Pieces of Lost Media That Will Be Lost Forever

I am the founder of the Funday Pawpet Show. That September 11 episode was done at a time in which we were moving the broadcast studio from one location to the other. The equipment wasn't quite completely hooked up yet when the events of September 11 happened so when we scrambled to set things up to make a broadcast that night the recording devices were not part of the connections that were made in a rush to get to the streaming. Therefore it wasn't that there was a lack of interest in recording it, but rather that part of the gear had not been unpacked and hooked up. Unfortunately the streaming media content of those days was very lacking, so recording live streams was difficult. It was a difficult night, but people did appreciate the efforts of that night.

Recently, there has been some slight developments in the search of the BBC Sad Story of Henry. Someone managed to come in contact with a crew member of the show and provided them with key production notes, including layout arrangement, model trains used, and attempts for following episodes. While the original broadcast is most likely lost, there is at least growing information that paints a picture of what it might have been like.

The thomas the tank engine live broadcast might just be my favorite lost media story. I just can't keep myself from imagining people's reaction to seeing a train derail, then a giant hand pick it up. it must have been so brilliantly surreal. I love it.

My mom is a hoarder (not shaming her, but she admits it too). There are a BUNCH of VHS tapes where she recorded shows and movies for me as a kid in the 90s. Sometimes I like to imagine one day I'll go through them and find something lost.

The source code to Kingdom Hearts was completely lost, developers had to dig through the compiled game data in order to recreate the code in order to rerelease the game in HD. Similar thing happened to Silent Hill and it's HD Collection. It's weird to think that all the coding and work that was put into these games would just vanish.

Hey, I’m the guy who wrote the original article on the Sad Story of Henry 1953 for the OG lost media wiki back around 2013-2014 or so. I’m always glad to see people talk about it, especially since when I write the article on it there were maybe two sources online for it, an article on Sodor Island Fansite which mentioned it in passing, and a scan of a news article I had to dig for. I should clarify that the claims of found footage or the like was not my doing, and I don’t know why people have claimed that since. I’m glad more info has since come out and I’d like to mention that within the last year there’s been further developments. Someone who preserves many props and BTS material from the later 1984 onwards show, has been in contact with a crew member who worked on the 53 pilot, and has received notes on the layout, engines, and other production details. They aren’t shared publicly yet, but it gives me hope that someday something will turn up, even if it’s just images of the broadcast

I guess the BBC has bad track records with recording and keeping old episodes that aired on their program, but it gets sadder than that. One piece of lost media that I want to try and find is the Appeal of June 18th which was a radio broadcast by Charles de Gaulle urging the French people to resist the German occupation. The BBC didn’t think it was important enough to be recorded but it is one of the most famous speeches of ww2. I know it’s most likely impossible but I hope a recording of the speech exists somewhere.

Paul Winchell's ventriloquism show he did before he became well known for voicing Tigger on Winnie the Pooh is sadly lost due to a dispute he was having with the producer of the show, he was demanding the rights to those tapes and the producers destroyed all of them out of pure spite, Winchell successfully sued them for millions but unfortunately his old work is pretty much gone forever as a result.

Ooo, a Railway Series illustration on the thumbnail? That draws me in. In all seriousness, I wish the BBC's 1953 Sad Story of Henry had at least one surviving production photo to at least confirm it, because even with the two newspaper articles, the idea of a live production of The Sad Story of Henry where Henry's model derails and a hand supposedly rerails it live on TV seems like something ANYONE could come up with

I'm so glad you're talking about the "Sad Story Of Henry" BBC Adaption on The Railway Series's 77th birthday! Even if so many people have already talked about it.

There's other lost media that will be lost forever: silent films from the late 1800s to 1920s. Cinema legends admit that 90% of silent films are completely lost. And for some of the luckiest silent movies being found after a century of searching, it's best we'll never see them again.

There are also other things that should've been mentioned as well. The Sonic the Hedgehog 1990 prototype that Yuji Naka himself said was lost, and the other Super Mario World 1989 stuff and others in the gigaleak that was lost to time due to poor archival. Also, kinda unrelated, but the entire SM64 prototype repo is thought to still exist, since the iQue repo that was in the leak contained only what Nintendo gave to them. There is definitely still more of it in Nintendo's internal files.

