Lost media
Culture
25 rabbit holes · 12 people exploring
Common starting questions
- What's the most famous lost film?
- Was the Max Headroom hijacker ever caught?
- How fast do web pages disappear?
- Was there ever a Sinbad genie movie?
- Was Polybius a real arcade game?
Rabbit holes
- Flash stopped on January 12, 2021, and people saved 160,000 games
An entire generation's childhood was Flash games and Flash cartoons, all in a format that was always going to die. I wanted to know how much actually got saved.
Ayodele Bankole · 7 sources
- London After Midnight, the most wanted lost film
Tod Browning and Lon Chaney, 1927. The last known copy burned in the 1965 MGM vault fire. All that's left are stills of Chaney's makeup, which are honestly scary enough, and a 2002 TCM reconstruction built from the script and those stills.
Ayodele Bankole · 7 sources
- a Roman birthday party invitation from 100 AD
Thin wooden tablets found in a waterlogged rubbish dump near Hadrian's Wall. Claudia Severa invites her friend Sulpicia Lepidina to her birthday. One of the earliest known examples of a woman's handwriting in Latin.
Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources
- Disney traded a sportscaster to get back a lost rabbit
Walt Disney lost Oswald, his first big character, in a contract dispute in 1928 and made Mickey in response. In 2006 Disney got him back from NBCUniversal as part of the deal that let Al Michaels leave ABC/ESPN for NBC's Sunday Night Football. Lost Oswald shorts keep turning up too: one in the BFI archive in 2015, one with a collector in Japan.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- the Voynich manuscript and other books nobody can read
Every few years someone announces they've cracked it and it never holds up. The vellum is from the early 1400s. The plants in it don't match any real plants.
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- silent films that survived by accident
After reading about films that are gone forever I wanted the opposite list.
Ayodele Bankole · 6 sources
- the 1086 Domesday Book is still readable. the 1986 one almost wasn't
For the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book, the BBC got over a million people (mostly kids) to document Britain in 1986, stored on special LaserDiscs for BBC Micro-based machines. By 2002 the hardware that could read them was getting rare.
Dev Malhotra · 7 sources
- Nobody ever caught the Max Headroom hijackers
Yuki Tanabe · 7 sources
- 38% of web pages from 2013 are already gone
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- Shazaam: the 90s genie movie that never existed
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- Polybius, the arcade game that never existed
Legend: a mysterious arcade machine in Portland in 1981 that gave kids nightmares and amnesia, and men in black collected data from it. Reality: no evidence any of it existed. It probably borrows from real 1981 Portland stuff, like two people getting sick at an arcade and the FBI raiding arcades over gambling machines.
Ludovica Ferri · 6 sources
- they actually dug up the E.T. cartridges in the desert
Grew up assuming this was an urban legend. Then in 2014 a documentary crew dug into a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and there they were. Not only E.T. though, it was all kinds of unsold Atari stock.
Yara Haddad · 6 sources
- a printer threw his entire typeface into the Thames so nobody else could use it
After falling out with Emery Walker, Cobden-Sanderson spent months in 1916 and 1917 walking to Hammersmith Bridge at night and dropping the type, the punches and the matrices into the river, a bit at a time.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- the Toynbee tiles
Hundreds of linoleum tiles embedded in asphalt across US and South American cities, all saying roughly 'TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOVIE 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER'. Pressed into the road by traffic.
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- the oldest recording of a human voice was never meant to be heard
Scott's phonautograph traced sound waves as squiggles on soot-blackened paper so scientists could look at them. Playing them back wasn't the point. In 2008 researchers scanned the tracings and turned them into sound, a recording that predates Edison's phonograph by 17 years.
Rosa Delacroix · 6 sources
- Batgirl was basically finished and got shelved anyway
Dev Malhotra · 5 sources
- why WKRP in Cincinnati sounds different on DVD
Tess Quinlan · 5 sources
- a whole TV network's archive supposedly got dumped in New York's harbor
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- 95 Doctor Who episodes are missing because the BBC junked them
Inês Carvalho · 6 sources
- the Star Wars Holiday Special aired once and survives because people taped it
Two hours of Chewbacca's family, a Jefferson Starship performance, and Bea Arthur running a cantina. It aired in full exactly once in the US, on CBS in November 1978, and has never been officially released in full. Everything people watch comes from viewers' VHS recordings.
Elif Şahin · 5 sources
- bone music: Soviet bootlegs pressed on X-rays
Banned jazz and rock'n'roll cut into old hospital X-ray film. You can see someone's ribcage while you listen to Elvis. Barely playable and incredible.
Rosa Delacroix · 4 sources
- NASA probably taped over the original moon landing footage
Daniela Ruiz · 6 sources
- GeoCities shut down in 2009 and volunteers grabbed what they could
Yahoo paid $3.57 billion in stock for GeoCities in 1999, and ten years later it shut the US service down. Archive Team scrambled to download as much as they could before it went dark, which is a big part of why the 90s web still exists in any form.
Ben Adler · 7 sources
- Myspace lost everything uploaded before 2016
In 2019 Myspace admitted a server migration had wiped out more than a decade of uploads, music included. For a lot of small bands that was the only place their early demos ever lived.
Lou Tremblay · 5 sources
- P.T. can't be downloaded anymore, and most old games aren't for sale either
P.T. was a free playable teaser for Silent Hills. When the game was cancelled, Konami pulled it from the PlayStation Store and made it impossible to redownload, and PS4s with it installed briefly listed on eBay for over $1,000.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources