Missing Episode - Television Tropes & Idioms

Patchy the Pirate: Oh, no! I've ruined the lost episode! Now it's lost forever!
Potty the Parrot: Sqwack! Lost forever!

—Spongebob Squarepants

An episode of a regular series which, for some reason, is not included when the series is shown in syndication. This can take one of two flavors:

An episode which was produced but never shown.
An episode which was shown during the initial run, but never rebroadcast.

The reasons for this can vary: with respect to relatively recent shows, there might be legal issues with respect to the rights on some of the content; the networks may have issues with the nature of the episode, due either to controversial content or because it's Too Soon after a tragic event; or it may simply have been lost in the shuffle when the program was repeatedly preempted. Missing episodes are somewhat more common for older shows, where syndication packages were not all-inclusive and might omit episodes based on nothing more than popularity. Episodes may also be deleted when a show is exported to another country with different standards of decency. In these cases, the missing episodes may be trotted out years later with much fanfare.

There may be a nascent trend of intentionally withholding certain episodes for a time in order to create a "Missing Episode" mystique around them. A promotional video for Power Rangers S.P.D. created for the DVD release was broadcast as a purportedly "Missing Episode" of Power Rangers Dino Thunder entirely to rook people into watching a ten-minute infomercial.

A related phenomenon is the "Lost Episode". Older TV shows and movie series may not have a full library of old episodes to work from. The originals may have been destroyed, either accidentally or deliberately, or in the case of live programs there might never have been a recording. Most of the first ten years of the Johnny Carson Tonight Show is missing because videotape at the time was expensive and the network reused the originals. Hundreds of American silent films are no longer extant because their master copies were destroyed in a 1950s Hollywood fire and no copies have been located. This sort of thing plagues the early years of television. Of course, at the time few had any notion that people would want to watch "classic television" fifty or sixty years in the future, so they saw no reason to keep copies.

In this case, the episode is not rebroadcast because no one has it anymore. Such episodes are lost to history until (as becomes increasingly unlikely) they unexpectedly turn up in the hands of a collector or a relative of one of the original producers.

The terms "Missing Episode" and "Lost Episode" are not synonymous, but which term refers to which phenomenon varies. It can also be an abused term, such as the case of Entertainment Tonight finding "lost footage" for their shows which is already properly cataloged and digitized, but uses the "lost" term instead of "old footage" as the latter doesn't work to pull in viewers.

Can sometimes result from Old Shame. Frequently confused with Lost Forever, which is a Video Game Items and Inventory Trope despite having a name that sounds like this Trope. For an episode that never actually existed in the first place, see UnInstallment.

Examples:

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Advertising

Despite not being considered TV episodes, advertisements are the #1 victims of this Trope. There are many reasons for advertisement pulling, most notably public outrage. Fortunately some missing advertisements have survived over the years through VHS tapes and recordings, and as a result they are widely shown throughout the internet. Otherwise, you're out of luck if you miss your favorite Advertisement and want to see it again.
Effective April 1970, the FCC called all tobacco companies to remove their commercials advertising their cigarette, cigar, or tobacco products and ordered them to never be shown on TV again. Instead, ads made opposing cigarette use were made, and they continue to this day. As for the tobacco ads, only certain numbers of them (most notably the Flintstones Winston cigarettes ads) are widely available on the Internet, and others may be lost forever.
A Burger King commercial featured a scientist chasing the King himself and shouting out "Stop that King. He's crazy!". It was pulled following legal threats by various mental healthcare groups, and hasn't aired since then.
- Supposedly, McDonald's may have also shared displeasure with the ad, but that was for a completely different reason (possibly the price it advertised in the commercial).

