Missing Episode/Live-Action TV: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

* ''[[The Honeymooners]]'': One of the most noteworthy sets of "Lost Episodes" belongs to the legendary Jackie Gleason series. Seventy-nine episodes were missing for several decades and thought to be lost ... until they were "recovered" in the mid-1980s (shortly before Gleason's death). Many, but not all of the "Lost 79" have now been recovered.

** One account held that ''[[The Honeymooners]]'' shows were never truly "lost" -- the kinescopes were sitting in Gleason's vault, and he just waited for an opportune time to capitalize on them. Also, these were not self-contained sitcom episodes ''per se'' -- they are sketches from Gleason's variety show, and vary in length from 7 or 8 minutes to nearly an hour. It was thought for a long time that they would not be marketable in a world where viewers expect "sitcoms" to be a be a normal 30 minutes long (all right, 22-24 minutes with commercials), but they were eventually edited and cobbled together to fit normal broadcast time slots.

* ''[[Bonanza]]'': When the long-running western entered syndication in 1973, there were 14-1/2 years (430 episodes) available for syndication. The initial syndication package offered to TV stations contained 260 episodes -- the first six seasons (complete, minus one 1965 episode), plus select episodes from the eighth through 11th seasons (1966-1970, those considered to be the "most popular" amongst fans); this is the package that airs currently on [[TV Land]]. For years, the remaining episodes -- a single show from the 1964-1965 season, the entire 1965-1966 season, the remaining 1966-1970 episodes and the last three seasons -- were never shown in syndicated reruns, and to some appeared to be "lost." However, they had not disappeared, but were rather packaged into a second syndicated package; these episodes have aired on CBN and the Hallmark Channel. To date, there are no known instances of the entire run of 430 episodes — from the premiere to the final episode — being aired as part of a single rerun package on a TV network or station.

* ''[[My Three Sons]]'': Although all episodes exist and have been aired, the CBS color episodes spanning the sixth through the first half of the 11th season (1965-early 1971) were for years the only episodes shown in syndication. The ABC black-and-white episodes from 1960-1965, along with the final 1-1/2 color seasons (spring 1971-1972) were included in a second syndication package that was not nearly as widely distributed.

* ''[[I Love Lucy]]'': The legendary CBS comedy starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had a Christmas episode, aired in 1956 and never seen again on terrestrial TV ... until December 1989 when it was rebroadcast. Although the episode is in TVLand's library, it is rarely shown.

* A 1971 episode of ''[[The Dick Cavett Show]]'' was never aired (and probably never will be) because a guest, ''Prevention Magazine'' publisher J.I. Rodale, [[Fatal Method Acting|died of a heart attack during taping]]. The story about the guest's death was told by Cavett himself.

** Some soaps even have all of their episodes gone. For example, Procter & Gamble erased all the episodes of ''[[Search for Tomorrow]]'''s CBS run.

** Even when episodes survived, [[Keep Circulating the Tapes|good luck seeing any re-runs]]. With few exceptions (such as the odd re-runs of the first two episodes of ''[[Days of Our Lives]]''), soaps aren't re-run anywhere even when the tapes survived.

** Averted by [[Dark Shadows]]. The show aired from June 27, 1966 to April 2, 1971. In all, it aired 1,225 episodes, all but one of which survived. However, a home audio recording of the one episode that did not survive still exists, and was used to construct a sort of mash-up episode.

* Puttnam's Prairie Emporium has not been rebroadcast since its national run on YTV in the early 90s, and the master tapes have been long since destroyed.

** The missing episodes (currently standing at 106) are all from the first six seasons from 1963-69, the eras of William Hartnell as the First Doctor and Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor. Of the first six seasons, the hardest hit by the mass erasure were the third (28/45 missing), fourth (33/43 missing), and fifth (27/40 missing) seasons (by contrast, the first is missing 9/42 episodes, the second 2/39 episodes, and the sixth 7/44 episodes). There are no complete serials from the fourth season, while the fifth season has only one complete serial, ''The Tomb of the Cybermen'' - and that was lost until the 1990s. The missing episodes from this era include some significant firsts for the series:

*** The final episode of ''The Tenth Planet'', the only missing episode from the serial, features the Doctor's first ever regeneration scene, from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton. Famously, a few seconds' footage of the regeneration exists because it was broadcast during an edition of the BBC children's show ''[[Blue Peter]]'' (at a time when one of its presenters was Peter Purves, who had played First Doctor companion Steven). <ref> The reason why the episode was "supposedly" lost was because ''Blue Peter'' wanted to use a clip from it for a TV Special and never gave it back, even though the BBC archives didn't suggest there being a copy there at that time. ''The Daleks' Master Plan was'' never given back, however, suggesting this episode's absence.</ref>

** Some of the First and Second Doctors' companions were hit particularly hard by the purges:

*** Only 18 of Steven's 45 appearances have survived, including three complete stories (four if "The Chase" is included).

