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I’m almost more disappointed to learn there were only 650 episodes available to begin with. IIRC, Sesame Street has thousands of episodes. At some point when I

I’m almost more disappointed to learn there were only 650 episodes available to begin with. IIRC, Sesame Street has thousands of episodes. At some point when I was watching as a child, they would display the episode number on screen at the end of the intro song, and it was huge. Where can someone access all of that cultural history?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
colechristensen 4y ago
>Where can someone access all of that cultural history? DVD box sets. Pirate sites.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  I admittedly haven't looked into this at all, but I suspect a majority aren't available on DVD, particularly the ones from the 80s and 90s. "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming services should be making economically viable for the first time.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    > "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming should be making economically viable for the first time. Broadly, it does, but the countless historic episodes (of many things) are not sitting there as nicely encoded video files with cleared distribution rights. Much work will not have been well-archived in the first place (if at all), nor catalogued well (if at all), and there will be performers and musicians and other contributors who may have various rights that need to be identified and negotiated before a legitimate streaming site can air it. In all, it makes the per-item preparatory effort quite high and means that most old stuff will be left to volunteer, underground distribution for a very long time.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      >there will be performers and musicians and other contributors who may have various rights that need to be identified and negotiated before a legitimate streaming site can air it. For example, there are pretty well-known TV series like Northern Exposure and WKRP in Cincinnati that are only available in essentially bowdlerized form because the music that was such a key part of the shows was never licensed beyond original TV use.
  - Someone 4y ago
    I don’t know much about marketing, let alone about marketing decades old television shows, but it would surprise me if doing the work to stream all of that were economically viable, let alone more economically viable than other things HBO could work on instead. Ten or twenty “best of” episodes (with “best of” decided by both content, licensing, and the quality of available recordings) might be economically viable, but thousands of episodes?
  - registeredcorn 4y ago
    > "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming services should be making economically viable for the first time. I see what you mean, but if we are at all concerned about preservation of old media, a streaming platform is useless unless we are able to download it without any form of restriction. I doubt most platforms would be okay with that, because it would remove part of the incentive of continuing to subscribe to their platform. If I recall correctly, Netflix and Hulu both have some form of "offline access" to certain content that their studios produced, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort heavy handed DRM associated with that. To make things more frustrating, consider this: Plenty of streaming services that have already come and gone. Most of those platforms had some amount of original content on it. Once the platform shut their servers off, viewers lost any form of access to it (assuming that there wasn't a workaround to download a local copy.) Theoretically, that media could pop up on another platform in the future if some deal is worked out between studios, but, I find it extremely unlikely, and even less likely that all of it would ever be available on a singular source. That is to say, there is a near guarantee that there is a growing amount of media that we will never have never know about, let alone have the chance to see. Technology seems to rotate through various trends. The only realistic possibility that I see of us finding any kind of long term solution to this issue is if there is a sudden, overwhelming shift back towards physical media (DVDs, Blu-ray, etc.) Without unrestricted physical access, the ability to access "lost" content is merely a expiration date, either by a subscription ending, or a platform dying off. The less likely alternative that I can think of would be some kind of gentlemen's agreement. Each time a new piece of content is created, a preserved copy is provided to a third party source, to be made public if that piece of content is no longer accessible. Something along the lines of how the Library of Congress works. I just don't see any studio being particularly interested in humoring that type of arrangement, unless it was a legal requirement, or something that was demanded through unions like Screen Actors Guild, Writer's Guild of America, etc.
- koheripbal 4y ago
  I've never been able to find Sesame Street on torrent sites for my kids.
colechristensen 4y ago
And wow you weren’t wrong. Early seasons were producing a new episode nearly every weekday for half the year. 130+ episodes per year.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > And wow you weren’t wrong. Early seasons were producing a new episode nearly every weekday for half the year. 130+ episodes per year. Though, if I remember Sesame Street correctly, those episodes heavily reused content between episodes (e.g. I probably saw this segment literally hundreds of times as a kid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_MEFVx5jM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_MEFVx5jM), so that might be less work than it seems.
  - mh- 4y ago
    Oh wow, that link. Before I clicked I was thinking: "there's no way I'd remember a specific sesame street segment I saw as a kid, no matter how many times." As soon as I clicked it and saw the girls sitting at the table, I remembered the swirling orange colors.. and sure enough, next scene. Thanks for this. I'd guess it's been at least 30 years since I'd seen it.
  - allturtles 4y ago
    Wow, that's a brilliant little piece of visual storytelling. No narration required for a child (or adult) to know exactly what's going on.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > Wow, that's a brilliant little piece of visual storytelling. No narration required for a child (or adult) to know exactly what's going on. Well, not exactly. Just watching it again as an adult, I just realized that I don't really know what the man is dumping into wax mixer at 0:26. I'd always assumed it was wax, but now I think it's probably orange pigment.
      - 4y ago
js2 4y ago
Apparently over 4500 episodes[1], some of which have gone missing[2]. This is what the Internet keeps telling me is the best source of information: 1. https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Sesame_Street_episodes https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Sesame_Street_episode... 2. https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Lost_episodes_of_Sesame_Street https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Lost_episodes_of_Sesame_Stree... Someone, somewhere, probably has nearly every episode on slowly deteriorating VCR tape.
- dmix 4y ago
  They link to this site which tracks lost media: https://lostmediawiki.com/Home https://lostmediawiki.com/Home I love reading into this sort of thing. Media can be so ephemeral unless the creators are careful. Hollywood should have had an archive.org sort of organization since way back.
  - soheil 4y ago
    Whatever studio created it probably has a copy of every episode on old tapes. Also I wonder if this is viable business model to request people who have a copy of a “lost media” to turn it up for a reward.
    - pigeons 4y ago
      Often media was reused by the studio, for cost reasons. This is one reason there are missing episodes of culturally significant television programs like Doctor Who.
      - GenerocUsername 4y ago
        Also the official reason there is no original videos of the moon landing.
      - soheil 4y ago
        Surely not the case in a Hollywood studio
phpisthebest 4y ago
>Where can someone access all of that cultural history? The high seas of the internet is the only place where gate keepers hold no power