Anime and Manga

Common in anime which has been imported for broadcast.
Dragon Ball GT lost several episodes when first shown on Cartoon Network, to pick up the pace of the storyline. The missing episodes were replaced for its second run, which was advertised as Dragon Ball GT: The Lost Episodes. It's worth noting that fanboys had been trashing these episodes since 1997, but the second they were "lost", they were in hot demand. That's Xanatos-worthy marketing.
In the original run of the edited version of Dragon Ball Z, two episodes were pulled. One was early on; a young Gohan gets lost in a cave during his wilderness training and encounters a grouchy robot, who ends up becoming fond of him and sacrifices his life to save Gohan. The reasons for pulling this episode are unknown. The other occurs after Frieza impales Krillen on his horns; in the first half of the episode, Frieza continually tortures him until he's lost nearly all the blood in his body. However, more material would end up being cut later on. At the moment, fifteen episodes' worth of material has been edited out, including most of the first episode and Tenshinhan's Z-era introduction to name a few. In addition to that, an episode created for the edited broadcast (Episode 10: "Escape From Piccolo") was skipped over in '96 due to objectionable content and only reinstated on the home release and on television in '98 after making the jump from syndication to Cartoon Network.
The DIC dub of Sailor Moon threw out numerous episodes entirely; these were not seen (legally) in the US until the uncensored, subtitled ADV release. Even that did not include Sailor Moon R episode 67, a Beach Episode with no relation to the rest of the plot or the setting of the show; it has Chibi-Usa befriending a baby Dinosaur on an island off the coast of (then) current-day Japan. The director supposedly hated it, and it's been said that Toei refused to license it.
- Episode 89 was skipped in several countries, but not in the Dic dub. That and the fact that it was a clip show lead many fans to think it was made by Dic, even though it was part of the Japanese run.
- The Swedish dub skipped episodes with "too much music". They also only aired the first two seasons.
- The Albanian dub skipped the third and fifth season entirely. Aside from Rini's returning in the third season, and already being a Senshi, there were really no plot holes.
- In Poland, three episodes were skipped: 45 and 46 were skipped because Polsat (the station that aired Sailor Moon in Poland) got the package that excluded these episodes, and 133 was skipped to avoid possible offense to Catholics.
- The last season has never been shown in the US. Depending on who you ask, either Toei has refused to license it in North America, or it's a separate license that would cost more.
The Hot Springs Episode of Outlaw Star was dropped from the dub on Cartoon Network, since it'd take too long to digitally cover the sheer number of naked breasts and crotch on the female characters and tone down some of the sexually suggestive lines. There does exist an edited version for pre-watershed screening, but due to the adult content of the episode the edit has a vastly shorter run time. The episode was shown, although with some apparent cuts, on the short-lived CNX Channel in the UK, and is available in completely uncensored form on DVD.
Black Jack examples:
- The third episode of the new Black Jack anime was left unaired because part of the plot dealt with an earthquake, and a real earthquake struck Japan hours before it was to air.
- The Black Jack manga has a number of "sealed chapters" that were cut from the collected volumes for being too morbid, too controversial, or just not very good.
Pokémon is notorious for this among the fan community. Most of these are only missing from the US dub, but there are a lot of examples:
- "Beauty And The Beach" was a Beach Episode, for one, but it really got itself banned for the scene where James cross dresses to enter the swimsuit contest with fake breasts, and then taunts Misty that his boobs are larger while inflating them. (A clip from this episode actually appears in flashback form in a later episode, confusing the hell out of viewers for years.) A heavily-edited version aired three years later in 2000, but even that one was never shown again. This caused severe dialogue changes in the next episode, which featured a twin of one of the characters from this episode that in the original vehemently objected to confusion with her twin. Of course...
- That next episode was "Tentacool and Tentacruel". It aired just fine then and years afterward, until 9/11. It was taken out of rotation as Too Soon for a scene where a giant Tentacruel smashes up a building, even though the building didn't look anything remotely like either of the Twin Towers, and even though that very scene was (and remained) part of the opening titles. It didn't come back until the Channel Hop to Cartoon Network a few years later.
- "Tower of Terror" was banned as Too Soon after 9/11 solely on the basis of the name, and Cartoon Network couldn't pry the rights for it until late 2007, which is an extremely loose definition of "soon". It was the middle part of an important three-episode mini-arc, to boot.
- "The Legend Of Dratini" was banned because of a metric fuckton of gun play, including two characters getting guns to their heads and one character shooting off about a hundred rounds at Team Rocket from two revolvers to interrupt their motto. Extra fun when in later episodes, Ash suddenly has 30 Tauros we never saw him catch, because he caught them here. Also could have been trouble since this is where the gang gets to the Safari Zone they had been searching for for a couple of episodes, but luckily the previous episode just happened to feature a nature preserve that just happened to be right next door to the Safari Zone which is also supposed to be a nature preserve. It was pretty easy to edit dialogue to make that episode the Safari Zone and actually make things more logical than they were before.
  - Ironically, the episode with the Squirtle Squad has a scene where a store full of people all point guns at Ash thinking he's there to rob the place.
- "Electric Soldier Porygon", the infamous "seizure" episode. It was only aired once in Japan, where the strobe effect employed caused seizures in the Japanese populace. And then a whole lot more Japanese people got some when the news reported on it by showing the clip that was giving people seizures! This wasn't the only episode where the effect was employed, but while the previous episodes had the strobe effect removed, this episode was simply banned. The episode can be found on YouTube, where it can (reputedly) be watched safely due to the lower frame rate. In fact, anime had been like this for years and it wasn't until the Porygon episode that this kind of thing stopped.
  - 4Kids had actually fully dubbed the episode, and even modified the strobe effect by dimming it and slowing down the frame rate, but ended up scraping it anyway. The incident also forced them to go back and dim the flashing effects on earlier episodes.
  - The delay caused by Electric Soldier Porygon caused two episodes to be delayed and run as specials (Holiday Hi-Jynx and Snow Way Out!), with one being canceled altogether (a New Year's Eve episode)
- After all this Season 1 madness, things ticked down a lot, but a few more missing episodes turned up. Besides the aforementioned earthquake episode, the two episodes depicting the first-generation Jynx have been pulled from rotation in the US (see that article for more details). Clip Show episodes in later seasons were skipped because, really, who wants to watch a Pokémon clip show?
- To add to this list, there were four episodes from Pokémon Advanced, one of them being Wattson's Gym Battle, where they only aired twice overall. This was after the massive three month hiatus before the next season began after these episodes aired. Though it's considered "missing" for a completely different reason.
- And the two-part episodes in the Best Wishes! series that would finally introduce Team Plasma. According to some previews and Word Of God, a lot of scenes showed a city being severely damaged. Then the 2011 Japan earthquake happened, and you have to take out these episodes from the grill. The producers promised that they will in fact air sometime, most likely re-edited and re-written to fit into a different time frame all together.
- Another episode (revolving around Cilan fishing) was removed. It was originally made to set up the arc in which Biance joins the group and Iris catching Emolga. When the episode aired, it was edited to retcon the episode's placement in the story, and the ending was changed to have Bianca leave the group.
Cowboy Bebop was aired in America almost immediately following 9/11, leading two episodes about terrorism to be pulled (including, eerily, one about a man who bombed tall buildings). Pulled for presumably unrelated reasons was an episode where Spike shoots an Enfant Terrible between the eyes.
- Also pulled for a short time after the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster was an episode in which the shuttle plays a key role.
  - In the Remix collection, the space shuttle is renamed Challenger in that particular episode. Which when you think about it isn't really that much better...
- It should be noted that Cartoon Network did air the episodes in later re-broadcasts of the series.
