This illustrates the problem with overly restrictive copyright. Rather than increase the amount of public works, it decreases them. The same studios that bitch about piracy love them when it comes to old crap they lost. Its happened with Dr. Who, nostalgic cartoons, etc. When companies control ALL the use of their products, everyone suffers. There is a reason that there is fair use in the copyright code.
This also shows the importance of backing up and not having a single point of failure. Something much cheaper when many people have copies of your work. I predict that there will be many more "lost" episodes in the future of TV, now that DRM is on the increase and becoming more insidious. All they have to do is lose the one "master" copy of a program and it is gone forever. That is until they go begging to the pirates once again.
Makes you wonder what the world would be like today if Sony v. Universal came out the other direction.
You know, if the FTL neutrinos are real, then there is every possibility that the episodes are on their way to a rescue point in the future right now.
Look, you might think the copy protection on Blu Ray is a pain, but wait until you get a load of the confusingly-named Hyperspatial Digital Causality Protection that the unelected cartel of the Time Lords require on any temporally displaced media. I mean, one can downgrade your nice 1080p to standard def, but that's not as bad as the headache you get when the real HDCP cuts in and makes you never have been going to see the video you just watched.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
In these "recovered" tapes, does The Doctor give instructions to not blink? Don't even blink? Blink and you're dead?
My second stop, of course, would be the mid-to-late 1930s, to have a drink with Hitler and get to know him and then decide whether I have a moral duty or even moral right to kill him.
Future Kryten: Kryten, we're epicures now. We travel through history enjoying the very best time has to offer. ... ...
Future Rimmer: Dolphin sweetmeats, roast suckling elephants, baby seal hearts stuffed with dove pate. Food fit for emperors!
Future Lister: We socialize with all of the greatest figures in history -- the Hapsburgs, the Borgias
Future Kryten: Why, only last week, Louis the Sixteenth threw a banquet especially in our honour.
Future Rimmer: The man is a complete delight -- urbane, witty, charming
Kryten: He was an idiotic despot who lived in the most obscene luxury while the working classes starved in abject poverty.
Future Rimmer: Well, we certainly didn't see any of that while we were there!
Future Kryten: And his wife's an absolute cutie.
Future Cat: I think they're our favourite hosts. If you don't count the Hitlers.
Kryten: The who?!
Future Rimmer: Providing you avoid talking politics, they're an absolute hoot.
Kryten: You're good friends with the Hitlers?!
Future Kryten: It's just a social thing. We don't talk about his work. We just have a few laughs, play canasta, and enjoy the odd game of mixed doubles with the Goerings.
Kryten: I don't believe what I'm hearing!
Future Rimmer: Look, you have to understand -- we travel back and forth throughout the whole of history, and naturally we want to sample the best of everything. It's just a bit unfortunate that the finest things tend to be in the possession of people who are judged to be a bit dodgy.
Kryten: Herman Goering is a "bit dodgy"! What has become of you all? You've all abandoned your morals, been seduced by power and wealth. All you're interested in now is indulging your carnal desires.
Future Rimmer: And could we tell you some stories about _that_!
Kryten: I don't recognize any of you! You're just amoral self- serving _scum_, freeloading your way through history!
Future Kryten: Good grief! I can't believe I used to be such a stuck-up pompous prig.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
"The recovered episodes are broadcast versions from Australia, which had bits censored out of them."
Are you kidding me? Please pay attention that I come from a country with a dictatorship back then. Are you truly telling me there were something to be censored out of a Dr. Who episode from the sixties!? I think even Franco would be surprised to know.
Talk about a cosmic coincidence- literally a couple of minutes after I'd posted the above, I become aware of this spoof article while reading this comment.
I can only swear that I thought that one up without ever having seen that article (and some time ago as well), though I'd be surprised if others hadn't come up with a similar idea independently as well.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
This makes 2 more episodes I will never watch, for a total of any.
Sure, 'friends' tried to make me watch a couple of times, but it made my brain hurt, and not in a good way.
Guess I didn't care for the show.
For some reason I liked 'The Prisoner'.
Was that English or American based on English?
No brain, no pain.
