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Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Apparently over 4500 episodes[1], some of which have gone missing[2]. This is what the Internet keeps telling me is the best source of information:

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.

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They link to this site which tracks lost media: https://lostmediawiki.com/Home

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.

Whatever studio created it probably has a copy of every episode on old tapes. Also I wonder if this is viable business model to request people who have a copy of a “lost media” to turn it up for a reward.

Often media was reused by the studio, for cost reasons. This is one reason there are missing episodes of culturally significant television programs like Doctor Who.

Also the official reason there is no original videos of the moon landing.

Surely not the case in a Hollywood studio

Universal Pictures (Hollywood) flat out destroyed their negatives.

>Whatever studio created it probably has a copy of every episode on old tapes.

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.

It also severely distorts our idea of the past, which was mostly reinforced by reruns and rebroadcasts. Major celebrities from the past had their entire careers wiped, especially if they primarily worked in live TV, or on the DuMont network:

"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...

> Whatever studio created it probably has a copy of every episode on old tapes. Also I wonder if this is viable business model to request people who have a copy of a “lost media” to turn it up for a reward.

Old tapes don't last forever, even the fancy professional ones.

> Hollywood should have had an archive.org sort of organization since way back.

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.

Simple problem with a straightforward solution--expire copyright at 20 years.

Suddenly there will be monetary incentive to copy and distribute old content rather than keep it locked up forever.

Even better (for this goal, maybe not in general) would be some kind of "use it or loose it" provision. Your copyright expires after 20 years, or 5 years after the last time your creative work was reasonably accessible to the general public, whichever is greater.

> Episode 0012

> Street Scenes — Mr. Hooper hands Js out to the kids

Early Sesame Street seems a lot more exciting

Ironically, Episode 847, the banned Wicked Witch episode, was recently found.

All things Lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKk_MAmT2Uc

The actual episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21btSNc6tIU

Oh cool, your first link answers my original question:

> 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.

(Sorry for the double reply, but as it's on a separate subject, I think it will make for easier threading.)

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!

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