The finale of Excel Saga was never broadcast in Japan, and many other markets, because it was intentionally made too indecent for broadcast. Even the length of the show (a full minute too long) was unsuitable for broadcast.
Moetan's sixth episode, "The First Date", never aired for "various reasons". Until it hits DVD, these reasons have yet to be seen.
- The "various reasons", given the evidence, appear to be "hype up sales for the DVDs." It worked, at least.
Whenever the original Astro Boy series is shown in Japan the episodes are not from the original recordings, but actually redubbed American edits of the episodes. This is because all original records of the series had been destroyed, because of financial reasons. (In short, the masters were destroyed by NBC, who hadn't the room to retain them, and when they offered to return them to Mushi Productions, Mushi, which was going through bankruptcy at the time, told them they were unable to accept them back and to do whatever they normally do with unwanted masters.) In fact, the practice to destroy copies, line arts, voice recordings or never aired episodes was very common in the past. Only god knows how much of such priceless original material had been destroyed.
- One episode never aired in Japan at all, because series creator Osamu Tezuka hated it so much he had the master destroyed. As it turned out, though, a copy had already been sent to America for dubbing. Only the dubbed version was ever aired, and in the 1990s was even released on VHS as "Astro Boy: The Lost Episode."
- For unknown reasons, the first two episodes of the 1982 Astro Boy remake were cut down into one single episode. Because all of the material about the creation of Atlas was cut, it made subsequent episodes about Atlas (some of which actually contained flashbacks to the cut material) somewhat baffling. It was only when the original episodes were released in subtitled form on DVD that most English-speaking fans finally understood Atlas' origins.
An episode of the anime Ghost Stories was banned before it even aired in Japan, due to complaints from viewers about the Kuchisaki-Onna, based off a Japanese folktale, being insensitive to those with cleft palate disorder (as in the myth, she had a deformed mouth). The episode has never been released to DVD or broadcast anywhere, as a result of this.
Mobile Suit Gundam episode 15 "Cucuruz Doan's Island" was removed from circulation by the series' creator because it featured horrendously Off Model animation. There are also rumors that Tomino had ... unspecified issues... with the episode's director, and apparently all that Tomino will say is something along the line of "He knows what he did." For the US broadcast, every episode after Lalah's death became a Missing Episode, supposedly due to 9/11, though many fans suspect Cartoon Network merely used 9/11 as an excuse to get out of their contract when the show did poorly in the ratings, though they did eventually run the final episode as part of their "New Year's Evil" event.
Nippon's "Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics" did have dubs for all of the episodes, but many were unaired in the U.S., or were pulled from reairing:
- Bluebeard (based on the Grimm's "King Bluebeard", not Perrault's) opens up with a man impaling his wife with a sword, and the climax of the whole story is the heroine (the man's seventh wife) finding the mutilated corpses of the previous wives. There were also magic roses that turned into blood.
- The Crystal Ball focuses on a decaying old witch who imprisons a beautiful princess in her castle, and every night performs a demonic ritual where she bites said princess, and drains all her blood. This restores her youth for about a day, and the princess is left a decaying corpse, but regenerates in about a second. What makes it worse is that this happens every night.
  - This episode actually aired, but was never released. The dubbed version cut out the biting scenes, and had the witch use her magic to make the princess switch ages with her.
- Godfather Death has a lot of on screen deaths. Do I even need to go into this one?
There are missing chapters of a manga version of Batman from the 1960's.
Various hentai have missing episodes that don't make it to overseas releases. This is usually due to the presence of underage female characters who can't be explained or excused as actually being of legal age. See episode 2 of The Maiden Diaries, among others.
The Transformers Energon episode "Scorponok's Scars" was not only never shown in the west, but never even dubbed into English. The episode is important to the plot, and there's nothing particularly objectionable about it, so its absence is a complete mystery.
- The fact that "Scorponok's Scars" is the AMERICAN title of the episode "Return! Our Scorponok" just makes it that much more confusing.
- Several episodes of Robots in Disguise were only aired once in the US or not at all due to September 11th.
  - The series premiere was three days before 9/11. The actual episode has not been re-run since due to a scene of Megatron smashing through a skyscraper... though in his Giant Hand mode instead of his Jet mode.
During its original Japanese run, Code Geass had two Clip Show "half" episodes, outright labeled X.5 and with the staff openly admitting that they only existed to get them some breathing room for actual plot-relevant episodes. These two episodes aren't included on the American DVDs and were never aired on [adult swim], resulting in a couple of Missing Episodes that nobody will miss all that much.
One episode of Super Dimension Fortress Macross was briefly literally missing, as in a courier accidentally left the master reels of the finished episode on a train. Fortunately, they were able to recover the film, rather than have to reshoot the episode all over again.
The episode Someday in the Rain from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was adapted to prose form in an issue of The Sneaker, but so far has not been included in any volume of the novels.
The 13th episode of Green Green is missing from the English Dub release due to its graphic sexual nature.
The entire final season of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX was "lost" to American viewers, leaving the series to end on the depressing note of Jaden/Judai never returning from the alternate dimension.
The Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds dub skipped about a dozen episodes, jumping from Yusei's duel with Placido straight to the setup for the duel with Team Ragnarok and skipping over the Crimson Devil arc as well as the duel with Team Taiyo. Don't know if those episodes will be released at a later date...
The Hungarian broadcast of Transformers Cybertron was all about this. For starters, the pilot episode was out-right omitted from the start. The series went on 'till about episode 16, after which the whole thing was constantly repeated multiple times. Finally, Cartoon Network got a hold of the rest of the series, and it aired further, before all of a sudden stopping at some point during the final arc. It went on to be repeated again, this time including the pilot. However when only a handful of episodes were left, guess what? The 1 year run of the show had come to an end, meaning it had to be pulled off the screen with only the last few episodes missing. The show was never re-aired or released on DVD.
Again from Hungary, both Dragon Ball Z and Inu Yasha have had a very troubled past, as neither series got to be aired in their entirety, nor have they been released fully on VHS tapes or DVDs. The reasons for this are difficult to decipher, and tons of Urban Legends have come into being because of them. However the real reason goes along the following lines: one of the country's main commercial TV stations, RTL Klub, had exclusive rights to airing the shows. Due to their violent nature, however, they were forced to push up the rating to the whopping 18+ age-range. The channel started protesting, which eventually lead to a lawsuit. Long story short, RTL decided to just cancel the shows, as a late night time-slot would have destroyed the ratings. Animax also held broadcast rights for Inu Yasha, but only for episodes that have already been shown on RTL. And, as their luck would have it, the final 63 episodes have never been aired.
Sazae-san has only aired most of its episodes once, and never released them to home video. It was due to a request the creator made before her death. But during the 40th anniversary show, they aired some 1970's episodes, which is why it was a special event.
- Another hard to find thing about Sazae-san is a Running Gag that appeared at the end of each episode from 1969 to 1991, in which Sazae would toss a bean or rice cake in the air and would catch it in her mouth at the end of each show. The stunt was imitated by viewers. In 1990, a child choked to death doing this, and just like the Hawaii Five-0 episode "Bored She Hung Herself", it vanished off the face of the earth, and was replaced with a rock-paper-scissors game between Sazae and the viewers at home.
After that whole defamation controversy, add Gin Tama episode 232 to the list; also counts as No Export for You inverted because it's still showing on, guess what, Crunchy Roll.
The third episode of the second Lupin III TV series was not broadcast by [adult swim] and had its release delayed until the fifth DVD volume, due to adventures and humor involving Those Wacky Nazis.
It's a common belief that Phantom Thief Pokémon 7 ended on a Cliff Hanger. In reality it had more chapters however the chapters were never put into volumes.

