Posted on 04/13/2025 9:59:35 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Levine — who has previously suffered from bladder cancer, sepsis and single sarcoidosis — estimates he spent £70,000 of his own dough while a group of other Who fans chipped in another £30,000 through a donation campaign. He searched the world as far as Bangladesh and Turkey to find designers up to the job of making moving AI images out of production photos, notes and the actual audio from the stories.
Since the AI remakes aren’t authorized by the BBC he is now only sharing the videos with the small group of friends and fellow diehards who also contributed to the effort, said Levine, who has been hooked on the show since it debuted in the UK in 1963, and was an unofficial fan adviser to the program in the 80s.
The BBC one had a policy of purging film after broadcasts in what now seems like a bizarre and terribly short-sighted move that left major gaps in its archives — including the first six, black-and-white seasons of “Doctor Who,” which focuses on the adventures of a mysterious alien who travels in time and space.
Copies of the lost stories have turned up over the years in private collections and been found in foreign TV studios where they had been shipped for broadcast years ago — but the reality is many or most of those still missing no longer exist in any form.
The BBC itself has used surviving fan-made audio recordings of the TV broadcasts to make animated recreations of several of the missing episodes, but Levine and some other purists have dismissed them as “cartoons” that aren’t authentic to the original, low-budget productions.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Only a government broadcaster would be stupid enough to delete its intellectual property.
Dr Pronoun
That was so good, until a couple of doctors ago
Videotape was really expensive in the early years of TV.
The network headquarters I worked at wiped out tons of 60s and early 70s original programming due to the price of tape.
I copied a lot of quad tapes to digital Beta.
Some disintegrated as they played back.
I managed to snag one for myself as when the tape vault was being purged.
Thousands of tapes in all analog formats were tossed.
IIRC that’s what happened to the first decade or so of the Johnny Carson show. The tapes got wiped and now those episodes exist only in people’s memories.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.