Lost media
One of my favorite rabbit holes is lost media. There are two definitions for how it usually comes up: first is media which is considered lost or otherwise inaccessible. The second isn't necessarily lost for sure, but simply relatively obscure media people can't identify. A lot of searches start with people recounting some vaguely traumatizing memory of some TV show, movie or book from their childhood, which can then turn into a vicious hunt that takes years to solve. The most famous example is probably the "Clock Man" which played a big role in drawing general attention to the concept of lost media.
Famous examples include the early seasons of Doctor Who, London After Midnight (and many, many, many other silent films), the first Superbowl, an extended version of the ending of Freaks, the original 9-hour cut of Greed... You can find countless ongoing searches today for all sorts of media ranging from songs to video games to commercials and even commercial bumpers.
It's a fun rabbit hole, particularly when you look into the searches themselves and how media gets found. Does anyone have any particular pieces of lost media you're looking for or invested in, or a search or piece you just find interesting? Feel free to talk about cases that have been found, too!
I really enjoyed this two hour video where a guy hunts down the original source for the Roblox "oof" sound that's made when your character dies. Not normally something I would find interesting at all but this video is far more engrossing than you'd ever guess.
https://youtu.be/0twDETh6QaI?si=8m0ruEUHBxN6tIsh
Hall of fame video for me, personally
There's an interesting story around the Egyptian papyri purchased by Joseph Smith and other Latter Day Saints leaders that I think fits this theme. Some papyri (and mummies) were being offered for sale in the town which was the main home of the LDS church at the time. Smith and the LDS leaders buy them, and Smith translates them, revealing that they are accounts of the biblical patriarchs Abraham and Joseph. The papyri go missing after Smith's death and are presumed to be destroyed, but his translations are included in the Pearl of Great Price and become canonized as part of LDS scripture.
Then, some of the papyri reappear in the mid-1900s. But, critically, between Smith's translations and the reappearance, Egyptologists have deciphered the Rosetta stone and learned to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics, and they have very different ideas about what the papyri say.
Wikipedia has a good introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith_Papyri
The story of Joseph Smith and Mormonism is absolutely wild.
The search for So Much Better, the case of the missing hit. Which was successfully found in the end, video.
I ran across that link a couple of years ago, and found the whole story just fascinating. This guy remembers a whole song that apparently no one else does. And he went looking. Like, he does a lot of the stuff you think you might try if you were serious about looking after the podcasters got involved and leveraged him some access.
They got in touch with people from Rolling Stone magazine for Christ's sake! There are people on staff there who know, apparently, everything about certain areas of music. Or, at least it was assumed they did, because maybe they didn't. Studio musicians (and a singer) were hired to replicate the song from this guy's memory, with him mouthing beats and rhythms and lyrics. Radio station directors who worked in the 90s were interviewed.
The answer was interesting. A little microcosm of the 90s music scene spun out into this song that does exist, isn't that bad, but just ... vanished because that's what happened sometimes in the 90s. Full on songs, albums, could make it all the way to CD and be completely done, only to be completely done as far as getting released or any sort of promotion.
Does anyone remember ffffound.com? It's been shut down for years at this point but it was basically a more interesting version of pinterest/stumbleupon. Although it was more focused on curated images/inspo content rather than blogs and rare web pages. If anyone knows of any small-ish site similar to that pls share.
Willie Brown where are you?
There are other missing delta blues records, and every couple of years another one turns up. For example, some guy on reddit recently found a previously lost 78 by Big Bill Broonzy. But the two missing Willie Brown 78s are considered the holy grail of unheard delta blues records.
There's also the rumored wax cylinder recording of Buddy Bolden from around the beginning of the 20th century. It was probably destroyed in the 1960s, if it ever existed at all.
I read an excellent but dark novel based on this premise. White Tears by Hari Kunzru.
Just last week I saw people are trying to hunt down the only season of Top Chef South Africa, though it appears to have become lost media so shortly after airing.
One thing that I've found fascinating while watching the lost media community from the sidelines has been when a piece of media turns out to have never existed. Perhaps the most famous of these is A Day With SpongeBob SquarePants, which had searchers on the hunt for several years.
Long story short: online listings for a live-action mockumentary/parody of SpongeBob show up in 2011, with orders seemingly being possible at some point. A few years later, no known copies of the film exist, so a group search begins, with a particular focus on the listed production companies. Everything dug up on these companies reveals a kinda sketchy, fly-by-night sort of feel, especially since no one associated with them seemed interested in talking, which leads to wild speculation on criminal dealings and the like.
Eventually, the owner of the main production company and the claimed director of the movie are contacted, revealing that the movie was as of yet unproduced, with the original online listings being made in a bid to gauge interest. While the production company owner said he was planning on beginning a crowdfunding campaign to secure funding, that was back in 2016 and no such campaign ever materialized.
