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Post by ifryer on Sept 13, 2017 8:36:15 GMT
It's a long shot, but another largely missing series to look out for is The Adventures of Twizzle. Only the first episode is known to exist, but a while ago I was checking Australian newspaper listings and confirmed that it was exported to Australia. With the series being made by Gerry Anderson's AP Films, if the missing episodes were ever found a DVD release would be almost guaranteed.
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Post by Martin Dunne on Sept 13, 2017 11:36:56 GMT
It's a long shot, but another largely missing series to look out for is The Adventures of Twizzle. Only the first episode is known to exist, but a while ago I was checking Australian newspaper listings and confirmed that it was exported to Australia. With the series being made by Gerry Anderson's AP Films, if the missing episodes were ever found a DVD release would be almost guaranteed. Do you have dates for Twizzle? Torchy the Battery Boy screened in an ABC afternoon show called Wonderbox in 1964; hence was not listed individually. Was that the same for Twizzle?
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Post by ifryer on Sept 13, 2017 12:00:25 GMT
I made notes on them a couple of years ago when I was writing a book on the careers of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. I don't have my notes to hand, but it was ABC that showed it. I'll dig around some newspaper archives and see what I can find.
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Post by ifryer on Sept 13, 2017 12:41:18 GMT
Update: I've done a search of the Sydney Morning Herald archives and it shows Twizzle being screened on Seven from Monday May 39th 1960 in a 5.00pm slot. It's not mentioned in the listings every week, which either indicates that it was being used as occasional filler, or that it was usually part of a larger show such as Wonderbox.
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Post by Martin Dunne on Sept 14, 2017 2:39:39 GMT
Update: I've done a search of the Sydney Morning Herald archives and it shows Twizzle being screened on Seven from Monday May 39th 1960 in a 5.00pm slot. It's not mentioned in the listings every week, which either indicates that it was being used as occasional filler, or that it was usually part of a larger show such as Wonderbox. I have a sole episode at 17.00 Friday April 11 1960, Twizzle Visits The Circus (Twizzle and His Friends Go to the Circus?), then the magic Five slot is occupied with Sir Lancelot, until Twizzle returns from Fridays, 30 May. By 30 October 1961 (it must be in repeats if screening continuously) it's listed as Twizzle and Cartoons, and on 6 March 1962 it shows up in the Saturday 14.00 to 17.00 Captain Fortune's Saturday Party, until 11 August.
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Post by Alan Turrell on Sept 14, 2017 10:48:50 GMT
The question is now is there any chance of Twizzle anywhere in the Australian archives or anywhere else for that matter it is encouraging to know it was shown over there.
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Post by Martin Dunne on Sept 14, 2017 12:49:07 GMT
Got Twizzle on GTV-9 in Cartoon Parade, 16.30 weekdays from Thursday 10 August 1961 to Monday 23 October. This is while HSV-7 and GTV-9 were affiliated, prior to Frank Packer buying GTV to go with his TCN-9 collection.
It may have been on Sevens and Nines in Brisbane and Adelaide. There was only one commercial station apiece in Hobart and Perth. I was amazed to find Fireball XL-5 on ADS-7 in 1967, let alone Pathfinders to Venus on SAS-10.
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Post by Alan Turrell on Sept 14, 2017 13:01:08 GMT
Martin what do you think the chances are of any Twizzle episodes existing in Australia.
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Post by Martin Dunne on Sept 14, 2017 15:57:50 GMT
Martin what do you think the chances are of any Twizzle episodes existing in Australia. Sorry to be negative, but probably zero. In context, I'm down the academic end of things; have no collection of lost television or knowledge of the subject beyond what's on the public record. I'm of the era that I can kind of remember the introduction of colour/Aunty Jack/Andra/The Games Affair. My first inkling of something wrong was the missing episodes list in the 1983 Radio Times Doctor Who 20th Anniversary Special (minus the "Radio Times" in Australia). My academic work is literally the practise of scepticism in history. My natural inclination is there will be no more exciting recoveries of Australian or foreign television, or of Portuguese habitation in pre-colonial Australia, or of the Laperouse expedition; even though I hope there will be. My specific thoughts on this case is so far we have up to three runs on one station and one on an affiliate. Possibly all the one copy of film prints. The era is so long ago that video tape wasn't common in television stations. The listings I'm drawing from focus on radio schedules with television being a secondary concern, there isn't any supporting coverage. The prospects for duplication are nil. Any clips played in other shows would have been out of the prints. Trailers could have been made, but tended to be simply cards with voice overs for station promos. Audio, clips filmed off air or photographed off screen are possible. HSV-7 moved from 2002, GTV-9 in 2011; this is usually very bad for their archives and even documentation. The NFSA holds limited documentation for both going back to then, which tends to be photographs of their talent or facilities. Human resources are possible but tend to have limited memories, let alone for import television films. There will be files relating to the classification held in Sydney (if anyone cares to look), which will give us dates of assessment and possibly details on things the censors found objectionable. With lots more research it may be possible to track a likely path of the prints, even see if they were cycled to another market. My television research is centered on the late Fifties to late Seventies and there's a huge difference between the different ends of the era. You may be asking the wrong person; James is the one who deals with artefacts and may have a stronger case for survival rates in the wild, as it were. My experiences with institutions tend to disappoint, wrenching the tiniest speck of data back from entropy's gaping maw is reason to celebrate.