While I hadn't gotten around to that 2nd serial, I've seen the first one from those douchebags at Loose Cannon that don't believe in public domain or digital copies (I've even seen them discourage OTHER restorers with absolutely no relation to them from releasing into the public domain at all!) This was one of my favorite lost serials, along w/ the Marco Polo one.
it seems like going back to a recent lotto drawing would be relatively non-disruptive to the timestream.
at worst the actual winner(s) would have to split the jackpot with you, and if there was no winner, the only effect is on the future: the jackpot for the next drawing wouldn't be as large.
you can easily blend in with the society of a few days ago
as opposed to going back a few millenia for diamonds, or going back a couple decades/centuries to invest in some big company early on - who knows what ripple effects that would have?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Personally, I'd ammend copyright in the following ways:
By 'common high-quality archive' I'm thinking things like 'glass master' for CDs and DVDs, certain backup tapes for programs, etc... Matter of fact, keeping stuff in multiple formats is ideal - For a movie: Glass master, 10 pressed DVDs, and a digital backup stored in a cloud type storage system. Regular testing and updating is included in the renewal costs.
The idea is to make Walt Disney think long and hard about keeping movies like 'Snow White' copyrighted, much less their huge archive. Sadly, Walt Disney is one of the better companies at preserving their works. Others have let films rot in vaults. Thus the requirement for the LoC to act as an archive.
I don't read AC A human right
the point was that he got bitter while broke and homeless in Vienna, and getting accepted would have avoided that.
it's hard to imagine what else would have happened to him or the world as a whole.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Actually, yes. Australia was fairly bad about it back then, though the US could be worse at times. Probably one of the most edited scenes was with body bits oozing out of a Cyberman in Tomb of the Cybermen, but stories featured drug taking (Aztecs), assassinations (Romans), religious extremism (Crusades) and other stuff that we'd think nothing of today but was really shocking back then.
Probably the most heavily-edited story was Masterplan, where episode 7 was entirely edited out of all foreign sales by the BBC for religious reasons. This is the only episode definitely never transferred to film and is therefore lost forever in video form. (The audio exists, thanks to fans soldering tape decks to the speakers of their TVs.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The telesnaps were photographs taken off a TV screen while the episode was first being screened. This was not done by the BBC but they did seem to have commissioned a lot of episodes from seasons 4 and 5 to be recorded in this manner. This hoard of telesnaps was found in 1993.
The Feast of Steven episode was broadcast from videotape but not converted to film for overseas sales.
I can say from experience that it's often cheaper, from a liability and general management stand-point, to simply destroy something that it is to facilitate giving it away. I guess you'd be surprised how much of a clusterfsck giving something away can be. You have to deal with tons of requests, people complaining they didn't get what they want or should be first. If it's a physical give-away you need to handle physical security, crowd control, inventory, liability insurance. It's cheaper to just chuck it in a dumpster (or skip, rather since it's the BBC). Liability doesn't go away just because you say it's someone else's problem now.
An auction, well, that can recoup it's own operating costs, so that's a better idea -- but only if the stuff sells. I gather the prevailing belief was that old TV programs wouldn't sell. Obviously we know now that's wrong, but TV was a very different world in the 1960s. The idea of the "re-run" was still relatively new. I'm not surprised the old guard didn't see the value, even going into the early 70s.
Also -- and here I'm speculating -- when it comes to copyrighted material, sometimes there are ownership issues that would need to be untangled. It's cheaper to just get rid of it than to pay a lawyer to sort it out. I have no idea if that played a part in any BBC purge, though.
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I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The missing episodes thing was a favorite excuse to do an anti-beeb rant, about them erasing old episodes in order to re-use the videotape, back in the black and white era, when I was an obsessive 'Whovian'.. wasn't the kind of thing you admitted to your neighbours though at the time, not like now, especially if you were at least old enough to drive.. They were still joint British/Canadian prooductions too, back then.. lotsa folks think it was simply a British series, but it wasn't in the beginning. That's why i suspect that there could be more missing episodes locked up in the CBC bins somewhere (unless we threw them away too!)...
I only saw "The Brain of Morbius" (4th Doctor) for the first time this year because the entire story was deemed unsuitable for broadcast. That story is basicly Dr Who meets Frankenstein without much in the way of horror, so I suspect the weirdos that demanded it not be broadcast were really objecting to the segments that made fun of strange religeous cults.
Censorship "for the children" as cheap populist politics has a long history in Australia.