Image description: a screenshot from the Wikipedia page for the Doctor Who TV series, with a user-added caption that reads “Preserve the media you can before it’s gone forever.” The Wikipedia article reads, “No 1960s episodes exist on their original videotapes (all surviving prints being film transfers), though some were transferred to film for editing before transmission and exist in their broadcast form. [88] Some episodes have been returned to the BBC from the archives of other countries that bought prints for broadcast or by private individuals who acquired them by various means. Early colour videotape recordings made off-air by fans have also been retrieved, as well as excerpts filmed from the television screen onto 8 mm cine film and clips that were shown on other programmes. Audio versions of all lost episodes exist from home viewers who made tape recordings of the show. Short clips from every story with the exception of Marco Polo (1964), “Mission to the Unknown” (1965) and The Massacre (1966) also exist.”
That’s another good post, thanks for sharing
Basically all historical documents are copies of original. Including the Bible lmao.
This is extremely common with media that is seen as “artless” mass market as well. Dr. Who was pulp and not deemed worth preserving.
Another example is the show that made me get into model making: Art Attack. A disney show made in the UK that was never collected or released in the original version.
There are some torrents of the Hindi version apparently, but that’s all.
Oh true.
Art attack was also shown in Australia in the 90s. Surely there must be some copies somewhere. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking
Canadian here, we also had it. Hopefully someone has it recorded.
There are tons of full episodes of Art Attack on Youtube. Not sure if it’s every episode, but they are digital rips, not VHS quality
Don’t even have to go that far back. Look at Netflix removing the DnD Community episode because Chang dresses as a drow elf (black skin, white hair). He even says he’s a drow in the episode yet Netflix removed it from the series since it was “racist”. Without pirates that episode would quickly be forgotten.
Shirley even says “we just gonna ignore this hate crime right here?” like it’s 100% meant to be a meta joke about blackface. But, even comedic irony isn’t allowed in this context with streaming services. Disney cut like 5 episodes of Sunny from streaming because Dee in brownface and Mac in blackface.
I think an Asian man wearing drowface is a complicated issue with no right answers. But the multiple times Pierce wears explicit brownface are way worse, and if anything was to be removed, they should have gone first.
The context being that Chang is a freak that doesn’t understand being a regular human, and Pierce is politically incorrect because he’s a fossil of a human. They’re both immediately challenged for wearing blackface by the group.
I agree on the count of Chang, but not Pierce. The group allowed him to use his “shwami” act as part of a plot-crucial heist while taking Greendale back from Chang’s army. And besides, I’ve heard rumours that Chevy Chase really was like that offstage too. Apparently the rest of the cast hated him.
A lot of people have come out of the woodwork saying they hate Chevy Chase over the years.
The group didn’t allow him to use his “notoriously awful Swami impression”. Pierce did it because he’s a narcissist and thought he knew the best way to fool General Chang.
I don’t think Pierce is a narcissist. Jeff is the narcisstist. And even if he were, NPD doesn’t make anyone racist.
I agree with you that it’s a complicated issue with no right answer and I don’t think that warrants the total destruction of the piece of media in question. And I don’t think you meant that it did either, but it seems that people think you did.
This situation reminds me of the old episodes of Mickey Mouse (Steamboat Willy? I can’t remember the exact cartoon the episodes came from, if they even came from a specific series at all and weren’t just one-offs) where Disney has a disclaimer on them if they’re ever shown anywhere about how they are for archival purposes only and that they reflect the views and culture of the time that they were made in, and how that doesn’t make those views okay. Because they’re super fuckin’ racist cartoons, like full on black people = monkeys racist, and Disney knows that that’s not okay (more like they know that showing that would lose them money at any rate), but that doesn’t mean that they’re not worth preserving so that we don’t lose sight of what the past actually was like and allow people to slap rose colored glasses on the “better days” or something.
As others have mentioned too, it also depends on how the depiction is used. Like when there was all that outrage over the Cyberpunk 2077 Chimaera “Mix it Up” posters of the girl with the giant “package” under her one piece. Yes, those posters are gross sexual objectification and horribly transphobic, but that’s the point. They’re intended to show how fucked up the dystopia of 2077 America is and how advertising has always used sexual objectification to sell products, and if a company thinks that using trans people’s bodies will sell a product, they absolutely will. Just like they do every year with Rainbow Capitalism during Pride.
There are times when the destruction of something horrible is absolutely the way to go, like when Germany destroyed all the Nazi statues right after WW2 and put a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust where Hitler’s bunker had been. But even then, it’s vital to preserve that past so it can’t be washed away. The Germans also took photos of the statues they destroyed, to preserve it so that something like that can’t happen again. We can’t learn from our mistakes if there’s no evidence that they even happened.
I agree that preserving the bigotries of the past to show people what they were like critically is important. Although I don’t think Cyberpunk counts in this instance. Yes, the artist who originally drew that poster had the intention of satirising the way capitalist companies use trans bodies to sell anything. The problem is, then CD Projekt Red, the capitalist company, used the poster to sell their game. They did the exact thing they were trying to satirise. At one point they held a cosplay contest, and the winner was a cis woman who stuck a glowing dildo up her pants to cosplay as the woman in that poster. And CDPR put images of her cosplay all over their twitter. A cis woman dressed up as a satire of the commodification of trans bodies to win a contest, and a company used her image to sell a video game. You can’t have effective satire while doing the very thing you “satirised”. I believe the original artist intended to satirise, but the company that owns the rights to the image just played it straight and did the horrible thing in sincerity.
That’s a great point about the poster and the contest, I’d never made that connection before. I mostly remembered the backlash targeted against the original artist of the poster and the bitter irony of the company using the poster to do the exact thing it was created to criticize. I remember the cosplay contest and thinking that that was a gross costume, but didn’t think any further about their use of the photos of a cis woman cosplaying as an over-sexualized trans woman to sell the game or anything. Just goes to show that even as a member of the targeted community, you can miss these kinds of things.
It’s great that you’re so open minded to seeing things from another perspective.
I don’t blame the artist who originally drew that poster, but I do think she could have played it smarter than to give a AAA gaming company the rights to a controversial and nuanced satire of transphobia. The result of that is kind of inevitable when you consider the capitalist context of big companies like CDPR. I totally want to see political media exploring these issues in indie games, but trusting big corporations to have a nuanced discussion of the most delicate trans issues is a bad idea. A cis woman with a glowing dildo up her pants on CDPR’s Twitter was kind of inevitable
Even if it would be full on black face it would be totally aslong as it isnt gloryfied to do so since it’s art. Do you think all actors who dressed as nazis should be shamed aswell?
Wearing traditional black clothes is not necessarily racist. Wearing blackface has a long history of being directly racist.
There isn’t an equivalent with wearing Nazi clothes.
Sure wearing a swastika is totally normal… the outlash after prince harry had one on halloween wasn’t equivalent to someone wearing blackface at all…
The point is art has the right to open a discussion and to show the bad sites of society. It’s ok for a non racist artist to play a racist and that includes letting that character wear blackface or a swastika.
It’s also fine to do something controversial like wearing a blackface in the context of cosplay to have the society talk about it.
Oh true, I didn’t even think about preservation of different versions of episodes
I wish there were something like bittorrent that worked better as an archival mechanism. The weakness of bittorrent is that material tends to disappear completely when there is no longer widespread popular interest in it.
Was just thinking about this. Usenet guarantees a certain amount of time ~10 years, and a torrent only lasts as long as people are willing to seed. The problem is, long term seeding takes up too much individual space, and I never know when it’s necessary. Obviously I’m not wasting 500GB of storage to seed something with 100+ seeders. More trackers should offer bonus points for things with less than 2-3 seeders to ensure long term survival of the media.
There’s all the remasters and tweaks as well. Star Wars is the obvious example, but even things like Red Dwarf got messed with with awful looking CGI plastered in.
At least they realised Red Dwarf tinkering was a bad idea and the originals still safely exist. I think they said they used the original negatives for Star Wars which were spliced and used for the Special Editions. They kept telling the public the original negatives for untouched Star Wars no longer exist. I can’t believe that’s true though. George keeps a copy of everything. There even a cut of Star Wars that used rear screen protection instead of blue screen!
I knew what this was from without reading the description. Such a sad portion of a wikipedia article to read.
While I agree that piracy can be preservation of media, it’s most often not the case.
Streaming torrents directly or through real-debrid doesn’t help preserve media at all. Leeching only without keeping torrents alive also doesn’t keep media accessible.
Some people might store media for a few decades and then reupload, but most people never create new torrents.
I’d say the pirates who help preserve media are a small subset of pirates.
I can’t tell if you are saying only ripping content helps preserve it or that seeding does too. I download things but seed them as long as possible. (Technically until I run out of disk space, but that hasn’t happened yet and I think I will upgrade before it does.) Considering how many pirates download things and keep seeding, I think the pirates that don’t help preserve stuff could be the minority.
Seeding definitely helps preserve media. My comment meant to say that many people pirate media without seeding like ddl, usenet or leeching on public trackers. E.g. because they don’t have good upload or not enough storage.