** Luckily, the Australian ABC (equivalent of the BBC) kept its copies of a number of episodes. The kicker? Australians didn't have color TV back then, so a lot of episodes from the Third Doctor era which originally aired in color are only available in black and white. Most of the episodes in question have since been subjected to color recovery technology using color information in the chroma dots in the black and white copies; most notably, the 2009 DVD release of ''Planet of the Daleks'', the 2012 DVD release of ''Invasion of the Dinosaurs'', and the (pending) 2012 DVD release of ''The Ambassadors of Death'' mark the first time the full stories have been available in color for over 35 years.

*** As of March 2012, the six episodes of ''The Mind of Evil'' are the only Third Doctor episodes not to have been subjected to color restoration. They are being worked on by the official team, but the available copy of the first episode has no chroma dots and so cannot be re-colorized using the technique, while there has been some difficulty producing stable re-colorizations for the other episodes, meaning it will be some time before the serial is released on DVD. (A short color clip of the last episode exists courtesy of an American fan who recorded a color broadcast on Betamax in the 1970s but unfortunately taped a football game over most of it, not anticipating its future value.)

** The losses ''almost'' didn't end there, either. In one of the Doctor Who retrospective specials, one of the crewmen related a story about a time he was in a BBC warehouse and happened to pass a cart containing master tapes due for erasure. Among these tapes was the second ever ''Doctor Who'' serial ''The Daleks'', meaning the introductory story of one of the most iconic British sci-fi monsters was very nearly lost forever.

** One episode, however, is usually only rebroadcast in graveyard slots, since one of the jokes concludes the with the line 'be quiet, you silly old fakir.' You can probably guess how Jonesy pronounces 'fakir.'

** Another ''Dad's Army'' episode that is now not re-broadcast is "Absent Friends", which centers around Mainwaring, Pike, Jones and Godfrey attempting to capture an IRA suspect. It was initially pulled from schedules in the 1980s because of [[The Troubles]]; twenty years on it still can't be shown because of its potentially offensive portrayal of the Irish.

** A notable aversion to this is ''[[Steptoe and Son]]'', which has no completely lost episodes. However, the only surviving copies of the seven episodes from the first colour series from 1970 are in black and white.

* British television featured two long-running police dramas in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s - ''[[Dixon of Dock Green]]'' (1955-76) and ''Z Cars'' (1962-78). The vast majority of episodes of both have been wiped (''Dixon'' was hit hardest - out of 430-odd episodes only ''30'' still survive - while around two-fifths of the 800-odd episodes of ''Z Cars'' still exist in some form), which, among other things, means the loss of early television appearances by the likes of Sean Connery and Michael Caine (both of whom appeared in guest roles in (different) episodes of ''Dixon of Dock Green'' in the 1950s before finding fame as film actors).

* Among the many other mostly lost pop music showcases on 1960s British television is ''Juke Box Jury'', which aired from 1959 to 1967 and featured a panel of guests, often from the pop world themselves, voting on which of a series of new singles would be a "Hit" or a "Miss". One 1963 episode featured all four Beatles on the panel; another from 1964 featured all five members of the Rolling Stones. These episodes were among those lost in the purges, and are high on the BBC's recovery wish list for the programme.

** At the time of the purges, ITV was a loose collection of regional broadcasters rather than a single organisation, and individual stations had widely varying attitudes toward programme preservation. On the other hand, it's quite possible that a few shows which might otherwise have been wiped, have survived by being re-recorded down the line by regional stations for timeshifting purposes.

* Many fans of ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'' may not know that the series came very close to being ''completely'' wiped. According to the Monty Python documentary "Almost the Whole Truth (The Lawyer's Cut)", the BBC had designated the show for "wiping" after the first season aired, as they believed the show had no shelf life whatsoever for re-runs. However, Terry Gilliam was alerted to this and cut a deal with the BBC to buy the corporation new tapes to use in exchange for the master tapes of season one and all future Python episodes. This would create a major irony, as Gilliam stated that when the BBC decided to re-run the series after all due to its runaway popularity, they had to approach him to borrow the master tapes he now owned in order to strike their own prints for the re-runs.