Comic Books

IDW's Classic Transformers trades, which collect Marvel's Transformers series, exclude issues featuring characters owned by Marvel, specifically Spider-Man and recurring antagonist Circuit Breaker.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster produced the first full-length Superman comic in 1933, five years before his official debut in Action Comics #1. When the publisher pulled out, Shuster threw the whole thing in the fire out of frustration. The only part that survived was the cover◊.
There was an issue of Swamp Thing that would have featured Jesus as a white magician. It was so controversial it was never released.
Similarly, there was an issue of the Warren Ellis run of Hellblazer that was set to be published during the days when school shootings were the latest panic... and implied that some students, due to the rundown nature of modern life and teenage pressures, wanted to be shot. That one hit the bin quickly.
- As of 2010, it's been pulled back out and published in a compilation book of lost and rare Hellblazer stories.
Many comics that feature licensed non-Marvel/DC Universe characters (For example, Marvel's Star Wars, Star Trek, Ren and Stimpy and Tiny Toons comics, and DC's own Star Trek comics) are not reissued most of the time due to licensing disputes with the character owners (these types of comics had licenses that had expired at a certain point in time; the publishers and/or artists still hold the comics' copyrights, but they do not own the characters themselves). Some may never be published again (So far, Marvel's Star Wars comics have not gotten a reissue by Marvel themselves, and attempts to reissue Tiny Toons comics are blocked due to Marvel's rivalry with DC) unless the character owners reach a deal with the publishers. Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog comics, however, continue to be reissued (Archie Comics has a long-term contract with SEGA).
Gotham Knights #12 was originally supposed to have an Elseworlds-style story by Devin Grayson about Mr. Zsasz killing Batman, but it was changed at the last minute after being deemed too graphic for an all-ages book. You can read about it here.
The Judge Dredd "Cursed Earth" epic had two arcs that, for legal reasons, could not be reprinted in the phone books. One involved a war between McDonald's and Burger King, which had attained power greater than medium-sized countries. In the other, Dredd and his companions are kidnapped by a Mad Scientist who looks and acts exactly like KFC's Col. Sanders, and had an army of mutants identical to various 20th century corporate mascots. Both drew complaints from the trademark owners.
The comics business is always changing, with canceled series, editorial changes, and Executive Meddling all frequent. As a result, a number of comics stories are commissioned and completed (or nearly so), without ever seeing print. This includes "inventory stories," which are intended to be published only if the regular team is late. After a while, unused inventory stories tend to "go stale" due to subsequent changes in continuity. Some examples:
- One of DC Comics' rarest titles fits, even though it was published... technically. DC canceled a large number of books in the "DC Implosion" of 1978, so suddenly that a large number of completed stories remained. Canceled Comics Cavalcade put many of these stories into publication for copyright purposes, but the series "ran" for only two issues, each with a print run of only 35 issues. A few of these stories eventually saw publication in "regular" DC titles, but most remain effectively "lost" to this day.
- The Marvel/DC crossover title JLA-Avengers was first scheduled for publication in 1983. The story was plotted, and George Perez completed 21 penciled pages of art. Due to editorial disagreements between the two companies, the project was canceled. In subsequent years, as editorial regimes changed, there was occasional talk of reviving the project, but to no avail (likely due to, among other reasons, changes in the teams' rosters during the intervening years.) Eventually, the project was revived, but with a new story and completely new art by Perez, in 2005.

