Missing Episode: Difference between revisions

{{quote|'''Patchy the Pirate''': Oh, no! I've ruined the lost episode! Now it's lost forever!<br />

'''Potty the Parrot''': Sqwack! Lost forever!|''[[SpongeBob SquarePants]]''}}

A related phenomenon is the "Lost Episode". Older TV shows and movie series may not have a full library of old episodes to work from. The originals may have been destroyed, either accidentally or deliberately, or in the case of live programs there might never have been a recording. Most of the first ten years of the Johnny Carson ''[[Tonight Show]]'' is missing because videotape at the time was expensive and the network reused the originals. Hundreds of silent films are no longer extant because the original negatives were destroyed in order to recover the silver content from the film stock, lost in studio and vault fires, or simply decayed over time. This sort of thing plagues the early years of television; programmes from networks which failed or went bankrupt (such as [[DuMont]]) fared particularly badly. Of course, at the time few had any notion that people would want to watch "classic television" fifty or sixty years in the future, so they saw no reason to keep copies.

In this case, the episode is not rebroadcast because no one has it anymoreany more. Such episodes are lost to history until (as becomes increasingly unlikely) they unexpectedly turn up in [[Keep Circulating the Tapes|the hands of a collector]] or a relative of one of the original producers.

Sometimes, a network may hold the rights to an entire series, but may not like some episodes for various reasons (personal preference, [[Executive Meddling|orders of the programming team]], cheaper to run a selected block of episodes etc.) so an episode isn't really "missing" ''per se'', but the term still applies. In some cases, a copy of the episode may exist, but in some format which is not broadcast-quality; the early "kinescope" recordings (made by pointing a film camera at a monochrome TV monitor) were one common example in the early days, as there was no videotape until at least 1956.

The terms "Missing Episode" and "Lost Episode" are ''not'' synonymous, but which term refers to which phenomenon varies. It can also be an abused term, such as the case of ''Entertainment Tonight'' finding "lost footage" for their shows which [[Never Trust a Trailer|is already properly catalogedcatalogued and digitized]], but uses the "lost" term instead of "old footage" as the latter doesn't work to pull in viewers.

[[Category:Orphaned/Sandbox/DepressingProduction TropesTrivia Episode]]

[[Category:EpisodesDepressing Tropes]]