* The pre-Python sketch series ''At Last the 1948 Show'' ran for thirteen episodes in 1967 and was the first TV series to star Graham Chapman as well as Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman, and the second to star John Cleese (the first being ''The Frost Report'' - see below). Aside from some sketches compiled into specials for Swedish and Australian television, the series was wiped and believed lost for many years. However, kinescopes of three episodes from the first series and two from the second series were recovered in 1994 and 2003, with a third episode from the second series cobbled together from the aforementioned compilations, and a fourth (mostly complete) episode from the second series (containing the famous "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch, previously only available as part of the compilations) returned to the BBC from a private collection in 2010. Various isolated sketches exist from each of the other six episodes except for the first episode of the first series, probably adding up to the length of three or four episodes, so that between sixty and ninety minutes' worth of material is still missing. Most of the missing material exists as audio recordings, except for part of the last episode of the second series and possibly some of Aimi MacDonald's link segments. (Audio recordings of these episodes and many other programmes mentioned on this page were returned to the BBC in 2008 from the collection of BBC Radio WM employee Ed Doolan, who made audio tapes of many BBC programmes from 1967 onward.)

* Rather less fortunate in terms of preservation is the other proto-Python series, ''Do Not Adjust Your Set'', which was the first series to star Eric Idle as well as David Jason (later of ''[[Only Fools and Horses]]'' and ''[[Danger Mouse]]''), and the second to star Terry Jones and Michael Palin (after ''Twice a Fortnight'' - see below); barely nine full episodes of the 27 episode run remain, all from the first series from 1968. The lost second series from 1969 includes all of Terry Gilliam's animated segments for the programme. As with ''At Last the 1948 Show'', audio recordings do exist for some, but not all, of the missing episodes.

** Terry Jones and Michael Palin's follow-up series, ''The Complete and Utter History of Britain'', ran for six episodes in 1969, with the first broadcast episode having been edited down from the first two production episodes. The series was believed completely lost until the discovery of both the first two broadcast episodes and the first two production episodes. The film segments were also recovered from the other four episodes by Terry Jones (the videotape segments are still missing). Interestingly, the only reason the surviving episodes were not wiped was because they were filed in the archives as history programmes rather than as comedy programmes!

** Frost went on to present three concurrent variety/interview programmes on ITV between 1968 and 1970, ''Frost on Friday'', ''Frost on Saturday'' (on which the Beatles' promotional film for "Hey Jude" had its British television premiere), and ''Frost on Sunday''. A combined total of over a hundred episodes were recorded for these programmes, of which only 23 survive (six of ''Friday'', seven of ''Saturday'', and ten of ''Sunday'').

** The sketch series ''Twice a Fortnight'', which ran for ten episodes in 1967, was the first TV series to star Graeme Garden, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, as well as Bill Oddie (who had already made some appearances in ''TW3'' and the also mostly wiped ''BBC3''; the latter is now mostly remembered for an episode in which Kenneth Tynan dropped the first F-bomb heard on British television) and future ''[[Yes Minister]]'' co-writer Jonathan Lynn. The videotape segments from the series have been completely wiped, leaving only the outdoor film segments. As the programme featured regular musical guests, this also means the loss of appearances by the Who, Cream, Cat Stevens, the Small Faces, and the Moody Blues.

** Only about ten or twenty ''minutes'' survive of the follow-up series ''Broaden Your Mind'', which ran for thirteen episodes across two seasons in 1968-69 and was the first TV series to cast Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, and Bill Oddie together, though Oddie only jumped on board for the second season, and does not feature in any of the surviving footage. (Audio-only recordings exist for all thirteen episodes.)

* Following [[The Two Ronnies|Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett's]] rise in prominence on ''The Frost Report'', David Frost executive produced a series of vignettes under the title ''Ronnie Barker's Playhouse'', which ran for six episodes on ITV in 1968 and was intended to test possible sitcom pilots starring Barker. Only one episode, "Alexander", still exists in the ITV archives.

