I Grew Up on These

[stickmaker]

Well, the later ones.

How Groucho's grandson saved _You Bet Your Life_:

http://boingboing.net/2013/03/12/the-day-my-grandfather-groucho.html

Comments

[kengr]

One of the things I'd do if I won one of those $3000 milion or so lotteries is set up a company to transfer old video & video to digital format and clean up the resulting files.

Then I'd start contacting TV stations (especially the small ones) across the US and Canada and try to reach deals to digitize their old film and video libraries. Y'see it used to be that the stations got film of the episodes of TV shows and got to keep them (they may have had to pay some sort of royalty when reshowing them later). It's perfectly legal to convert those to digital for the use of the station. In spite of what the copyright owners & MPAA would like.

Anyway, this means that *lots* of those station may have "lost" episodes of various shows and old serials and the like.

One of the other things that would be possible if this was done is that due to the practice of stations clipping out bits of the film to make more room for commercials. Different stations will have clipped different parts. Also, damage to the films will have happened at different spots as well.

So, if the company doing the digitizing acts as an offsite backup for the stuff it digitizes, it can compare the different copies from different stations and "upgrade" the digital version by restoring missing footage and restoring damaged frames.

At some point, the restored & digitized copies would be good enough to try working out a deal with the stations and copyright owners to produce & market DVDs. It'd be a win for the copyright owners as they'd not be out anything for the digital conversion and restoration. And a win for consumers.

Heck it might even recover/restore programs and episodes that have lapsed copyrights.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

I used to have a number of frames - usually two per piece of film - cut from episodes of _Star Trek_ by TV stations. These were sold by Lincoln Enterprises, back in the day. I mounted them in slide frames, and later sold them to another collector.

That was decades before I got a film scanner...