Film

Many, many old silent and early sound films (including those of superstars like Theda Bara and Clara Bow) are now considered lost (partially or completely), simply because — in an era well prior to rebroadcast opportunities like TV or home video — it didn't make financial sense for the studios to care about keeping them around. The prints that do remain are usually those that were preserved in private collections.
- It hardly helps that nitrate-based film stock (used until 1951) is notorious for its chemical instability and flammability.
  - And that the way many of the films were copied for distribution - with an optical printer - means that each pass to create a new copy actually destroyed the original negatives somewhat. That's why a lot of the movies from this period (if they're not just impossible to find) are pretty bad copies. You could only get about a thousand copies out of one set of original negatives.
- Some of the early Academy Award winners and nominees are missing. Including a best picture nominee (The Patriot), and a best actor winning performance (The Way of All Flesh). One of the first best picture nominees, The Racket, was also missing for years...and when it was found, it sadly turned out to be just a standard gangster film.
Two of Alfred Hitchcock's early films, Number 13 (1922; unfinished) and The Mountain Eagle (1926), are lost. But on the bright side, the first half of a lost 1923 Hitchcock melodrama, The White Shadow, was discovered in the New Zealand Film Archives. The second half of the film remains lost.
In a rarer example of a deliberately missing movie, the Disney film Song of the South is more or less impossible to see through legal channels (at least in the US; there was an official PAL VHS), as Disney fears the wrath of those who might have reasonable objections to a film full of friendly, happy sharecroppers in the Deep South during Reconstruction. These days, it's largely remembered only because it produced the song "Zip-a-dee Doo-dah."
- By how often "Zip-a-dee Doo-dah" is used in modern Disney canon, it seems like a lot of people inside Disney want to finally just release the film and get it over with. The film is the source of the Splash Mountain ride at various Disney park, leaving many younger riders confused on what the hell the ride is based on (Plus, the Brer Rabbit part of the film is quite good).
- Back when they actually aired Walt Disney cartoons on the Disney Channel, the Brer Rabbit segments would occasionally be aired by themselves, usually to fill time between a movie and a regular show. Thanks to some clever editing they came off as stand-alone cartoons and not parts of a larger film.
Yet another "lost movie": the infamous 1994 Roger Corman produced The Fantastic Four. The story began when Constantin Film optioned the rights to make a Fantastic Four feature film with a planned budget of $40 million. Unfortunately they couldn't raise the money on time and the option was about to expire so they brought Corman on board who managed to reduce the budget to $1.5 million and managed to make it with a one month shooting schedule. From that point onward, accounts differ. According to Stan Lee, Constantin Film never planned to release the movie and made it only to keep the rights and basically blackmail Marvel into giving them a substantial sum in exchange for the movie never seeing the light of day (depending on the legend, Marvel either locked the movie in a vault or had Avi Arad himself burn the negatives), whereas Roger Corman claims one of the other producers managed to raise the intended money, bought the distribution rights from Corman via a clause in his contract and simply chose not to release it. 9 years later, Constantin Film produced the now well known 2005 Fantastic Four and the rest is history. These days, one of the few ways you can see the movie is via bootleg copies sold at comic book conventions.
The Beatles documentary Let It Be was last legally released in 1991 (laserdisc and VHS). Odds are, it will never be legally released again in its original form, and we've no idea if it'll ever be legally released again in any form. (There is dissonance between what viewers will expect to see and what Apple Corps wants to show.)
Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown who insults Hitler and ends up a Pied Piper to the children of a Jewish concentration camp. People are split on if keeping it suppressed is a good thing or not. Apart from the question of good taste, the project's legal ownership is disputed.
Superstar The Karen Carpenter Story, which retells Karen's life story using Barbie dolls, was forced out of circulation by Richard Carpenter and all prints were ordered destroyed. It's readily available over the Internet, however, and a 16mm print was screened at Bard College (the filmmaker's alma mater) as recently as 2011.
The "Gay Jesus" film HIM (actually about a man who has sexual fantasies about Jesus), is sometimes thought to be mythical. Evidence for the film's existence (in the form of contemporary newspaper and magazine clippings) has been collected to show that the film at least did exist, but if any prints have survived, their location is unknown, and they're not in public circulation.
The original cut of Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, as well as the hour or so raw footage that was excised for the final release, is lost forever - and we do mean forever; the excised footage was rended for the silver nitrate.
- Also from Welles' filmography is The Chimes At Midnight (also called Falstaff), a 1965 adaptation of Shakespeare's "Henry IV" plays focusing on the character of Sir John Falstaff. The film was little-seen on release, and for many years, the only way to obtain a DVD in English-language markets was to import from such countries as Spain or Brazil (the Brazilian version received a boost in popularity thanks to Roger Ebert publicising its availability in a "Great Movies" column on the film). A British DVD release finally hit retailers in late February 2011.
- And again, Orson Welles' The Other Side Of The Wind, one of his last projects, starring John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich; supposedly "96% complete" but gathering dust in a vault for decades due to legal squabbles.
Four of the Charlie Chan movies from the 1930s, Charlie Chan Carries On, Charlie Chan's Chance, Charlie Chan's Greatest Case, and Charlie Chan's Courage, are lost (though Charlie Chan Carries On survives in a Spanish-language version, Eran Trece).
The last known copy of Tod Browning's London After Midnight was destroyed (along with hundreds of other silent films) in 1967 when the vault it was stored in caught fire.
The original theatrical cuts for Star Wars films A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Neither of those cuts appeared on the VHS releases or even the 2006 limited edition DVDs (which did feature versions of the original theatrical presentations, not the original cuts themselves), due to (according to George Lucas) the original negatives being deteriorated and destroyed. Part of this is supposedly due to Lucas having Old Shame over the fact that there were several elements of the films that weren't as good as he hoped (including effects and specific scenes) - he considers the altered versions his "true" vision. However, the American Film Institute and U.S. Library of Congress both purportedly hold prints of the original theatrical versions, so it's anyone's guess whether they will be released a long, long time from now.
Errol Flynn spent $500,000 of his own money to produce his comeback feature William Tell. Most of the money went to building an Alpine resort set, and he only had enough money left to shoot 30 minutes of film. He screened the footage at the Venice Film Festival, but bouts with dysentery and diarrhea kept him from meeting with investors for any meaningful lengths of time. Desperate, he staged a fake paralysis from a fall in his hotel room, hoping to secure a large insurance settlement. When this failed, he abandoned the project and spent the rest of his career playing drunks before dying of heart failure at the age of 50. None of the film's footage has been found, and the only evidence of the film remaining is the Alpine resort set, which is now a popular tourist attraction.
The original cut of the silent film Greed was 9 hours long. Most of that footage has been lost, and even TCM's 4 hour cut of it replaces a lot of the footage with still photos just to keep the story intact.
The original Wicker Man had something like twelve minutes of footage removed after an early screening. They've never been seen since. Christopher Lee, who considers this one of his best films, is NOT happy about this.
Subverted for Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis when a big chunk of footage previously thought forever lost was located in 2007 in film archives in Argentina and New Zealand. With the newly discovered footage, nearly 95% of the original 3 1/2 hour epic has been recovered.
This is a common occurrence in VCR-era porn (late 1970s - through early 1990s), where entire film series would simply fade away due to lack of interest and the cash-grab tendencies of many producers. Another common cause of vanishing porn titles is the discovery of an underage performer, in which case every copy of the film in question is found and destroyed as child porn. Traci Lords is an infamous case of this (though several!
HIGHLY FRIGGIN' ILLEGAL IN NORTH AMERICA
bootlegs of her latter "work" are available via European copies, from countries where the A.O.C. for porn is 17 instead of 18.)
Stanley Kubrick's first feature, Fear and Desire, a shoestring production funded by donations from Kubrick's family and friends. Paul Mazursky, who himself went on to a successful directing career, played a leading role. Kubrick was embarrassed by it, so he bought up as many copies as he could and discouraged screenings of the movie while he was alive. It still isn't available on (legitimate) video.
Good luck finding a copy of Day Of The Tiger, the ultra violent early 80s kung-fu film. After the audience reaction (disgust and horror) to its limited screening, the original distributor attempted to destroy all copies of the film to appease their theaters, and it's unclear if they succeeded or not. Most of the time, you'll just find small clips mistaken for parts of "The Story of Ricky". Its sequel, at least, can be found in torrents.
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was edited down from its original 3 1/2 hour length for worldwide distribution following its original release, and the cut footage was discarded and believed lost for years. Thanks to a batch of the discarded footage being found in a condemned warehouse and the efforts of Stanley Kramer, 20 minutes of footage were re-edited back into the film for the VHS release. The film's first DVD release (in a white cover and now out-of-print) has the footage on Side B. The second release (in a blue cover) does not have this footage.
Humor Risk (also called Humorisk), the 1921 silent film which was the Marx Brothers' real screen debut. Groucho so disliked the result of their first venture on the screen that he bought and destroyed all copies of the film and its negatives. It would take 8 years (and the invention of talkies) before the Brothers returned to the movies.
Not one, but two Japanese adaptations of King Kong:
- The 1938 film King Kong Appears in Edo (featuring an unauthorized use of RKO's Kong character) appears to have been one of the first, if not the first, Japanese Kaiju films. Never shown outside of its original theatrical run in Japan, all prints of the film appear to have been lost during World War II or the postwar occupation. All that remains are movie posters (incorporating stills from the film).
- Wasei Kingu Kongu, a silent short, is supposedly lost for similar reasons. Stills remain of this one too.
The deleted footage from 2001: A Space Odyssey was seen as this for several decades. Prior to the film's release, nineteen minutes of footage (including a much longer opening sequence, shots from the "Dawn of Man" scene, and several other scenes) were cut from the print at Stanley Kubrick's request. For years afterward, the prevailing notion was that the deleted footage (much like footage cut from Kubrick's other films) was destroyed - this was due to the fact that Kubrick was wildly fanatical about making sure that no one ever saw the material he didn't use for his films (as it compromised his vision), to the point that 2001's original Discovery model was destroyed after filming completed. In 2010 (the actual year, not the sequel), though, seventeen of the nineteen minutes of cut footage were discovered in a Kansas salt mine (the low temperature and humidity of salt mines make them ideal for film preservation), and will eventually be included on an upcoming Blu-Ray release.
The original version of the 2003 Disney documentary The Sweatbox, which is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the music for The Emperor's New Groove. The process of scoring the film's soundtrack (composed by Sting) was held in a cramped sound stage that was nicknamed "The Sweatbox", but grew in nature to encompass the state of the film's troubled production. The doc (directed by Sting's wife Trudi) chronicled the change during the production from its original title Kingdom of the Sun to the final product, and the filmmakers' growing horror when they released the original version was terrible. The documentary was screened for a limited time at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2002 in order to qualify for consideration for the Academy Awards, but it has been barred from release (perhaps indefinitely) by Disney.
Catch My Soul, a musical version of Othello starring Richie Havens and directed by Patrick "Number Six" McGoohan was released in the early 1970s to terrible reviews (not helped by, according to legend, one of the producers "finding God" and adding fifteen minutes of religious imagery much to McGoohan's chagrin). It was retitled Santa Fe Satan before disappearing completely. The soundtrack can often be found for sale on Ebay, though.
Prior to Birth Of A Nation, Charles Giblyn's 1913 The Battle of Gettysburg was the longest and most expensive movie about The American Civil War. Today, it appears to be a lost film.
The Poughkeepsie Tapes is a horror movie that had an incredibly limited run in theaters, and the director refuses to release it in public in any way (it doesn't help that the studio that financed it is only just recovering from its recent bankruptcy). The only way to find it these days is through pirated copies online.
The 3D versions of Top Banana and Southwest Passage, as well as the uncut version of the former.
The 1937 adaptation of Lost Horizon had a running time of 132 minutes in its first release. When restored in 1973, only 125 minutes of film could be found, but they did have the entire soundtrack. The restored version shows publicity photos and stills in place of the missing film elements.
Dracula, in its original release, had an epilogue in which Edward Van Sloan (Van Helsing) addressed the audience. The epilogue starts out sounding like a reassuring This Is a Work of Fiction message, until at the last moment he subverts it with "There really are such things as vampires!" The epilogue was cut from the 1936 re-release due to fears of offending religious groups by endorsing the supernatural, and is now lost.
The full cut of The Breakfast Club is over 2 1/2 hours long and includes scenes such as Carl predicting where the five kids will be in 30 years (Bender will have killed himself, Claire will have had "2 boob jobs and a face lift," Brian will have become very successful but die of a heart attack due to the stress of the high paying job. Allison will be a great poet but no one will care, and Andrew will marry a gorgeous airline stewardess who will become fat after having kids), Brian stopping Bender after Bender's demonstration of "Life at Big Bri's house" and correcting him with a much more pessimistic version of the skit, and Allison writing with her toes, as claimed in the "talents" discussion. The negatives were destroyed years ago, but John Hughes still had the only existing complete cut on a VHS tape at his house, which he would occasionally screen. Its whereabouts following his death are unknown.
One of El Santo's many films, Santo en El Tesoro de Drácula (Santo in Dracula's Treasure) (1968), had an alternate version entitled El Vampiro y el Sexo ("The Vampire and the Sex"). Additional scenes featured nude or topless vampire seductresses (fortunately or unfortunately, the heroic luchador himself did not engage in any sexual activity.) This version of the film, intended for more liberal audiences outside Mexico, apparently had a limited release (newspaper ads exist for showings in New York-area Spanish language theaters), then disappeared, but stills of nude vampire ladies from the "sexy" version provided evidence of its existence. It was finally discovered by the producer's grand-niece and publicly screened in Guadalajara in July 2011.
Black the Ripper, a 1975 Blaxploitation horror movie from the writer of Blackenstein, was announced in Variety and had a reported cast. It's unclear whether the movie was ever, in fact, made... but if it was, it's lost now.
Apocalypse Now had a 289-minute bootleg workprint that was leaked sometime in the early 80's on a set of six Betamax tapes. The print, which had almost every scrap of footage that had been shot for the film up to that point (including alternate scenes and a ten-minute opening sequence, among many other extended sequences) was duplicated endlessly over the years, and now exists only as nth-generation copies (copied from DVD, which was in turn copied from VHS and from the original Betamax). It's telling that even the "Complete Dossier" DVD and Blu-Ray sets have a set of workprint clips sourced from the same grainy, muddled, washed-out pirated copies - proof that the original workprint is lost permanently.

