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Post by lousingh on Apr 5, 2014 23:04:36 GMT
Thanks for your hard work. Those of us who don't have the wherewithal for whatever reason appreciate the work of those like you who do.
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Post by lousingh on Mar 31, 2014 21:07:07 GMT
You say that as if sexism was restricted to the BBC. They were different times and the BBC were merely a part of a wider, sexist society. Absolutely true ! Remember what Barry Letts, Terrance Dicks, and Katy Manning said about her audition for Jo? She had to scream. Sadly, most people thought that was believable at the time.
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Post by lousingh on Mar 16, 2014 20:33:24 GMT
I'm quite happy for PM to make as much money as he can out of what he finds. Very much IMO: Interest in Doctor Who is at its peak right now. There's probably a window of opportunity for sales which will last about 5-10 years. I'd actually be very surprised if Doctor Who is still being made in 10 years time - so maximising sales / value of returned episodes is going to be around now or maybe in the next year or two. If I was in PM's position, I'd want to hype interest as much as possible now then sell quickly while value is at its highest. Richard I hope Capaldi can arrest the slide but he needs some decent scripts and a change of emphasis so I suspect you're right about the longevity,Richard. I hope that the introduction of Peter Capaldi will get the series back to basics. Also, if the series popularity starts to wane, maybe BBC will actually enforce a change in the production team and allow someone with a different vision to fix things. On the other hand, all the changes have the popularity of the show in the US way higher than it was when I was a kid (and that doesn't even count that the percentage of female viewers is much higher, allegedly through the introduction of romance), so what do I know?
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Post by lousingh on Mar 10, 2014 22:34:45 GMT
Over-rated: Marco Polo (especially here in the US, where John Peel's and Ian Levine's worship of it hold unmitigated sway; it almost can't live up to the hype) and The Celestial Toymaker (again, with their sway). Under-rated: The Savages and The Faceless Ones can't possibly be as bad as their reputations, can they?
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Post by lousingh on Mar 10, 2014 22:24:33 GMT
I have it on good Authority that Frazer did not say it was Back ! He does not know like the rest of us. Thanks Shelly, I didn't know you held me in such high esteem!! If memory serves me right, Frazier Hines has been the alleged focus of several missing story finds; hence I take any rumours that allegedly come second-hand from him with a dollop of salt. Not just any salt, but something like Sodium 2-Aminopentanedioate (MSG). I have heard his name connected to "The Highlanders," "The Underwater Menace," "The Macra Terror," and "The Faceless Ones." (Don't ask me why no one has ever connected him to "The Moonbase.") It enhances your current taste, but leaves you unsatisfied later.
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Post by lousingh on Mar 10, 2014 22:13:33 GMT
Of course it's 50/50 as to whether their collections would go into the public domain, or into bin bags. That's what I find most horrifying, the prospect that some old chap who squirrelled stuff away in the 60s and 70s might have his house cleared out by some young relative who can't see any potential value in "that load of old tat that Grandad had". Brr. I do agree that would a tragedy, although I'm not sure whether people slightly overstate the "young relative binning an entire collection of 16mm films" scenario. In a time where half-eaten bags of crisps are put on ebay, I'd imagine that most (sensible) people would, faced with a large collection of films, at least entertain the thought that some could be of monetary value to them. And that would at least make people wary of chucking everything out before trying to ascertain their value (I do realise that for some vast collections it would be a bit less practical). I'm with you here. If someone found a pile of film, they would probably just sell the stuff to collectors on eBay. One idea a friend of mine came up with was if any of the production team or actors wanted to get jobs in, say, the US. They might have been able to get an extra copy from the BBC to send here. This is his theory for how one of the Ian Hendry episodes of "The Avengers" was found.
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Post by lousingh on Mar 4, 2014 21:24:25 GMT
Quick question inspired by the article: Say you had found a significant number of missing eps. So a few stories still had missing eps, but most of them were complete, and you wanted something for the purposes of assessing market value. So you go through and pick out one complete and one nearly complete. Which two stories (one complete, one almost complete) would you release? I keep coming back to WoF and EofW as, pretty much, the best possible choices: the stories are linked by a cliffhanger, they have two very popular companions, they are -- neither of them -- anchored by "popular" monsters that would allow someone to say "Well, people wanted it for the Cybermen/Daleks/etc." And following along, what would be the third story you'd release? I see a lot of good reasons for a Marco Polo: history rather than sci-fi, Hartnell rather than Troughton, first season rather than later when Hartnell was declining. They felt to me to a taste of what was to come. Rush released to meet the 50th Anniversary. If that's all that was found I don't think they would have been treated so haphazardly with no extras etc... I think most fans would have been over the moon with a DVD of The Web Of Fear chock full of docos to sit down and watch over the 50th weekend. Agreed it seems like they are testing the water. A story like Marco Polo would not have drawn in many new fans but Web Of Fear is hugely watchable even now forty years later and it's full of historical significance with the debut of The Brigadier. Nice to see a level headed view on the missing episodes. True - Web of Fear holds up very well. Thanks for sharing.
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Post by lousingh on Mar 2, 2014 22:26:25 GMT
Yeah if the BBC Office in Sydney gave up on Daleks Master plan after the ABC walked away from it. The odds perhaps suggest there might only be one more print of the series and that being a copy held by BBC enterprise's that might have been made ahead of time based on prior Dalek story sales. We may never know. . . ? There is one other option. Background: back in the early 1970's, some of the more hardcore Star Trek fans noticed that the episodes were edited in syndication and that the edits varied from city to city. So they got chummy with station managers and such, who told them that they edited their prints of the episodes. Every now and then, the station would ditch the films of the least popular episodes and give them to collectors. (For instance, here in Buffalo, "Assignment: Earth" landed in the hands of a friend of mine who used to show it at every con he could just to show off.) Maybe something like this happened somewhere along the line and has been forgotten about.