My grandpa used to record the TV with Super 8 in the 60's. He really liked Popeye and Chaplin so we have some of that. There's a chance people recorded lost media like this and don't know it's even lost because it's private recordings. But the chance of finding a very specific episode is maybe one in a million. lol

Same thing can be said for the deleted scenes from The Wizard of Oz, the classic iconic 1939 movie. The full uncut version of The Wizard of Oz that was shown only to test screenings before the movie got released in theaters Nationwide, it ran 20 minutes longer than the version of the film we have today. The only deleted scene from that movie that completely survives or just remains fully intact is the scarecrow dance, it's also called the extended version of If I only had a brain. The lost deleted scene from the movie that to me is the most painful and the most tragic loss is the Triumphal Return to Emerald City. It's also called the reprise of Ding Dong The witch is Dead. Only a few seconds of footage of that scene survive in one of the trailers for the movie, and some production stills, the entire audio and soundtrack still survives for that scene. It would have been the musical climax of the movie if it had stayed in the film. Sometimes I wish I never found out about that deleted scene, because when I watch The Wizard of Oz now, the movie feels tragically incomplete.

Most older video games no longer have source code. I don't know when it became the norm to save source code, but it was probably as recently as the PS2/XBox 360 era. Prior to that, if your company name wasn't Nintendo then you didn't save source code. For various reasons. Lack of storage capacity, lack of interest in preservation (for most of the time that video games have existed, nobody thought they would be anything people would care about after their initial release), and security (to keep someone from stealing the source and creating pirated versions of the game or stealing tech) have all been cited. So singling out any one game for "lost source code" is probably a bit superfluous. It's like picking out one snowflake on a mountaintop. It's kind of pointless. However, lost source code for games that were completed, but never released? Now that's a different topic. One of my personal holy grails is the expansion for Ultima VIII: Pagan called The Lost Vale. The expansion was complete and so close to release that game boxes were even printed, though most of them ended up destroyed when the expansion was cancelled as a result of EA acquiring Origin Systems, Inc. One surviving box (confirmed authentic) sold on eBay in 2005 for almost $2000. People who worked on the project said manuals had been printed as well and the master had been sent out to be stamped onto CDs, but that the order was cancelled before any discs were produced. After EA acquired Origin, whatever remained of the source for that expansion seems to have been discarded from all accounts. It's quite likely that it's lost forever. The source for Ultima VIII itself still exists in the hands of former Origin employees. One anonymous ex-Origin dev reached out to the devs of a fan project to remaster Ultima VIII for modern hardware and offered them the complete source code to the original game. They declined, for legal reasons. But it's good to know that it still exists somewhere and might see the light of day eventually. But the expansion? Seems gone forever.

Maybe someone could do a lost media search for Boomerang bumpers

I'm impressed with your ability to always find new stuff & keep the topic of lost media fresh, especially since the vast majority of Lost Media fans don't seem to give a crap about anything they haven't personally seen, pre-2000s or from countries outside of America, Canada, the UK, or Japan. Personally, the older & more foreign, the more interesting it is.

Ninja Gaiden isn't the only classic Japanese gaming franchise to lose it's source code, it also happened to Silent Hill as Konami also ballsed up big time and lost the original source code for both Silent Hill 2 and 3, which is the reason why Silent Hill HD looked inferior by comparison as Konami had to essentially remake the game from scratch and they were unwilling to dedicate a lot of time and resources to do it so they did it on the cheap.

There was a cancelled Star Trek video game called "The Secret of Vulcan Fury", which was written by D.C. Fontana and featured the voices of the entire cast of the original series. According to interviews I've read, all of the hard drives that would have contained the source code and other production materials were intentionally destroyed. All that is left is a trailer featuring some footage and narration by James Doohan. This is something that I really wish could be found, as it would be neat to see another "episode" with the original crew.

At first, seeing the thumbnail, I thought the original Railway Series books were now "lost media" and I was like "huh? No they aren't, I literally have a massive book containing all of them and their illustrations." Cool to see what this actually was, sad it's lost.