Game Shows

Game Shows, more than any other genre, were prone to becoming either missing or lost. The practice of wiping (reusing videotapes) stopped as a whole around 1979, with the earlier years of television particularly affected. (The oldest televised game show episode known to exist is from 1947's Party Line, hosted by Bert Parks.) The comparative lack of circulating game show episodes may owe to the format's inherent lack of rerun potential.

Most of the Chuck Woolery era of Wheel of Fortune is missing, if not erased. Only a handful of episodes exist, as do some (often low-quality) clips of others. Pat Sajak's early daytime era (he took over in December 1981) is better-reprsented, as are the versions hosted by Rolf Benirschke (1989) and Bob Goen (1989-91). Even the three pilots (Shopper's Bazaar with Woolery {1973} and both attempts by Edd "Kookie" Byrnes {1974}) exist. In comparison, the syndicated nighttime version (1983-present) is known to be completely intact.
- In a lesser example, three episodes had entire puzzles edited out. The first (taped in San Francisco and aired November 2, 1992) removed a round with an answer of VANNA'S PREGNANT because she miscarried before the episode made it to air; in its place, viewers saw a three-minute spiel on San Francisco, followed by a post-production clip of Pat standing at the puzzle board and announcing who won that round. Two New Orleans episodes aired in November 2005 each had one puzzle removed before airing because it was believed the answers would be insensitive to Hurricane Katrina victims; instead, they showed clips of Pat and Vanna asking viewers to donate to Hurricane Katrina relief funds. Oddly, one round was restored when the episodes reran the next summer (the answer was THE LOUISIANA SUPERDOME), but the other puzzle is Lost Forever.
- Also because of Katrina-induced evacuations, a Family Week that was supposed to air in November 2005 never even got taped. However, the families that were supposed to appear on it did get to play later in the season.
Sister show Jeopardy! is also missing almost all of the original Art Fleming era (1964-75), with only a few episodes circulating; the 1974-75 syndicated run and 1978-79 revival are intact, but only five episodes circulate of the latter. Subsequent eras are also intact, including both Trebek pilots.
Bob Barker maintains a ban on The Price Is Right episodes that have fur coats as prizes despite offers by BCI to use disclaimers and/or donate to his favorite charities if he'd just allow the first three tapings from 1972 on the DVD set. Barker has also tried other arbitrary kinds of whitewashing, most notably to show model Holly Hallstrom and 1972-77 nighttime host Dennis James; while the Hallstrom ban is due to ill will instigated by Barker and the fact that Holly won her lawsuit against him, the ban on James' episodes would appear to be more about the frequent instances of furs as prizes...although Bob wasn't involved with that version until James was dismissed, and certainly doesn't explain why GSN avoided the non-fur episodes as well.
- Since Drew Carey became host, and especially since Roger Dobkowitz was fired, Bob's grip has been weakening — and Laser-Guided Karma has finally arrived since the show's been removing most references to him. And, despite Barker casting a pall on much of his run on Price, clips and entire episodes are liberally found on YouTube (including Barker episodes with furs).
- For the original Bill Cullen era, many early daytime episodes were erased while the nighttime shows that survive are presented as black-and-white kinescopes; the NBC nighttime run aired in color, but none are known to exist in that form today.
Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions usually managed to preserve at least one episode from most of their shows...but even with them, there's a couple of exceptions.
- The Better Sex (1977-78): Only four episodes are known to exist — the pilot and finale have circulated for years, while two general episodes were aired by GSN.
- The Match Game (1962-69) is almost completely lost minus 11-12 episodes. Virtually all of these episodes are black-and-white kinescopes.
  - Some episodes of the far more familiar 1973-82 era are absent from the GSN rota due to racial slurs or homophobic slurs that are now seen as unacceptable, although one supposedly has a malfunctioning tape.
  - On the other hand, there is a string of CBS episodes from 1979 that never aired until GSN finally showed them in 2001.
- Almost all of Mindreaders (1979-80) is MIA. The pilot, two episodes (August 15 and December 13), and the opening of a third (December 31) exist, and that's it.
- Number Please (1961) has only one episode existing, although said episode has been seen on GSN.
- Most of the original 1961-67 daytime run of Password was wiped, although most nighttime episodes remain. Some 1966-67 daytime shows only survive in their Edited for Syndication forms, including the Grand Finale.
  - Almost the entire run of the ABC Password (1971-75) was later taped over (reportedly with Family Feud), and less than 20 episodes of 1,099 are known to survive.
- Password Plus was hit with this in two unusual ways:
  - 1979: One episode went unaired during the show's original run because George Peppard started a rant about NBC's standards and practices. It has since aired on GSN.
  - 1981: A round with Wink Martindale and Gene Rayburn was erased after recording but before airing due to a technician's error. Some time later, once the error was realized, the duo and host Tom Kennedy recorded a new segment to verbally describe the round; luckily, the puzzle card was still available to help fill in the gap.
- Snap Judgment (1967-69) is a rare example from Goodson-Todman, because it's completely gone. The only audiovisual proof we can provide that it even happened is a low-quality mic-to-TV audio recording of an intro with Phyllis Newman and Paul Anka. Although the August 19, 1968 show is known to exist on audio tape, it doesn't appear to have been leaked and the episode's holder (Archival Television Audio, Inc.) doesn't have any way to listen to its recordings online.
Concentration is quite MIA, too:
- The Barry-Enright version on NBC (Hugh Downs/Jack Barry/Ed McMahon/Bob Clayton, 1958-73) is largely lost, according to producer Norm Blumenthal. So private tape collections to the rescue, right? Well...not really, since NBC still owns the rights to all versions and has not allowed any series to be rerun. Here's what's known to exist and circulate:
  - 1958-73: About a dozen or so episodes in private collections (individuals and media collections such as the Paley Center). Nearly all of these shows — scattered throughout the run — have been posted on YouTube, including the Grand Finale. A Jack Barry episode (from the brief 1958 nighttime run) exists, while none of the Ed McMahon-hosted shows has so much as an audio clip.
  - 1973-78: Although believed to exist in its entirety, only one complete episode (Spring 1978) circulates among traders, with said episode posted on YouTube; clips from other episodes also have been posted on the video-sharing service.
  - 1987-91: Exists in its entirety, with dozens of episodes circulating among collectors and/or posted on YouTube. The 1985 pilot with Orson Bean is also around.
Many of the game shows that aired alongside Concentration and Jeopardy! on NBC no longer exist either, aside from tapes at the Paley Center. These shows include The Who, What, or Where Game, Three on a Match, and the original version of Sale of the Century.
What's My Line?: Most of the first two years of the CBS run (February 1950 through roughly June 1952) are gone forever, the network having recycled the silver in their kinescopes. Mark Goodson and Bill Todman put a stop to it in Summer 1952, and all episodes from then onward exist today as black-and-white kinescopes (including the 1966-67 season, the only CBS season to air in color). The syndicated series (1968-75) exists in its entirety and (minus the 1971-72 season, which has seen only scattered airings of select episodes) has been liberally rerun on GSN.
The Adventure Game was one of the victims of the BBC children's television purge of 1993 (see Live Action TV below). Each of the first two series (May-June 1980 and November 1981) includes one lost episode*
Although it is speculated that Episode 2 from Series 1 might exist in a private collection somewhere, as the Adventure Game Wikipedia article features an unusually detailed summary for an episode that has supposedly been lost since 1993
and one episode which only exists as a low-quality home recording (prompting the BBC to continue to regard the episodes as "missing"). Moreover, apart from the fourth and final season (which has occasionally aired on Challenge TV), none of the surviving episodes have been rerun since the 1980s, and only eight episodes (of sixteen) from the first three seasons are known to be in private collections.
The Big Showdown has only two surviving episodes — the pilot (called Showdown) and the 67th episode. The latter is a mostly-regular episode that probably survived due to a certain blooper — host Jim Peck tripping down the stairs while making his entry.
The original incarnations of Chuck Barris brainchildren The Dating Game (1965-74) and The Newlywed Game (1966-74) are mostly lost (save for scattered episodes), although the revivals from 1977 onward are intact.
The vast majority of NBC's daytime run of The Hollywood Squares has been wiped, and both the 1968 nighttime run and 1971-81 syndicated version were thought mostly lost until somewhere between 650 and 3,000 episodes were discovered some years ago. About 150 episodes were seen in its brief run on GSN — including, oddly, a single daytime episode from December 19, 1977.
Press Your Luck: The episodes with Michael Larson (actually one game split over two episodes because Round 2 ran abnormally long) never aired in syndication, out of sheer embarrassment that Larson memorized the game board and took them for $110,237. In 2003, it aired as part of a GSN retrospective on Larson's stunt, which analyzed his methodology and even included previously-unaired footage that CBS excised. There's also a sixth episode from Back-To-School Week (August 1985) which never aired in the original CBS run or the repeats on USA, but has also appeared on GSN.
The Pyramid series is...a bit complicated.
- Most of $10,000 and the first two years of $20,000 have been lost; among other things, although clips exist of William Shatner playing the Winner's Circle round solo (June 27, 1975) and Billy Crystal leading his partner to the top in 26 seconds (December 1, 1977, and a Pyramid record that stands to this day), most of the episodes in question are lost. The final two years of $20,000 (1978-80) are intact, as are the subsequent revivals.
- It is possible, though by no means certain, that the CBS run of $10,000 is intact, as CBS stopped wiping in September 1972 (which is how The Joker's Wild and Spin-Off survive, having been found at WCBS in 2000); 14 episodes of $10,000, all from November 1973, aired on GSN in 2001, while a black-and-white video of the fifth episode (March 1973) is traded and has been posted on YouTube (another episode from June 13 also exists). However, if the tapes still exist they're gathering dust in a warehouse, and at best qualify as missing rather than lost.
- The original $25,000 (Bill Cullen, 1974-79) is intact, along with $50,000 (1981) and New $100,000 (John Davidson, 1991), but haven't been seen in years due to rights issues.
  - $50,000 was last seen on CBN in mid-1982, ending shortly after New $25,000 debuted.
  - A few stations aired $25,000 in the 1980s, hence the name change on the CBS version to New $25,000. In fact, most of the circulating episodes are from WLIG repeats during the 1985-86 season.
  - The Davidson $100,000 hasn't been seen since the last repeat aired on March 6, 1992.
Host Geoff Edwards has confirmed that every episode of the NBC Jackpot, which he hosted, was destroyed.
Several episodes of the UK classic The Golden Shot from Bob Monkhouse's tenure only survive because he, being a compulsive collector, kept copies (production company ATV was notorious for wiping and reusing videotapes to save money). This includes his original Grand Finale in 1972, where he makes some rather dark comments during the live broadcast about his ousting and replacement Norman Vaughan (whose debut was quite odd — during the credit roll, an assistant took a drink from the staff party and brought it to Vaughan, standing off to the side, who took a sip and immediately began shouting as if drunk). Monkhouse was reinstated in July 1974 after Vaughan and Charlie Williams failed, but the show was canned a year later in favor of Bob's Celebrity Squares.
Deal or No Deal didn't air two episodes of the US version, including the first episode of the "Million-Dollar Mission" (where extra $1,000,000 cases were added) because the first contestant knocked out both millions right off the bat, and another random episode just because they didn't think it was exciting enough.
A set of Lingo episodes with a Hawaiian trip up for grabs were supposed to air in 2005, but canned because the sponsor backed out at the last second. After some finagling, they finally aired in 2007.