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Post by ifryer on Sept 14, 2017 16:13:19 GMT
Part of the work that needs to be done is to work out in which territories the series was screened. If there are no official records as to where prints were sent on to, this at least might give some indication if Australian prints of Twizzle were sent on, for instance, to New Zealand. I started looking into this a while back, but work pressures got the better of me.
At least online newspaper archives make some of this work possible without visiting the countries concerned.
At worst, at least by talking about a series like Twizzle we can raise the profile of its largely missing status. A lot of people don't realise that almost an entire Anderson series, of great historical significance, is missing. As a kids show, it's just the sort of thing that might turn up in a garage sale somewhere, or in the collection of a film collector who doesn't know they have a missing item in their possession. Stranger things have happened, as we have discovered with The Avengers.
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Post by Archive on Sept 14, 2017 22:49:23 GMT
Cant help with twizzle i am afraid, as far as chances of something like that being found here, i am tempted to say..very unlikely....BUT, then again i am reminded of the material that has turned up over the years, and especially in recent times that prove "never say never"!
Unfortunately, what most often hampers these things is that the collecting community (and sometimes content owners) can often be their worst enemies. Everyone wants to be "the one" to find and retrieve missing material, and it can become quite competitive and quite frankly ego based, often its not really about the material, its more about the person and how they can gain a cult following in a collecting community.
Consequently, it can be very hard to step into such a community and not be ridiculed and scoffed at, or as an example, what happened recently when I introduced myself and started an interesting thread on a well known UK groups facebook page, I was banned and entire thread deleted, claiming i was entirely a fraud, dealing in "pirated material". Members then spoke amongst themselves re-enforcing that admins decision, concluding with agreement that nothing I had discussed had a factual basis to it. Of course, not one person had actually spoken to me, (including the head of the page whom didnt follow up on a planned phone call) neither did anyone bother to check my credentials via a simple google search.
What this means is that often individual collectors (and content owners) can be essentially so blinded perhaps by self importance/ego, call it what you will, that any apparent outsider can be treated with such disbelief, disrespect and dismissed so easily that in many cases, many many finds have probably been right in front of them, but they refused to believe it! I have seen this happen time and time again!
The "dark side" of all this where it can become very hurtful and nasty and the internet has only made this worse as its made the world suddenly become much smaller.
I am increasingly seeing it becoming one of the main reasons collectors refuse to part with their material, and more often than not, when bringing it in for digitisation - strictly instructing its not to be known it exists. When i ask why, they explain they's been burnt before, and just don't want to be caught up in the stress and the politics of it all.
This i find really sad, because when i hear "nothing exists of this at all" I immediately want to correct them when I know for a fact it does, and i could easily prove it - but it would mean breaking that trust with the contributor and once thats gone...well, the next piece of material wont go through my hands, and possibly nobodys and be lost forever.
Sometimes when your scoffed at and asked to prove certain things, I need to point out that its not unusual when dealing with large content providers/owners or other entities as clients, often a standard part of the agreement falls into a type of non disclosure agreement, (NDA) basically its will be along the lines that it must never be disclosed to anyone the nature of the business conducted, or even that fact alone they were a client. So for example in some cases where archive material was discovered and later supplied for whatever reasons, there may effectively be no way this can be publicised, nor anyone be recognised as responsible for the "find".
In that sense the reality is, if you do this kind of work it should never be just about finding "the holy grail" of lost material, nor looking to develop self importance and hoping to become famous as the find goes public and all the rest, its really just not how it works.
The dark side of the collecting community, can and does get so bad at times collectors or holders of material have got so frustrated or disillusioned, they have posted photos of the material being destroyed, or mailed a film in all chopped up.
Thats one thing working in this area has taught me the most about, and thats people and how they work. That's why i cant stress it often enough, forging trusted relationships with content owners, collectors etc are vital, the reality is however of course..very different.