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

colechristensen 4y ago

>Where can someone access all of that cultural history? DVD box sets. Pirate sites.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
I admittedly haven't looked into this at all, but I suspect a majority aren't available on DVD, particularly the ones from the 80s and 90s. "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming services should be making economically viable for the first time.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  > "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming should be making economically viable for the first time. Broadly, it does, but the countless historic episodes (of many things) are not sitting there as nicely encoded video files with cleared distribution rights. Much work will not have been well-archived in the first place (if at all), nor catalogued well (if at all), and there will be performers and musicians and other contributors who may have various rights that need to be identified and negotiated before a legitimate streaming site can air it. In all, it makes the per-item preparatory effort quite high and means that most old stuff will be left to volunteer, underground distribution for a very long time.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >there will be performers and musicians and other contributors who may have various rights that need to be identified and negotiated before a legitimate streaming site can air it. For example, there are pretty well-known TV series like Northern Exposure and WKRP in Cincinnati that are only available in essentially bowdlerized form because the music that was such a key part of the shows was never licensed beyond original TV use.
- Someone 4y ago
  I don’t know much about marketing, let alone about marketing decades old television shows, but it would surprise me if doing the work to stream all of that were economically viable, let alone more economically viable than other things HBO could work on instead. Ten or twenty “best of” episodes (with “best of” decided by both content, licensing, and the quality of available recordings) might be economically viable, but thousands of episodes?
- registeredcorn 4y ago
  > "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming services should be making economically viable for the first time. I see what you mean, but if we are at all concerned about preservation of old media, a streaming platform is useless unless we are able to download it without any form of restriction. I doubt most platforms would be okay with that, because it would remove part of the incentive of continuing to subscribe to their platform. If I recall correctly, Netflix and Hulu both have some form of "offline access" to certain content that their studios produced, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort heavy handed DRM associated with that. To make things more frustrating, consider this: Plenty of streaming services that have already come and gone. Most of those platforms had some amount of original content on it. Once the platform shut their servers off, viewers lost any form of access to it (assuming that there wasn't a workaround to download a local copy.) Theoretically, that media could pop up on another platform in the future if some deal is worked out between studios, but, I find it extremely unlikely, and even less likely that all of it would ever be available on a singular source. That is to say, there is a near guarantee that there is a growing amount of media that we will never have never know about, let alone have the chance to see. Technology seems to rotate through various trends. The only realistic possibility that I see of us finding any kind of long term solution to this issue is if there is a sudden, overwhelming shift back towards physical media (DVDs, Blu-ray, etc.) Without unrestricted physical access, the ability to access "lost" content is merely a expiration date, either by a subscription ending, or a platform dying off. The less likely alternative that I can think of would be some kind of gentlemen's agreement. Each time a new piece of content is created, a preserved copy is provided to a third party source, to be made public if that piece of content is no longer accessible. Something along the lines of how the Library of Congress works. I just don't see any studio being particularly interested in humoring that type of arrangement, unless it was a legal requirement, or something that was demanded through unions like Screen Actors Guild, Writer's Guild of America, etc.
koheripbal 4y ago
I've never been able to find Sesame Street on torrent sites for my kids.