** Among the missing episodes is "Ah, There You Are", the only one to get a spinoff series in the form of ''Hark at Barker'', in which Barker played bumbling aristocrat Lord Rustless, presenting a sitcom/sketch show from his ancestral home of Chrome Hall. The series ran for fifteen episodes across two series in 1969 and 1970 and featured writing from Eric Idle, Graeme Garden, and Bill Oddie as well as Alan Ayckbourn and Barker himself writing under assumed names; though all fifteen episodes have survived, the second series episode "Rustless at Law" only exists as a low quality, off-air black and white recording (ITV had made the transition to colour in late 1969).

* Cook and Moore's ''Beyond the Fringe'' castmate Alan Bennett appeared in an acclaimed sketch variety series called ''On the Margin'', which ran for six episodes in 1966 and featured future political commentator John Sergeant alongside Bennett, as well as guest appearances from ''Fringe'' cast member Jonathan Miller, readings by poets John Betjeman and Philip Larkin, and clips of old music hall routines by such performers as Arthur Askey and Max Miller. The tapes were wiped in the 1970s, although the music hall clips survive (in their original contexts), as do the scripts. Audio clips exist of some episodes, and an audio compilation was released by the BBC in 2009.

* The British series ''Adam Adamant Lives!'', about an adventurer in Edwardian England who is cryogenically frozen and wakes up in the 1960s, ran for 29 episodes across two seasons in 1966-67 and was one of the inspirations for the ''[[Austin Powers]]'' movies. Only 17 episodes survive, all but two from the first season. The scripts of the missing episodes have survived, however, and were included as a bonus on the DVD release along with a four-minute audio clip of the first episode from the second season.

* The BBC were still conducting purges as recently as 1993, when then Archive Selector Adam Lee ordered the wiping of numerous videotaped children's series from the 1970s and 1980s, believing they were of no further use and not bothering to consult the Children's Television division first. Series thus affected included ''Play School'' and its sister show ''Play Away'', storytelling showcase ''Jackanory'', and art programme ''Vision On'' (specifically geared toward deaf or hard of hearing audiences).

** Supernatural sitcom ''Rentaghost'' was another victim of the 1993 purge, but as the series had been sold for re-broadcast on UK Gold, copies of the missing episodes were later returned to the BBC. However, it has not been re-run in many years and, apart from the first season, is unlikely to see a DVD release any time soon due to contractual disputes with the surviving cast members and rights problems with music clips used in the programme.

** ''Tiswas'' aired opposite ''Swap Shop'' on ITV from 1974 to 1982 and launched the television careers of Chris Tarrant and Lenny Henry, but although the episodes were taped in case of investigation by the Independent Broadcasting Association, most of the tapes were eventually wiped on the assumption they would have no future value, and many of the episodes which were not wiped were stored in conditions which led to deterioration below broadcast quality. Of over 300 episodes, only 22 are known to exist in their entirety in watchable quality, mostly from domestic recordings.

* In 1973 the BBC produced an extremely gritty hard-science fiction program called ''Moonbase 3,'' which was canceled the same year. All the tapes of it were destroyed, and the program became semi-mythical to [[Science Fiction]] fans. Twenty years later, NTSC copies of the program were found at an American PBS affiliate, and made available in DVD format. Excellent series.

* After 9/11, several episodes of ''[[Power Rangers]]'' which featured the destruction of skyscrapers were pulled from syndication.

** A "Lost Episode" example: the original [[Pilot]] for ''[[Mighty Morphin Power Rangers]]'' was advertised as such. Notable changes include the casting of the Yellow Ranger as Audri DuBois as opposed to Thuy Trang, Zordon being known as "Zoltar", and the Zords being referred to as "Droids".

* The ''[[Star Trek]]'' episode "Miri" was only shown once by the BBC (at least until the 00s). Three other episodes, "Plato's Stepchildren", "The Empath" and "Whom Gods Destroy" were also omitted. It was not until the advent of home video that British viewers were able to see these episodes - they weren't shown on UK TV until the 1990s! And "Patterns of Force" wasn't shown on German television for decades, [[No Swastikas|for obvious reasons]]. (Hint: [[Planet of Hats|Planet Of Nazis]])

** A color copy of the original series pilot, "The Cage", was lost; the complete episode only existed in black-and-white, except for segments that had been chopped up and reused in the first season two-part episode "The Menagerie." When "The Cage" was first released on videocassette in 1986, it combined color segments from "The Menagerie" with black-and-white segments. A complete color copy was eventually discovered and released in 1990.

