NBC Daytime Schedule 1980

[tyshaun1]

Is there any particular reasons the tapes for Mindreaders are missing, given that G-T was generally good at archiving?

After a show is broadcast, what happens to the tape?  I'm guessing it's held by the network for a period of time but is it at the network's discretion to decide what happens to it after that, or is it up to the producer to request it for their archives?

Maybe NBC figured G-T wouldn't want it because the show wasn't a success(?)

But yet, they kept Double Dare. And Beat The Clock.

I think it may be a NBC thing, considering most of the run of Sale of the Century, Wheel of Fortune, High Rollers, and Dream House were all lost.

[snowpeck]

Is there any particular reasons the tapes for Mindreaders are missing, given that G-T was generally good at archiving?

After a show is broadcast, what happens to the tape?  I'm guessing it's held by the network for a period of time but is it at the network's discretion to decide what happens to it after that, or is it up to the producer to request it for their archives?

Maybe NBC figured G-T wouldn't want it because the show wasn't a success(?)

But yet, they kept Double Dare. And Beat The Clock.

I think it may be a NBC thing, considering most of the run of Sale of the Century, Wheel of Fortune, High Rollers, and Dream House were all lost.

At least some of High Rollers exists and Dream House was lost in a flood much later on.

[chris319]

Is there any particular reasons the tapes for Mindreaders are missing, given that G-T was generally good at archiving?

After a show is broadcast, what happens to the tape?  I'm guessing it's held by the network for a period of time but is it at the network's discretion to decide what happens to it after that, or is it up to the producer to request it for their archives?

Maybe NBC figured G-T wouldn't want it because the show wasn't a success(?)

My interpretation is that any decision to destroy a tape was totally up to the producer/packager who owned the show. Producers paid NBC for everything from the tape stock itself to studio facilities and editing, and the packager owned the intellectual property, i.e. the program concept and content. The packager also paid the performers - contestants, models, emcees, announcers.

It seems improbable that Goodson would have authorized the destruction of Mindreaders tapes because he kept so much else.

[Eric Paddon]

It seems improbable that Goodson would have authorized the destruction of Mindreaders tapes because he kept so much else.

Yeah, but remember he didn't keep ABC Password or "The Better Sex".   It's only the CBS shows and the syndicated shows of the 70s that have a relatively perfect track record (though the first year of the Garry Moore "To Tell The Truth" is evidently lost along with the first year of the Narz "Beat The Clock" taped in NY and most of "He Said, She Said").    ABC supposedly was recycling the tapes of Password and the Better Sex for "Family Feud" as the years went by.   

[RMF]

A few notes, touching on various elements involving preservation:

1) I'm not sure that the missing late NBC programs mean anything with NBC- in addition to the points raised concerning High Rollers and Dream House (though the version I've heard for the latter involves flooding), Sale of the Century seems to be a Reg Grundy issue, as Going For Gold (which aired in the United Kingdom into the 1990s) is similarly missing a pile of episodes.

2) I would be cautious about making assumptions about networks in terms of preservation, based on examples from other genres:

2a) There seems to be an idea that CBS stopped wiping earlier than the other networks due to the survival of the Goodson-Todman programs and the rediscovery of The Joker's Wild. The notes that soap opera fans have compiled concerning what survives in that genre make this suspect- the CBS soap operas of the 1970s do not seem to be particularly well-preserved, further suggesting that it was based on production firms;

2b) That said, even production firms could be inconsistent- there is a general consensus among those who have researched television sports broadcasting that ABC seems to have done a better job of preserving their sports broadcasts from the 1960s and early 1970s than either CBS or NBC, but there are a number of places where gaps are apparent, with their coverage of the NBA from 1964-1965 to 1972-1973 existing (on the basis of the available evidence) in a fragmentary state indeed (total number of NBA Finals games known to exist completely on master-quality tape from this period: one).

Overall, this ties back to considering the survival of the programs in a key regard: while we have some ideas of what is out there, there are still limitations to our information (note that, twenty-five or so years later, we still aren't sure of the total contents of that Hollywood Squares rediscovery, to name just one example) that are such that I would be deeply wary about assuming any general rules existed, rather than a collection of individual circumstances for which consistency cannot be assumed.