Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
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Post by Richard Develyn on Mar 11, 2012 23:07:13 GMT
Hi Steve,
Ok, I understand what you're saying too, however I would like to make a couple of points.
Given the fact that an episode can only be "perceived" missing/unique rather than "guaranteed" missing/unique means, in my opinion, that there will be a cap on the amount of money that people will be prepared to pay for it.
This is exacerbated by the fact that the increasing technology available in episode restoration will soon mean that even a relatively poor copy of a film print would be good enough to effectively reduce the desirability of the original print to the status of existing episode.
Given that, I accept that the value of a perceived missing episode may well be greater than that of an existing one, though this has to be balanced against the fact that in the Doctor Who world a recently returned film print will be extremely collectable.
So I'll concede the point that you may well make more money selling a missing-episode on ebay than selling it after handing it back to the BBC first. However, you'll have a harder job of it - passions in the Doctor Who world run far higher than in Z-cars - and you're not going to make an astonishing sum of money from it anyway because you cannot guarantee the episode's uniqueness. You might make a bit more, but you'd be far better off going down the first-return-to-the-BBC then sell-as-collectable route.
Note that I'm not talking about film collectors here. Film collectors may well be shuffling missing-episodes between themselves for any sort of figure they like and, sure, they're going to have a reputation between them that they want to maintain. What I'm talking about here is the open market, where there is no loyalty between buyer and seller once money has changed hands. I think that a buyer would find it very difficult to sue a seller who sold a missing-episode which turned out not to be missing on the next day, and I think that a seller would find it very difficult to manage the logistics whereby the buyer could somehow or other be guaranteed that this was not going to happen.
Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Mar 11, 2012 21:06:04 GMT
You are missing my point... Let's leave aside any legal issues with selling the print. Let's say I put a 16mm missing Dr. Who on ebay -- three classes of people are going to bid on it -- 1) people who want it returned to the BBC, 2) People (like me) who collect dr. Who films. or 3) people who want to have a missing episode and not return it. I must admit I think you're missing mine. If an episode has extra value to whoever wants to buy it because it is "missing", what guarantee does the buyer have that the episode will continue to be "missing" the day after he forks out the money for it. You don't have to hand back the actual film print to the BBC in order to remove it's status of "missing". A good copy will do. Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Mar 11, 2012 18:03:16 GMT
The value of a print of an episode that is the only copy in the world (i.e. before it is returned) has substantially more value than it would have once it has been copied. No it hasn't, because the minute you sell it you can distribute all those substantial copies of it, that you made previously, all over the world, thus reducing it's value to the same as any other print (which will annoy your buyer, of course, though he will have no recourse against you). Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Mar 11, 2012 17:22:00 GMT
Unfortunately, there is not enough clips to do that. What would be an interesting project is someone to remove the blue peter text from the remaining few seconds to restore them. If someone was going to do it however, a good quality original print would be recommended. The point that I was trying to make was that there are more *clips* of Power of the Daleks than of any other missing episodes, and a few years ago they seemed to be turning up from all sorts of funny places. Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Mar 11, 2012 14:34:47 GMT
Thank you for your answers.
I must admit I hesitated about asking this, and I don't want to speak out of turn, however I think the time might be right to give some sort of opinion on the subject of selling missing episodes.
For all we know, there may be people watching these forums with a missing episode in their hands thinking to themselves - "surely I can make some money out of this."
I would like to propose the view that the best way to make money from a missing episode is to first of all give it back to the BBC so that it is no longer missing and then to sell it on the open market in the way that the chap with this Hartnell episode is doing.
There are three principal reasons why I believe this is the best thing to do:
1) (most importantly) is that by trying to sell a missing episode you would be trying to cash in on the episode's uniqueness. However, given how easy it would be to make a high-quality copy before selling it, a buyer would have no guarantee that the episode was unique. Who's going to pay a lot of money for a missing episode when tomorrow it might turn up at the BBC? Even if you were somehow able to draw up a legal contract which allowed the buyer to sue you if this should happen, you would then have to convince your buyer that your source for the episode hadn't made a copy themselves. If you got it "from source", so to speak, you would then have to publicise this in your sales pitch which could then subject you to legal action from the BBC (who I imagine would scrutinise this sort of deal to the nth degree).
2) Going on the open-market with a missing-episode is going to attract a lot of attention, 99.99% of it *very* unfriendly. You are, after all, cashing in by withholding from a large number of people something which they feel particularly passionate about. Ok, so the world isn't a perfect place, however you should be prepared for people to hate you for doing this as much as they would love you if you decided to return the episode before selling it.
3) Going on the black-market is something I would not recommend unless your surname is Corleone. You have no idea what you're dealing with if you take a step in that direction - who you're going to run up against and how big and ugly they're going to be (likely much bigger and uglier than you). This sort of thing is great for mini-documentaries but unless you really are called Bugsy or something I would not contemplate it.
People can make good money out of Doctor Who film prints, on the open market, once they're no longer "missing". I would conjecture that you will make particularly good money if the episode has only just got back, as long as you publicise well what you are doing. There's a lot of fandom out there who would be very happy to bid for such a real and significant piece of Doctor Who history.
All the best
Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Mar 11, 2012 12:17:19 GMT
What would happen if they tried to sell a missing episode?
Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Mar 11, 2012 11:09:30 GMT
When I was 13 (1976) I thought hard about writing to Jim'll Fix It saying "please can you fix it for me to watch some old episodes of Doctor Who" because I was massively into the target novelisations and I had never seen the episodes. Had I done so, and had he done so, things could have been quite different today, even if all that had happened was highlighting the junking that was taking place.
Oh well.
Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Mar 11, 2012 11:05:44 GMT
What is the BBC / legal position on this?
Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Mar 11, 2012 11:01:18 GMT
I used to think Power of the Daleks would be recovered in its entirety using lots of 4 and 5 second clips from other programs.
Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Mar 6, 2012 0:04:52 GMT
Well, like I've said elsewhere, IMVHO it's not the film collectors you want to find.
General advice, of course, is simply to feel your way slowly and learn about what you're doing as you go along, particularly before you spend too much money on this.
All the best
Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Mar 2, 2012 20:54:51 GMT
Most likely to exist I would have thought would be Power of the Daleks and Evil of the Daleks, just because I think people are more likely to rescue the more "famous" Doctor Who episodes (i.e. containing the word "Dalek") than any other (from wherever it is they get them).
Obviously, that doesn't make them the most likely to come back in the short term, though possibly the most likely to come back eventually.
Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Feb 27, 2012 8:40:39 GMT
Well G4-3 is older than I thought, and we should all write to Madonna to see if she adopted any others!
But I guess the answer is that we don't know anything about them.
Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
|
Post by Richard Develyn on Feb 26, 2012 17:58:02 GMT
I think it's been established that they were both Australian prints. Do we know anything else about their journey through life ? Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Feb 23, 2012 23:11:33 GMT
What I'd like for the demi-centenary (and I think I'm giving the BBC enough notice) is ... reconstructing the day Doctor Who was first broadcast Can I be a real Doctor Who geek and point out that this has already been done - to a certain degree, anyway. Sorry - couldn't resist that. Richard
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Feb 21, 2012 23:06:18 GMT
I'm sure I'll meet a few interesting characters along the way ...I smell a sitcom... A missing one?
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