** Another ''Next Generation'' episode, ''Conspiracy,'' was similarly delayed due to the (rather uncharacteristically) graphic depiction of a man pretty much literally ''exploding,'' guts and all.

** Many of the unreleased episodes can be viewed in their entirety on [[YouTube]]. However, due to [[YouTube]]'s 10 minute limit, the episodes are posted in parts. The admins over there have taken the odd tactic of pulling different parts of episodes claiming copyright infringement while leaving most of the rest of the episode posted.

** FiveUS in the UK aired a handful of never-before-seen episodes mixed in with their usual reruns a couple years ago. (They're mostly notable because one of them is a Greg/Denny episode--one of the only American episodes ''without'' Wayne.) Since there was only one actual "missing" episode, it's assumed that FiveUS somehow got a hold of the original taping footage and used it to cobble together their own episodes (since a large chunk of episodes were made like that, it's not exactly noticeable). Nobody knows why.

** This episode was advertised in the DVD release as "never before shown episode"; of course, the DVD was released in 2005, years after the fact. Especially hilarious since this marketing lie was copied verbatim for the Region 2 release -- where the episode was shown in regular syndication, ''over a decade'' before the DVD release.

* George Lucas has said that he will do his best to make sure the ''[[Star Wars Holiday Special]]'' is never seen again, anywhere, and that he would happily destroy every last copy if he could. But while the special will likely never have an "official" Lucasfilm re-release, it is very widely available from unofficial sources.

* An episode of ''[[Degrassi the Next Generation]]'', in which female student Manny goes to have an abortion at the end of an episode after discussing it with her boyfriend and parents, was not shown on the 'N' Channel during its original broadcast run (on CTV in Canada). It was only due to fan pressure that the episode was added to the channel's rotation. In a similar vein, a sequence from the premiere of the original Degrassi High, in which student Erica goes to have an abortion, and pushes through angry protesters at an abortion clinic with her sister, was not shown after its original airing on television.

** The first season final, in which Ashley takes ecstasy and kisses Sean, was skipped over in Australia and the US. This caused confusion the following season.

* Two episodes of ''[[Seinfeld]]'' were lost from the show's syndication run until 2002. One, "The Invitations," was pulled due to the death of Susan by toxic envelope glue being too close to the anthrax scare shortly after September 11. The other, "The Puerto Rican Day," was pulled because of a scene where Kramer accidentally burns the Puerto Rican flag. The episode aired once on network and was not seen again on television for four years. But after a few years it was quietly removed from the syndication package again.

** "The Protector (originally supposed to air in the middle of the third and final season; was banned because the episode dealt with child molestation [Amy discovers {{spoiler|that the boy who harasses her in school is the son of the man who molested her as a child while her parents were in jail}}] and ended up airing as the series finale, even though the true last episode is {{spoiler|the two-parter episode "Insanity Genetic"}}. Because of this, the references to Amy being molested that were shown in "The Session" and the aforementioned "Insanity Genetic" two-parter don't make a lot of sense, and viewers end up not getting a good insight as to why Amy is such a bad kid (besides the fact that her mother is a drug addict, her stepfather is an abusive alcoholic, and both of her parents are never around to care for her).

* [[Max Headroom]] was cancelled with 3 completed episodes left unaired. 2 were shown 6 months later when a writers' strike left a shortage of new programming, while the last episode had to wait until the Sci-Fi Channel showed the series 8 years later.

** The scenes that were reshot were eventually made available on Youtube.

* Many of the early episodes of ''[[The Tonight Show]] Starring Johnny Carson'', including his first episode as host, were lost due to tape reuse.

* ''[[The Prisoner]]'' episode "Living in Harmony" was not broadcast in its original American run on CBS due to its plot, which involved Six rejecting a call to arms. It was felt that, with an active draft for Vietnam, which many had protested and sought to escape, it probably wasn't a good idea to show it. An explanation offered at the time was the use of mind-altering drugs to a far greater degree than elsewhere in the series (the call to arms is presented through a "waking hallucination"). In all later runs, the episode has been shown in its correct place.

* The ''[[Twilight Zone]]'' episodes "Miniatures", "Sounds and Silences", and "A Small Drink From a Certain Fountain" were caught up in litigation over possible plagiarism when the series was first put into syndication. The lawsuits were eventually settled, but the episodes vanished for decades.