I'm a bit disappointed the Lost Media Wiki article as it is now glosses over the history of the search, as the story of the search itself is more compelling than the movie ever could have been.
I have no idea how to find it now (ironically) and it's not really traditionally lost media as such. But I really enjoyed 4chan trying to create their own rules for a game called "Time Wizard" aka "Los Magos del Tiempo"
Some random guy posted a thread on /tg/ one day describing this game his friends made up when they used to play D&D in his basement and 4chan took the bait. After asking a load of questions and "this sounds great where are the rules?" the original poster had nothing to give and just stopped posted.
What followed was several efforts to recreate the game based off that one thread.
Years later the original poster came back, laughed his ass off at the fact people had actually tried to remake his dumb game and actually posted the real rules, which really tied the whole story up.
Mine would be this song by a band I’ve never been able to find online but I SWEAR I bought the song on iTunes back in 2006/2007ish. The band is “Ever Since August” and the song is “Right as Rain” and it starts with this beautiful piano intro (there was a mistake on the piano toward the intro that was kept in the final recording).
I’ve not even been able to find proof that the band ever existed online, never mind being able to listen to the song again.
I saw Who Created the Skull Trumpet GIF on Tildes earlier this week and it (sort of) fits the genre. It was a pretty great video IMO.
I think an interesting comparison might be to endangered species. There are many relatively obscure media today which might be fully lost in 100 years.
One of these might have been, or might still be, Love Complex (2000). Brilliant show. Definitely worth a watch if you like weird shakespearean? kafkaesque? Japanese dramas.
If it makes you sleep any better, I can stream that show on FOD. So I don't think it's in too much danger. However, I imagine a lot of lovingly made fansubs are at a high risk.
Speaking of the Internet Archive, they used to have a huge backlog of E!'s The Soup. Alas, it got taken down for infringement. I worry about shows like that where the licensing is too tricky to end up streaming it / producing DVDs / etc.
I've been looking for a flash animation I remember from sometime between 2004-2006. It was an egg looking thing that would sing a variation of "twenty eight days til Christmas, twenty eight days til Christmas, twenty eight days til Christmas...." something, something, something. I can't remember the last part. It was kind of a countdown that would say how many days until Christmas. I'm not sure if it was on Ebaumsworld or something like that, but I feel like it was likely the same place that hosted the Hamster Dance. Any sleuths have an idea?
Does Weebl and Bob ring a bell?
You found it!!!! It was this video! Great sleuthing!!!!
Haha yes I knew it. Old neurons fired when you said that.
This is one of my favorite videos I've seen on the topic: The 10-Year Hunt for the Lost McDonald's DS Game.
BrutalMoose on YouTube has a few videos where he watches old random VHS tapes.
There is a subreddit for this kind of stuff as well, forgot what it's called.
I found a random public access show once, searching YouTube for "pickle perfection".
It's a recent discovery with me. My introduction was this catchy song. I haven't kept up but as far as I know it's still not found. X-Files also had a song in it that was considered lost media but found now. Source.
One of my favorite political ads was a spot the Obama campaign put out in 2008 called "Bad News." They cleverly edited together news coverage and footage of McCain winning the Republican nomination to make it look like he won the general, complete with scrolling stats talking about record low youth turnout across the country. It then flashed past a rush of static to a message about preventing that future by making sure to register and go to the polls. Apparently the news channel whose footage was used complained and the campaign pulled the ad, and it doesn't seem to be preserved anywhere else.
There's this series of French (well, francophone, it's a franco-belgian-swiss collaboration) science history documentary from the early 2000s called "Eurêka j'ai tout faux" (and its sequel "Eurêka j'ai (encore) tout faux"). It covers science history with the framing device of "look at how mistaken we continuously were during history (and it's normal)" concerning evolution, what the matter is made of, our place in the universe, etc. What put this series apart is its presentation, with a lot of humorous usage of stock and/or historical footage and sounds (Aristotle is always represented with the same old-timey footage of a guy arguing on a boxing ring, with a fog horn sound effect).
It seems the sequel series is available on DVD through this network of Belgian libraries, but alas I'm not Belgian.
All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling (1994) is no-longer-lost cassette album by post-rock artist Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The Wikipedia article goes into detail, but the gist is that there were 33 copies made and the band chose to never release it beyond that initial run. They more or less did not acknowledge it afterwards. 20ish years after its release it became clear that someone had leaked a portion of the record, but it was hard to confirm. Then last year someone leaked the full thing, and people were more sure about it being legit this time. It prompted the artist to release it for real on Bandcamp.
Creatively/emotionally, it seems a little disappointing, because clearly they didn’t want to release it and were essentially forced to - but I am sympathetic to the chase for something that was technically “released” even if in such a small quantity.