[NotYourLawyer]

> So DuArt Media Services got to work trying to rescue the tape . . . . DuArt then made a documentary about this, called “Lost and Found: The ’73 Knicks Championship Tape”. It won an Emmy. The punchline? That documentary seems to be lost.

I'm just speechless.

[funwares]

The IMDb page for the film [0] does appear to have an Emmy win as trivia, but I can't find anything about this documentary on the 2013 Sports Emmy Awards Wikipedia page [1] or its source [2].

It is not listed as 'Outstanding Sports Documentary' winner or even as nominee. Same for the 2014 Sports Emmy Awards.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2883206/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34th_Sports_Emmy_Awards

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20131118154841/http://www.emmyon...

[zerocrates]

This was aired on MSG Network, a local network for New York sports, so I figured it was probably a local Emmy (like when your local news talks about winning some large number of Emmys).

Indeed, that documentary won in the "Sports: Documentary" category in the 2014 New York Emmys ceremony.

See this list of the winners (note: PDF): https://www.nyemmys.org/media/files/files/7c2ad17b/57th_NY_E...

[yellowapple]

Are there local versions of the Grammys, Oscars, and Tonys, too? Maybe an EGOT ain't as out of reach as I once thought.

[michaelcampbell]

Imdb can be quite innaccurate; an ex colleague of mine is listed as some minor production staff in one of the Star Wars movies, but he never was involved whatsoever. He told me but I can't remember how he got listed.

[ly3xqhl8g9]

ABC Britain made this probably amazing anthology series in 1962 called Out of This World [1].

I say probably because out of the 14 episodes made the only one left today is episode 3, Little Lost Robot [2], the first adaptation of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. The reason we don't have the other episodes? Apparently ABC had this practice of wiping the tapes after the episodes aired. What could they have been possibly thinking.

So many treasure troves, art and otherwise, have been lost to carelessness; perhaps with the new found generatively hallucinatory powers of statistical learning we could see some restorative trend, a retro-magination, based on extant leftovers. Perhaps Aristotle did write a treatise on Comedy after all [3].

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0163475/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_This_World_(British_TV_...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-RX1GT4GT0

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#:~:text=T....

[pessimizer]

The loss of the DuMont archives adds to our extremely distorted idea of the entire celebrity environment of the past. Some of the biggest entertainers have had their entire careers lost, notably Ernie Kovacs: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dumont-network-gleason...

> In the early 70's the DuMont network was being bought by another company and the lawyers were in heavy negotiation as to who ould be responsible for the library of DuMont shows currently being stored in the facility - who would bear the expense of storing them in a temperature controlled facility, take care of copyright renewal, etc..

> One of the lawyers said he would "take care of it in a fair manner..." He took care of it all right...

> At 2am the next morning he had 3 huge semis back up to the loding dock at ABC, filled them with all the stored kinescopes and 2" videotape, drove them to a waiting barge in n New Jersey, took them out on the water, made a right at the Statue of Liberty and dumped them in Upper New York Bay. Very neat... no problem!

- Edie Adams, comedian, entertainer, and wife of Ernie Kovacs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081208112200/http://www.loc.go...

Edie Adams’ son explains why her late husband Ernie Kovacs is seemingly forgotten in Hollywood

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/edie-adams-ernie-kovac...

[jcranmer]

> Apparently ABC had this practice of wiping the tapes after the episodes aired. What could they have been possibly thinking.

Maintaining archives of material is actually a pretty complex and expensive process, especially when we're talking about physical analog media (that is sometimes literally a ticking time bomb, as is the case with old cellulose film stock). Also, such media is expensive to acquire, so reusing them wherever possible is useful to keep costs down.

Combine this with the fact that the value of such preservation is often not apparent. Reruns of old material don't provide a lot of value--especially in an era where there are very few available channels--and there's no practical means for making copies of them to even interested buyers, at least in any sort of economical way (see above about cost of media). It's not until around 1980 or so that the home video market is a viable way to make money on old productions, and it's around that time that the wiping of old broadcasts was stopped as a regular practice.

[ly3xqhl8g9]

"Maintaining archives of material is actually a pretty complex"

Sure, but the tapes had Boris Karloff himself as host, you can't just wipe a tape with Karloff in the 60s [1] and think "eh, probably no one will ever want to watch this again".

It's just a point how awfully relative everything is. What if Max Brod actually listened to Franz Kafka and burned all his texts. How much we miss because Nikolai Gogol did actually burn the second volume to his Dead Souls.

[1] "Boris Karloff was awarded two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 8 February 1960", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Karloff