Reminds me of how something like 60% of video games only exist as emulators, because companies never bothered to preserve them in any form. There was even a remake of a game in the past few years that still had the Skidrow logo in it, because the devs had to go and torrent a pirated copy of the game since the original code was gone and they forgot to remove the cracker’s logo. There was also the infamous GTA remake that was made from the phone version of the game for the same reason.
Oh wow I didn’t know that. That’s both sad and hilarious that they used a pirated version
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* rolls eyes in r/datahorder *
On a related topic fck torrents. They are the worst for long-term piracy. I’m trying to find old and rare shows that were uploaded over a decade ago, and everything is dead.
Bring back the mule!! The fact I can share things without needing to care about their changing name and location is fantastic. It’s so empty now, compared to 15-20 years ago :(
I’m going to have to look into newsgroup (EDIT: usenet, I mean) stuff again soon. Or IRC. Money or effort. :(
I do hope that the new torrent protocol will help with that, especially for “compilations of stuff” (e.g series, episodes, starring XYZ, …): as I understand it, seeding will become a global file-level thing that can cross torrent boundaries. The new trend of seeding and referencing over I2P might help with keeping the old stuff afloat too.
Head to 4chan: /r/ Requests and /t/ Torrents. Good magnet link trade there.
Internet archives should be an entity receiving funding through tax dollars. They should be archiving a lot more of the internet, too, including all media. All tax paying citizens should have access to it through a govt provided email acct. Artists should apply for grants instead of relying on corporate residuals.
Socialize copyright.
Copyright should be set to its original 25 year limits. Then we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place.
Reminds me of Fraggle Rock. Due to the television station that produced the show being taken over many times over the years, most of the original broadcast masters have been lost. I think all episodes have been found but they’re mostly at home VHS recordings.
I don’t see any evidence supporting this, but I also don’t recall ever seeing reruns in the US.
I forgot to mention, this was specifically relevant to the UK version of Fraggle Rock as each country has different wraparounds.
The British inserts were filmed first at the TVS Television Theatre in Gillingham, Kent, and later at their larger studio complex in Maidstone (the former since closed and demolished) and presents Fraggle Rock as a rock-filled sea island with a lighthouse. Exterior footage was that of St Anthony’s Lighthouse located near Falmouth in Cornwall. The lighthouse keeper is The Captain (played by Fulton Mackay), a retired sailor who lives with his faithful dog Sprocket. In the third season, as MacKay had died in 1987, the role was played by John Gordon Sinclair as P.K., (the Captain’s nephew) and in the fourth and final season by Simon O’Brien as B.J. (son of the lighthouse’s owner, Mr. Bertwhistle). In 2014, 35 of these British wraparounds were still missing, believed wiped, although subsequent recoveries have gradually reduced this number.[7] As of December 2020, all 96 wraparounds have been found and handed over to the BFI, confirming that the entire UK production still exists in some shape or form.[8] Nickelodeon repeated it in the UK from 1993, as did Boomerang and Cartoonito in 2007. The episodes shown were the original North American versions.
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I don’t have the originals, but I am happy to say I have all of the 1963 and 2005 Doctor Whos (with the exception of some new stuff… I should really get sonarr.) They are on i2p and I am still seeding if anyone wants them.
Except of course the missing/lost episodes from the 1963 run, although from what I’ve heard, some of them have been found!
I checked and I have at least some of the ones wikipedia lists as missing if I didn’t read it wrong.
I’m still very new to torrenting, is i2p the name of a website or does it mean something like p2p?
I2P is similar to TOR in that it’s an alternative Internet with strong privacy protections, in many ways stronger than TOR, but nothing that still uses TCP over IP can be truly secure.
Huh interesting. I guess I’ll have to start looking into it more, thanks
https://geti2p.net/en/download for the java version, which comes with extra apps. Otherwise, you can go to https://i2pd.website/ for the C++ version which is much lighter and you can just point your browser/torrent clients at the i2p router and you are good to go.
Thank you for the links! I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend lol
Sorry to be that guy but if the tapes were never preserved it’s probably because nobody cared…
The BBC stupidly recycled the tapes because they didn’t give much credence at the time to how important their archive would become.
This was a common practice, especially during a certain decade but I forget which. Old tapes were erased to be used again. No thought was given to preserving what was being wiped.
People absolutely do care. These lost media include the origins of shows that are still relevant today. But backups weren’t exactly treated with much care until relatively recently.
It was a cost-cutting measure to save money on tapes by reusing the old ones.