** It probably had more to do with the episode having high school students {{spoiler|rig their school with explosives and blow it up}}.

** ''Once More with Feeling'' was not aired in syndication (e.g. on FX) for a while because of its longer than usual run-time. A trimmed down version of the episode is sometimes shown (indeed, many episodes are trimmed down slightly for time).

** Also, the episode "Top Hat and Tails" wasn't aired in the US for years simply because it had been misplaced.

* ''[[Tru Calling]]'s'' final episode wasn't aired on the original broadcast, but it was shown when the series was being rebroadcast on The Sci-Fi Channel.

** Of note, "Skeleton Crew" centered around an investigation into the death of an old flame of Harm's, Dianne Schonke, played in that episode by Catharine Bell. When she joined the cast as Major Sarah Mackenzie in season 2, the fact that she resembled Harm's old acquaintance was referenced, and later became a plot point in "Death Watch".

'''*flashback to [[Zipping Up the Bodybag|Dianne's bodybag being closed]]*'''<br />

'''Harm:''' Not anymore. }}

* The final episode of [[Dollhouse]]'s first season was not aired on TV during the initial run. The FOX network paid for 13 episodes and counted the unaired original pilot as one of them and did not wish to show a 14th episode. However, 20th Century Fox, the show's producers, had DVD contracts requiring 13 episodes, so Whedon created "Epitaph One". Oddly, it is considered one of the best episodes in the series and is quite possibly the reason the show got a second season. It was eventually aired as between seasons one and two. It was shown as the season one finale internationally.

** The original pilot episode has also never been aired.

* Thirteen episodes of ''[[Wonderfalls]]'' were produced, but the show was cancelled after four episodes. All thirteen are on the DVD release.

* A strange version of this is the [[Eurovision Song Contest]]. Depending on who you ask, the 1964 edition, which took place in Copenhagen, is lost due to an archive mishap at the Danish broadcaster's, or has never been shown again because of a Spanish anti-Franco protester showing up near the end. There are bits of it that are still shown, including the winner's reprise by Gigliola Cinquetti.

* Parodied in ''[[Mr. Show]] with Bob And David''; at the beginning of the episode, the hosts declare to the audience that the episode being filmed is intended to be the "lost episode" of the series, which will be trotted out years later to much fanfare. At the end of the episodeBob and David give the only tape of the episode to a uniformed security guard, who walks outside and tosses the tape into outer space in a ''2001'' parody.

* The first 20 stories of ''[[Ace Of Wands]]'' are missing.

* At least two episodes of ''[[Home and Away]]'' have never been seen in the UK. One involved the students of Summer Bay High being confronted by gunmen and ITV felt it was [[Too Soon]] after a similar incident in Ireland. Another banned episode involved Duncan making a bomb.

* When rerunning ''[[Cagney and Lacey]]'', Lifetime omitted the first season episodes featuring Meg Foster as Cagney. The first DVD release does likewise, labeling the second season (featuring Sharon Gless as Cagney) as the first season.

* A lot of early Japanese television shows from NHK are lost. To give an example, there was a popular children's puppet show that ran for 8 years (from 1956 to '64) called "Chirorin Mura to Kurumi no Ki" (Chirorin Village and the Chestnut Tree). There were over 800 episodes produced. Of those episodes, how many survive? No more than four, from the show's final year. Another puppet show, "Hyokkori Hyotanjima" (ran daily from 1964-1969), has a bulk of its series lost, too, with only eight (out of 1,224) episodes surviving. Years later, in the early 1990s they tried remaking the missing episodes using the original puppets and any actors still alive at the time.

** The full story is [http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Snuffy%27s_Parents_Get_a_Divorce here].

** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i51DU_rj4BE&feature=fvst The infamous clip] of a [[Stripperific|scantily-clad]] [[Katy Perry]] singing a [[Bowdlerised]] version of "Hot n Cold" with Elmo.

** An example of a lost ''Sesame Street'' segment would be the infamous (and quasi-mythical) [http://tailotherat.blogspot.com/2009/04/crack-that-roared.html Crack Master]! A cartoon segment about a wall crack that comes to life. While apparently a whimsical story about using your imagination, it has been banned from public view for decades as also being [[Nightmare Fuel]].