Though its not all bad however, there are some amazing people out there, and in my opinion, in an area where time is of essence in regards to preservation, I prefer to find out sooner or later, where someone i am working with fits along that line because time is something that cant afford to be wasted on the bad eggs.
In closing, there is material out there and many private collections but for reasons explained above, many will always remain just that - but never say never!
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Post by Mark Vanderlinde-Abernathy on Sept 15, 2017 4:08:49 GMT
The dark side of the collecting community, can and does get so bad at times collectors or holders of material have got so frustrated or disillusioned, they have posted photos of the material being destroyed, or mailed a film in all chopped up. Thats one thing working in this area has taught me the most about, and thats people and how they work. That's why i cant stress it often enough, forging trusted relationships with content owners, collectors etc are vital, the reality is however of course..very different. Though its not all bad however, there are some amazing people out there, and in my opinion, in an area where time is of essence in regards to preservation, I prefer to find out sooner or later, where someone i am working with fits along that line because time is something that cant afford to be wasted on the bad eggs. It is that permanent action of destroying film that worries me about the intense public reaction and fan scrutiny after the recovery of Enemy of the World and Web of Fear. I know little about the world that you, Phil, Paul and others work in and hope that the repeating rumors on the Doctor Who message boards don't do anything to jeopardize the relationships you've built with collectors. Not just for Who material, but for all material. I still remember the rumor that the discovery of the Our Man at St Marks: A Previous Conviction back in 2012 frustrated the owner of the film. He had put it up on eBay and I believe he was overwhelmed with the response. I can only imagine what was said to him by people who do not know any better. (I don't know the actual truth about that recovery, but that's the moment I started to realize recovering material is a delicate business). I admit in hoping to be "the one" to recover and bring home something missing. I think we've all been there! However, if any discovery I make overwhelms me, I would seek advice from those with decades of experience. I would even advise the Collector that it would better behoove him to negotiate his film with someone else than trying to figure out how to do it by myself. Many collectors out there have been keeping material safe. If it weren't for them then there would be no Missing Episodes message board. There would be no mystery. Collectors keep safe material that is not lost. That term applies to films that have no copy, and they are the ones that have kept the film from becoming that. I would only hope that one day they can share their collection with the world.
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Post by Paul Vanezis on Sept 15, 2017 6:26:20 GMT
It is that permanent action of destroying film that worries me about the intense public reaction and fan scrutiny after the recovery of Enemy of the World and Web of Fear. I know little about the world that you, Phil, Paul and others work in and hope that the repeating rumors on the Doctor Who message boards don't do anything to jeopardize the relationships you've built with collectors. Not just for Who material, but for all material. I still remember the rumor that the discovery of the Our Man at St Marks: A Previous Conviction back in 2012 frustrated the owner of the film. He had put it up on eBay and I believe he was overwhelmed with the response. I can only imagine what was said to him by people who do not know any better. (I don't know the actual truth about that recovery, but that's the moment I started to realize recovering material is a delicate business). Maintaining good relationships with collectors is essential if we want plug important gaps in radio and television archives. Not that long ago on this very board, we discussed an EBay sale of some 'missing' archive programmes. A respected collector had decided to sell part of his collection. He was criticised by members of one group for doing this, their argument being that anything they could not raise the funds to buy would be 'lost to the nation'. Of course, the irony is, any material going to members of that organisation is bought by individual members, and do not end up safe on a shelf in a temperature controlled vault. Any material they acquire is no safer in their hands. What was disturbing was the level of public criticism of the seller and how he was described so negatively. He's a member of this board and read the posts. I think it also ironic that this is the same group that banned James from a different board. I read what was said about him after he could no longer read the messages and every single point they made about him could be levelled at the people who banned him. I think the lesson here is that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Paul
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Post by Robert Lia on Sept 15, 2017 20:19:20 GMT
I think we all dream of being one who is able to find and return missing material. God I know back in the 90's when I was traveling the southwestern pacific ocean with the US Navy I had a dream of finding a pile of film prints and bringing them back to the ship and then back to the USA after the deployment ended.
Alas it never happened for me but having had the chance to live the dream by vising foreign country's and having had the opportunity to seek out lost episodes is still a positive feeling that I will never forget.
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Post by Jon Preddle on Sept 15, 2017 21:54:45 GMT
Part of the work that needs to be done is to work out in which territories the series was screened. If there are no official records as to where prints were sent on to, this at least might give some indication if Australian prints of Twizzle were sent on, for instance, to New Zealand. I started looking into this a while back, but work pressures got the better of me. Twizzle screened in New Zealand on a regional basis from 1962 to 1963. The film traffic registers record that all the films were sent back to Global, who was the original distributor, in July 1971.
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