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Post by lousingh on Feb 28, 2014 2:29:03 GMT
What is the most unexpected return we might expect? Planet of Giants 4 "The Urge to Live", Duh! :-)
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Post by lousingh on Feb 28, 2014 2:27:49 GMT
Puppets? Like the Skarasen?
Also, we need to remember this: Doctor Who is probably NOT the highest priority for the BBC to release. Which do you think would make more money for the BBC : The Beatles on TOTP or "The Evil of the Daleks"? It's not even close.
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Post by lousingh on Feb 26, 2014 2:03:05 GMT
Firstly, can we just remind ourselves that there is a difference between ‘found’ and ‘recovered’? Secondly, why do people assume any ongoing negotiations that may be taking place are between Phil Morris and the BBC? My understanding is that TIEA’s business is the preservation of material for archives that do not have the facilities to transfer their recordings to modern formats themselves. There seems to be a prevailing assumption that once an archive has sent material to TIEA that it is Phil Morris’s to do with as he wishes. That simply isn’t the case; it belongs to the archive. He can’t hand films over to a third party, such as the BBC, without his customer’s permission (even if the third party has a legal claim to them). To do otherwise would mean the end of his business. Some have implied that when Phil discovered the Enemy of the World and Web of Fear episodes he simply greased a few palms and walked out the door with them because ‘it’s Africa and that’s the way things are done over there’. It’s far more likely that he negotiated their return with the proper authorities at the archive, effectively acting as a middleman on behalf of the BBC. This would certainly explain the apparent discrepancy between the time the films were found, which the likes of Ian Levine suggest was in 2011, and the fact that they were returned in 2013. It might also explain the following: - Why the rumours of more episodes persist but there have been no further announcements.
- Why no episodes are with the Restoration Team to work their magic.
- Why Phil Morris has kept details about his endeavours very much to himself
- Why there were suggestions that rampant fan speculation on the Internet could jeopardise returns.
It is reasonable to assume that agreement was reached with the Nigerians for the episodes in their possession, but if they have yet to be reached with another archive (or archives) than the last thing Phil Morris or the BBC would want is for fans to interfere by contacting the archives themselves enquiring about missing episodes and/or demanding their return. Of course, there could be other reasons why the rumours continue and we have yet to hear the full story of Phil’s searches. For a long time we weren’t aware of any potential leads, although there was work going on ‘behind the scenes’ that led to recoveries such as the censor clips. The fact that we know Phil’s been actively exploring avenues that have led and might yet lead to further recoveries is in itself a reason for hope and now we have the whole AFRTS situation too. It’s certainly an exciting albeit sometimes frustrating time for all of us interested in missing episodes! This is a nice collection of idea . I would also add that negotiations take a lot of time. Even once they are in the TIEA's and the BBC's possession, they have to be stored, triaged, processed, etc. I am as frustrated as everyone else here, but I do have more hope than many here. I hope my optimism is communicable. I also see no reason to ascribe anything other than the best of reasons to what Philip Morris et al. have been doing. I am just thankful for the new episodes I get to watch. :-)
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Post by lousingh on Feb 26, 2014 1:49:47 GMT
Interesting little tidbit: how many guys do you know have created national institutions in two countries? Sydney Newman created Hockey Night in Canada and Doctor Who.
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Post by lousingh on Feb 25, 2014 13:15:48 GMT
If you have access to a reel-to-reel, try this experiment: Time yourself to see how long it takes you to get a tape container from the top of a pile, take it out, mount it, play it, then UN mount it and put it back. Then multiply by 10,000. That does not even include a triage of its state. I tried this Sunday. A minute at a bare minimum under optimal conditions. The time this is taking does not surprise me.
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Post by lousingh on Feb 17, 2014 15:53:04 GMT
I want to spin off of this and make this a more practical issue, because I have always wondered about this scenario and I think you guys are the most likely to give me coherent responses.
Let us suppose that the BBC get, say, "The Wheel in Space" back except that bits and pieces of episodes 4 and 5, amounting to 10 minutes of film, can not be recovered from the prints.
Is this story considered recovered? After all, they could be staring at the last prints in existence. And what should BBC do? Both the animation and the telesnap reconstructions would stick out like a sore thumb. But with 93% of the material in hand, they would need to do something, right?
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Post by lousingh on Feb 13, 2014 22:41:16 GMT
For those thinking of buying missing episodes, the costs are astronomical. The guy who offered his personal copy of "The Tomb of the Cybermen" in 1992 after the BBC had recovered the Hong Kong copy allegedly claimed that he had paid 40,000 Pounds Sterling for it. Outside of private hands and given the the viewings at Army bases, I would recommend NATO bases, British Embassies in countries that had the series and nearby countries' Embassies, and just general media production studios (music, video, whatever). I also completely agree that you should look for something aside from "Doctor Who". Anyone else want to see the rest of the pilot to "The Avengers" that is not on youtube? As proof that missing episodes of television are held by private collectors who don't sell them publicly but will share anonymously, someone has the theoretically missing episode of "Hawaii Five-0", "Bored, She Hung Herself", and put it on youtube once. The third post in the thread below shows you links to the stale links on youtube. magnum-mania.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?p=32262Someone else put it up last year in 4 acts.
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