IIRC, Sesame Street has thousands of episodes. At some point when I was watching as a child, they would display the episode number on screen at the end of the intro song, and it was huge.
Where can someone access all of that cultural history?
1. https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Sesame_Street_episode...
2. https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Lost_episodes_of_Sesame_Stree...
Someone, somewhere, probably has nearly every episode on slowly deteriorating VCR tape.
I love reading into this sort of thing. Media can be so ephemeral unless the creators are careful.
Hollywood should have had an archive.org sort of organization since way back.
No, It was super common for studios to tape over old content during the early years of television. Plenty of stuff literally doesn't exist anymore.
"In the earlier '70's, the Dumont network was being bought by another company, and the lawyers were in heavy negotiation as to who would be responsible for the library of the Dumont shows currently being stored at the facility, who would bear the expense of storing them in a temperature controlled facility, take care of the copyright renewal, et cetera.
"One of the lawyers doing the bargaining said that he could "take care of it" in a "fair manner," and he did take care of it. At 2 a.m., the next morning, he had three huge semis back up to the loading dock at ABC, filled them all with stored kinescopes and 2" videotapes, drove them to a waiting barge in New Jersey, took them out on the water, made a right at the Statue of Liberty and dumped them in the Upper New York Bay. Very neat. No problem."
-- Edie Adams, widow of Ernie Kovacs (largely forgotten extremely famous comedian) testifying before the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070927072638/http://www.loc.go...
Old tapes don't last forever, even the fancy professional ones.
In 2022 this is obvious, where we can economically store vast amounts of digital data. In the 20th century, the cost to store all that media would have been far greater, and they had no way to know the internet would come along and radically change the means and cost of distribution. From that perspective, I think the decision to not invest as much in archival is not surprising.
Suddenly there will be monetary incentive to copy and distribute old content rather than keep it locked up forever.
> Street Scenes — Mr. Hooper hands Js out to the kids
Early Sesame Street seems a lot more exciting
All things Lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKk_MAmT2Uc
The actual episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21btSNc6tIU
> As part of Sesame Street's 50th anniversary, it was announced that the Sesame Workshop would be donating almost 4,500 episodes across 49 seasons to be preserved by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
The episodes are available to members of the public in-person at the Library of Congress or at WGBH Boston.
Yes, it would be much better if they could be streamed over the internet, but I'm really glad to learn they're publicly available in some form.
I watched that witch episode (skipping through the non-story segments), and I'm not sure what to make of it. What an odd storyline.
Here's what I kept expecting to happen: the witch asks nicely for her broom back, the man says "well of course, since you asked so nicely", and they all live happily ever after.
In a way, that's exactly what happens, but in a bizarre fashion and minus the happily-ever-after part. The witch does ask nicely and the man does return her broom, but then the witch turns around and is like "aha, I tricked you" (through the power of appealing to his basic sense of decency?) and flies off—only to drop her broom again during the final moments of the episode. What?
One thing I appreciate about Sesame Street is that it generally doesn't talk down to kids too much, and perhaps this exchange is an example of that. Kids aren't stupid—they realize that not all misunderstandings are easy to resolve, or worth resolving.
But I still can't figure out what Sesame Street was hoping to teach here!
The high seas of the internet is the only place where gate keepers hold no power
Though, if I remember Sesame Street correctly, those episodes heavily reused content between episodes (e.g. I probably saw this segment literally hundreds of times as a kid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_MEFVx5jM), so that might be less work than it seems.
As soon as I clicked it and saw the girls sitting at the table, I remembered the swirling orange colors.. and sure enough, next scene.
Thanks for this. I'd guess it's been at least 30 years since I'd seen it.
Well, not exactly. Just watching it again as an adult, I just realized that I don't really know what the man is dumping into wax mixer at 0:26. I'd always assumed it was wax, but now I think it's probably orange pigment.
It is if the question is if the video shows you exactly what is going on.
It's not if the video is meant to mostly be just interesting pictures that give general sense of what a factory that makes crayons is "like."
DVD box sets.
Pirate sites.
"Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming services should be making economically viable for the first time.
Broadly, it does, but the countless historic episodes (of many things) are not sitting there as nicely encoded video files with cleared distribution rights.
Much work will not have been well-archived in the first place (if at all), nor catalogued well (if at all), and there will be performers and musicians and other contributors who may have various rights that need to be identified and negotiated before a legitimate streaming site can air it.
In all, it makes the per-item preparatory effort quite high and means that most old stuff will be left to volunteer, underground distribution for a very long time.
For example, there are pretty well-known TV series like Northern Exposure and WKRP in Cincinnati that are only available in essentially bowdlerized form because the music that was such a key part of the shows was never licensed beyond original TV use.
I see what you mean, but if we are at all concerned about preservation of old media, a streaming platform is useless unless we are able to download it without any form of restriction. I doubt most platforms would be okay with that, because it would remove part of the incentive of continuing to subscribe to their platform.
If I recall correctly, Netflix and Hulu both have some form of "offline access" to certain content that their studios produced, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort heavy handed DRM associated with that.
To make things more frustrating, consider this: Plenty of streaming services that have already come and gone. Most of those platforms had some amount of original content on it. Once the platform shut their servers off, viewers lost any form of access to it (assuming that there wasn't a workaround to download a local copy.) Theoretically, that media could pop up on another platform in the future if some deal is worked out between studios, but, I find it extremely unlikely, and even less likely that all of it would ever be available on a singular source. That is to say, there is a near guarantee that there is a growing amount of media that we will never have never know about, let alone have the chance to see.
Technology seems to rotate through various trends. The only realistic possibility that I see of us finding any kind of long term solution to this issue is if there is a sudden, overwhelming shift back towards physical media (DVDs, Blu-ray, etc.) Without unrestricted physical access, the ability to access "lost" content is merely a expiration date, either by a subscription ending, or a platform dying off.
The less likely alternative that I can think of would be some kind of gentlemen's agreement. Each time a new piece of content is created, a preserved copy is provided to a third party source, to be made public if that piece of content is no longer accessible. Something along the lines of how the Library of Congress works. I just don't see any studio being particularly interested in humoring that type of arrangement, unless it was a legal requirement, or something that was demanded through unions like Screen Actors Guild, Writer's Guild of America, etc.