The Game Show Forum
The Game Show Forum => The Big Board => Topic started by: johnnya2k3 on July 28, 2018, 06:37:28 PM
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Five years ago, a flood in Don Reid’s house permanently wiped the entire run of Dream House, and since then, home video recordings of some episodes are all that exists.
But I’m sure somebody managed to salvage those masters and have kept them under lock and key all this time, and there are facilities all over the country that can be able to restore flood-damaged videotapes, as well as “baking” and digitizing them for generations to come. Look at Spin-Off and the CBS Joker’s Wild; they were thought to be gone forever until a remodeling at WCBS proved otherwise.
So hoepefully soon, we could be seeing all those lost episodes of Dream House in its pristine quality once again as was 35 years ago.
/Love to hear Johnny Gilbert read that slate in the same manner he’s done for years
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I don't think it was ever said the flood was five years ago...it's just that we first learned of the flood five years ago.
It's possible the tapes had been junked long before then.
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Even if the tapes were to be discovered...do you really think people are clamoring to see reruns of a rather mediocre game show that only lasted a year? Especially considering there are still several eps on the trading circuit/YouTube as you said, and there are still numerous other, superior game shows that are almost all completely gone AFAWK (the original Match Game and Sale of the Century come immediately to mind), I'm honestly not too broken up about this loss.
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Is there a reason the original Match Game is in such poor shape? Like, I know it being in color wasn't going to be saved because of wiping, but not even kinescopes? Given the care G-T took to preserve their CBS shows (particularly the panel shows), why wasn't the same done for some of their others, particularly their poor record at NBC? Did NBC not even want to do kinescoping?
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Even if the tapes were to be discovered...do you really think people are clamoring to see reruns of a rather mediocre game show that only lasted a year? Especially considering there are still several eps on the trading circuit/YouTube as you said, and there are still numerous other, superior game shows that are almost all completely gone AFAWK (the original Match Game and Sale of the Century come immediately to mind), I'm honestly not too broken up about this loss.
IIRC, the music reels were destroyed too, which included the show's second theme song. That was on my personal Holy Grail list, so I'm bummed that will probably never see the light of day. It was a very funky piece.
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Is there a reason the original Match Game is in such poor shape? Like, I know it being in color wasn't going to be saved because of wiping, but not even kinescopes? Given the care G-T took to preserve their CBS shows (particularly the panel shows), why wasn't the same done for some of their others, particularly their poor record at NBC? Did NBC not even want to do kinescoping?
Goodson-Todman put energies into saving most of their primetime programs, starting in the summer of 1952, but seem to have been largely indifferent to doing the same with their daytime programs until 1972- note that there isn't that much in a relative way of the daytime run of the Cullen Price Is Right, almost nothing (as far as we can tell) of the daytime Beat The Clock, how few episodes seem to exist of Play Your Hunch (and that a good hunk of what does exist are primetime episodes), that it appears that nothing from Say When! is held by FremantleMedia, and that no one has found any footage from Snap Judgment.
Even the two main exceptions to this rule aren't that big of exceptions when we consider them in greater detail- the existing daytime episodes of Password are almost solely from the color run and were sold in syndication after the end of the run (and survive in the syndication copies, rather than as originally broadcast), and the existing daytime episodes of To Tell The Truth also seem to chiefly be from the color run and similarly were preserved with syndication in mind (though Goodson-Todman ultimately decided just to revive the series, meaning that these episodes do survive in original format).
Ultimately, then, it seems that the fact that so little exists of the original Match Game is not really something specific to NBC, and certainly not the product of NBC being unwilling to kinescope (there is a massive collection of NBC kinescopes at the Library of Congress, and I've seen kinescopes at both Paley Center and UCLA that have origins from NBC's reference collection), but, rather, reflects that Goodson-Todman weren't especially interested in saving daytime materials in that period unless they thought they could make money off of them later- and that, unlike with Password and To Tell The Truth, that day never came for Match Game.
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Even if the tapes were to be discovered...do you really think people are clamoring to see reruns of a rather mediocre game show that only lasted a year? Especially considering there are still several eps on the trading circuit/YouTube as you said, and there are still numerous other, superior game shows that are almost all completely gone AFAWK (the original Match Game and Sale of the Century come immediately to mind), I'm honestly not too broken up about this loss.