colechristensen 4y ago

And wow you weren’t wrong. Early seasons were producing a new episode nearly every weekday for half the year. 130+ episodes per year.

tablespoon 4y ago
> And wow you weren’t wrong. Early seasons were producing a new episode nearly every weekday for half the year. 130+ episodes per year. Though, if I remember Sesame Street correctly, those episodes heavily reused content between episodes (e.g. I probably saw this segment literally hundreds of times as a kid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_MEFVx5jM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_MEFVx5jM), so that might be less work than it seems.
- mh- 4y ago
  Oh wow, that link. Before I clicked I was thinking: "there's no way I'd remember a specific sesame street segment I saw as a kid, no matter how many times." As soon as I clicked it and saw the girls sitting at the table, I remembered the swirling orange colors.. and sure enough, next scene. Thanks for this. I'd guess it's been at least 30 years since I'd seen it.
- allturtles 4y ago
  Wow, that's a brilliant little piece of visual storytelling. No narration required for a child (or adult) to know exactly what's going on.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > Wow, that's a brilliant little piece of visual storytelling. No narration required for a child (or adult) to know exactly what's going on. Well, not exactly. Just watching it again as an adult, I just realized that I don't really know what the man is dumping into wax mixer at 0:26. I'd always assumed it was wax, but now I think it's probably orange pigment.
    - 4y ago

js2 4y ago

Apparently over 4500 episodes[1], some of which have gone missing[2]. This is what the Internet keeps telling me is the best source of information: 1. https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Sesame_Street_episodes https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Sesame_Street_episode... 2. https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Lost_episodes_of_Sesame_Street https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Lost_episodes_of_Sesame_Stree... Someone, somewhere, probably has nearly every episode on slowly deteriorating VCR tape.

dmix 4y ago
They link to this site which tracks lost media: https://lostmediawiki.com/Home https://lostmediawiki.com/Home I love reading into this sort of thing. Media can be so ephemeral unless the creators are careful. Hollywood should have had an archive.org sort of organization since way back.
- soheil 4y ago
  Whatever studio created it probably has a copy of every episode on old tapes. Also I wonder if this is viable business model to request people who have a copy of a “lost media” to turn it up for a reward.
  - pigeons 4y ago
    Often media was reused by the studio, for cost reasons. This is one reason there are missing episodes of culturally significant television programs like Doctor Who.
    - GenerocUsername 4y ago
      Also the official reason there is no original videos of the moon landing.
    - soheil 4y ago
      Surely not the case in a Hollywood studio

phpisthebest 4y ago

>Where can someone access all of that cultural history? The high seas of the internet is the only place where gate keepers hold no power