** ''Police Stop!'' (also full unedited version of ''Danger Drivers Ahead!'' from 1994 pilot version of series)

** ''Helicops'' (1995, but the 2007 episode of the same title ''does'' get aired. Never happens to the episode ''Safety Last'' which was part of the 1995 series, and the original 1995 episode does get aired, as well as the unrelated 2007 series episode).

** ''Don't Look Back In Anger'' -- uncontroversial road-safety episode from November 1997, rarely if-ever aired.

** ''Danger Ahead'' -- from the 2000 series, but bizarrely never aired in syndication. Last aired on ITV 7th August 2000

** ''Ford'' (alternate title ''The Fords'') -- last seen on ITV 7 January 2002 but never aired since then.

** ''Police in Pursuit'' from 2007 series with Adrian Simpson - '''never aired on [[ITV 4]], and not even on [[ITV 1]]''', so a literal [[Missing Episode]].

* Much of the early material from ''[[The Guiding Light]]'' has been lost, particularly serials from the radio years and the early television era. Since GL has roughly 18 solid months of material, this is not surprising.

* The last four (of six) parts of ''The [[Quatermass]] Experiment'' are missing because technology to record TV programmes for posterity was in its infancy at the time and the results for the first two episodes were so bad they gave up. Many TV shows from before the 1960s don't exist nowadays for this reason.

* The ''[[Alfred Hitchcock Presents]]'' episode "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (featuring a mentally disabled man who believes himself to have the power of the magician he works for, who ends up cutting a woman in half during a poorly prepared trick) was skipped during its original run, the result of the sponsor feeling it was too dark. It was later seen unedited in syndication.

* Several episodes of WCW Monday Nitro have not been rebroadcast on WWE Classics when they would have normally been included in the schedule of programs. In the case of at least one episode (the episode originally aired on 9 June 1997), the master tape for that show contained several problems with the audio, and was unfit for broadcast. Other episodes have been heavily edited (or omitted entirely from rotation) due to Chris Benoit appearing prominently within them.

* "Bored She Hung Herself", a 1970 ''[[Hawaii Five-O]]'' episode about a deadly yoga technique that bears more than a passing resemblance to [[Erotic Asphyxiation]], has been banned since its original broadcast, allegedly because a viewer accidentally died while imitating the technique. The episode was never syndicated, and it's not included on the second season DVD box set.

** 20 years later in Japan, popular anime show Sazae-san had to remove a skit involving the main character doing a dangerous stunt involving a bean that appeared at the end of each episode and replace it with another one after a child almost died imitating the stunt, in a similar fashion to this incident. More info on this can be seen in Anime and Manga.

** It's reaired in the US, but very rarely. Also very rarely airing is [[Green Aesop|iGo Nuclear]].

* ''[[Neighbours]]'' episode 4175 was accidentally skipped over when aired in Australia. It was later shown in New Zealand and the UK.

* A number of ''[[Iron Chef]]'' episodes are now considered missing, namely the Ishinabe and Nakamura era battles, due to Food Network not dubbing those episodes for some arbitrary reason. (The most likely explanation is they stopped because they got the go-ahead to do Iron Chef America.) Sadly, this includes the Beijing Special, where four chefs of different Chinese cuisines go head to head in the Forbidden City. There's a website dedicated to finding copies of these missing episodes from VCR copies.

* 12 live action segments for ''[[The Super Mario Bros Super Show]]'' went missing from DVD releases, apparently over legal reasons. Several of the missing segments (''9001: A Mario Odyssey'', ''Baby Mario Love'', and ''Texas Tea'') were later reinstated on the internet.

** After the show ended its circulation run in 1991, DIC ordered almost all of the ''Club Mario'' reprints (excepting "The Unzappables", which later was picked up by internet distributor Hulu and iTunes) destroyed. Most of the destroyed segments are available for viewing on [[YouTube]]. You can see one [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEwIyV-4uRI here].

* When [[Nickelodeon]] in the UK screened ''[[Gilmore Girls]]'', they were happy not only to cut episodes in its 6pm Sunday slot but also to drop the odd episode, most notably "The Big One" (in which Paris loses her virginity, fails to get into Harvard, and has a meltdown live on C-SPAN as a result of the latter). Unsurprisingly the channel dropped the show itself after the first three seasons.

* A majority of episodes from ''[[The Jack Benny Program]]'' are missing. Out of 257 episodes (by the [[IMDb]]'s count), about 30 have survived and slipped into the public domain (and thus released often from multiple home-video sources.) CBS owns the masters for about 25 additional episodes (also believed to have lapsed into the public domain), but thus far has refused to release them or to allow access to third parties.