I seem to recall the reason we found out the tapes were destroyed was because GSN was interested in acquiring the rerun rights to the show for a possible revival at one point.
Tyshaun
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That's cool that Spin-Off exists, but if it's never shown again, why keep em?
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That's cool that Spin-Off exists, but if it's never shown again, why keep em?
The reasons were explained to you nine years ago (http://www.gameshowforum.org/index.php/topic,18547.msg223594.html#msg223594) when you last trolled with this comment.
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Thanks Mark. Looking forward to seeing them someday.
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It's great that new discoveries are being made all the time, but if they're never going to be seen, what's the point? I hope nothing else ever gets erased, but it's been 20 years since Spin-Off was discovered and not a trace of it has appeared anywhere. Would it have been better not knowing it still exists?
While I liked Dream House and was sorry to hear that it's gone, if neither GSN nor BUZZR is interested in running it, there's no point in trying to restore it.
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Even if the tapes were to be discovered...do you really think people are clamoring to see reruns of a rather mediocre game show that only lasted a year?
I presume that for a format where an $89,000 house-and-land plot can be won every day that the ratings would have to be better than mediocre to hang on for fifteen months.
As to doing a revival, it seems like winning a home falls completely outside either the GSN paradigm of $500 becomes $5000 or the million-dollar game shows that had become en vogue. And given that the game is just toss-up and bonus with questions that would be laughed out of an NAQT read maybe they would have done well to either get just the name and do something else, or maybe give away a massive prize through something other than the Golden Doors.
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The original Ron Greenberg version was much more exciting. Fast paced Q&A buzzer beater.
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Even if the tapes were to be discovered...do you really think people are clamoring to see reruns of a rather mediocre game show that only lasted a year?
I presume that for a format where an $85,000 house-and-land plot can be won every day that the ratings would have to be better than mediocre to hang on for fifteen months.
Yep. Dream House was more a victim of being the lead out from Wheel of Fortune after its ratings took off than its own ratings.
Tyshaun
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I recall reading an interview with Bob Eubanks, that NOT so many new homes were won on the show, and that Dream Furniture would've been a more appropriate title.
I believe another problem was winners' sometimes having problems acquiring land to build the new homes on, and making it more expensive for them.
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Does anybody know whether house winners were given a cash option of some sort?
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Does anybody know whether house winners were given a cash option of some sort?
IIRC, they eventually were on the 60s version, but I can't speak for the 80s one.
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Does anybody know whether house winners were given a cash option of some sort?
What I find interesting is that when they had celebrities on for charity, they donated a whopping $5,000 for a show where the bonus round was won maybe once every 2 weeks on average. Compared to a house, that seemed chintzy even for then. Makes me believe the cost on those houses wasn't that much.
Tyshaun
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Regarding the "why preserve something if it's never going to be seen?" theme that's come and gone hereabouts:
Ultimately, it's because we don't KNOW that something is "never" going to be seen, and we can't predict what future people will value when they look back at the mass culture of a given period. Ownership changes, tastes and critical consensuses change, rights get cleared, new discoveries are made. When the only extant copies of something are junked, their non-availability becomes permanent for every succeeding generation.
About 30% of American silent features survive today in some form, including incompletes. In the middle years of the last century, many were discarded once their prints and negatives began to decay, because their owners usually felt that these movies had no further commercial potential and that there would never again be public demand to see them. Archivists and historians may have differed with them, but opinions won't bring those movies back.
In the late 1970s, 20th Century-Fox junked all of its three-strip Technicolor nitrate negatives. The color reversal intermediates made at the time were deemed adequate. Comes the era of DVD and especially Blu-ray, and the consequences of this preservation choice become more apparent when Fox's Technicolor output of the 1940s, while certainly watchable, lacks a certain something that modern scans of original three-strip negatives can reveal.
So that's why you keep things, even seeming trivia like a 65-episode game show. Retention and preservation practices are there (or should be) to benefit not only those now living, but for later generations as well.
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If I ever get Zuckerberg-like finances, I'll start a boutique DVD label for orphan game shows. Where are the "Spin-Off" tapes? Both Nicholson and Muir are dead.