* Much like the ''Buffy'' example above, an episode of ''[[Bones]]'' was pulled because the plot included a boy being killed on a college campus, and it was set to air right after a similar, high-profile event in real life. It was eventually aired later in the season, but some of the side plots, such as Hodgins {{spoiler|proposing to Angela and being rejected}}, were cut because they didn't fit the show's established timeline.

* Similarly, ''[[Leverage]]'' pulled ''The Mile High Job'', which was set on a plane and devoted much of its comedy to making fun or water landings after the Miracle on the Hudson. The episode was later aired in its original form after the media frenzy had died down.

* The ''[[Law and Order]]'' franchise had some type of instance with this. Based on news reports, rumours were going on that some episodes from the franchise's incarnations were destroyed by the 2008 Universal Studios fire. This has been dismissed as speculation, as (according to Universal) the original copies may have been saved in another vault.

** "Sunday In The Park With Jorge", from the 11th Season, was never reran on NBC since its initial airing after complaints about the very negative portrayal of the Puerto Rican community, though it was later shown on TNT.

* The Dutch TV Series ''Pension Hommeles'' and ''Ja Zuster Nee Zuster'' from the late 50s launched (or reinforced) the career of many Dutch singer/actors. The songs were written by Annie M.G. Schmidt and several amongst them are considered to be classics. Unfortunately most of the original tapes of the series were lost in the intervening decades, and the first episodes of ''Pension Hommeles'' were broadcast live so there were never tapes of it in the first place.

* The [[Nickelodeon]] original movie ''[[Cry Baby Lane]]'' aired on the night of October 28th, 2000, was deemed so excessively scary that it was never re-aired or released on home video. The network officially denied the thing ever existed, leading many to wonder if the entire concept was a Creepy Pasta taken to the next level. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OwcQRYoV0U#at=35 A full version has been found] and uploaded to [[YouTube]], however.

* The [[Miami Vice]] episode "Too Much Too Late" was not aired on NBC because of the controversial child-molestation storyline, though it was later aired on USA network,

* ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'' has a few episodes that have only aired once and were either never seen at all (or in full) after that point:

* When the [[Disney Channel]] aired reruns of ''[[Boy Meets World]]'' they didn't air several episodes from the later seasons that dealt with more mature subject matter, including one about teen drinking and two that focused more on sex.

* [[The Drew Carey Show]] had an unusual example in the episode "Two Drews And The Queen Of Poland Walk Into A Bar"; the episode itself wasn't banned, but the original opening of the episode (Mimi meeting the King of Poland, her aunt dying and Mimi stealing her aunt's ring in order to claim her title) hasn't been seen since its original airing due to complaints of the sterotypical portrayal of the Polish community. Every other airing of this episode in the U.S. uses the opening from the episode "It's Your Party And I'll Crash If I Want To" in addition to removing all references to Poland and Mimi's Polish heritage, though other countries like Australia have aired the original version of the episode.

* Unlike virtually every [[Disney Channel]] Original Movie, the 9/11-centric ''[[Tiger Cruise]]'' is hardly ever shown on the channel (while this is a given for older DCOMs, it applied to this one almost from the start) and it would seem has never been screened internationally (certainly not in Britain) - and although two of its stars have become better known since then, it hasn't gotten any kind of physical release (it wouldn't even be a case of [[Billing Displacement]] to prominently display [[Hayden Panettiere]] on the cover, since she does in fact star in the film. [[Jennette McCurdy]] as her sister, on the other hand...).

* In a particularly sad example of [[Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things]], the series ''Winchell-Mahoney Time'' (1965–1968) featured what was regarded as some of the best work of the famed ventriloquist and comedian [[Paul Winchell]]. In 1988, Winchell was involved in a dispute with the studio about the rights to the syndication of the 288 surviving tapes. The studio responded by vindictively ''erasing all the tapes.'' Winchell proceeded to sue them for a whopping $17.8 million, but the damage was done forever.

* The "Klansmen" episode of ''[[The Professionals]]'' has never been screened on British terrestrial television - not in the show's original run due to its questionable content, and not in any subsequent runs (with the exception of a 1997 airing on the now-defunct Superchannel, it's also never been shown on UK cable television). However, this episode ''has'' aired overseas.