Literature

For certain values of "episode", this trope is known to be Older than Dirt: many ancient masterpieces of literature are lost forever, and many others are missing chunks of text due to physical deterioration. We know of a relatively small number from quotations or references in other literature of antiquity.
- One well known example of lost literature: Sappho's poems, the vast majority of which are simply lost to history (read: out of nine volumes of poetry, exactly one complete poem has survived.)
- The Iliad and The Odyssey were originally just two of eight poems that made up The Trojan Cycle telling the story of the Trojan War. The other six, which were not attributed to Homer, are all lost. However, it is possible to deduce the contents of the other poems through a number of summaries, excerpts and references in extant works.
  - Said lost works include many of the most widely-known episodes of the whole saga. For example, Achilles' death and the building of the Trojan Horse happen after the events of the Iliad, and were recounted in the Aethiopis and the Little Iliad respectively. The fall of Troy is the subject of the Iliou Persis (Greek for "The Sack of Ilion").
- The Library of Alexandria
  - A particularly scary hypothesis on the destruction of the Library's contents claims that the works of Aristotle, Plato, Sappho, Alceus and many more were used to heat the baths in the city for months after the Library was ransacked. Luckily (or not) it's more widely accepted that most of the work in the Library was lost simply due to negligence during what was a politically disastrous time.
The never-published (but still canon) BIONICLE book, Invasion, which was eventually lost forever after Greg Farshtey's computer died.
- Not that it was ever close to being finished, mind you. Even if the written chapters were to be published somehow, about two thirds of the story would still have been missing.
The memoirs of Agrippina the Younger, which we only know existed due to their having been used as references by later Roman historians. Seeing the life of one of the most powerful and prominent woman in Roman history from her own point of view would've been nice.
Many ancient philosophical texts are considered lost. This includes all of Aristotle's dialogues (which themselves started a genre of texts distinct from Plato's dialogues) and all the writings of the pre-Socratic philosophers. If Socrates himself ever wrote anything, that has vanished too. All that we know about any of these works, we owe to excerpts, summaries and other secondary sources written by later authors.
One of the Just William books contain a story where the Outlaws dress as "Nasties" (Nazis) in order to frighten a local Jewish shopkeeper whom they suspect of cheating his customers. This is now left out of reprints of the book at the initial request of the author and the executor of her estate.
An example that's notable for being a missing book concerning a major film. In the final years of his life, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine writer Michael Piller spent a significant amount of time writing Fade In: The Making of Star Trek: Insurrection, a very comprehensive look at the behind-the-scenes process and development of what was the ninth feature film for the franchise. While the book is very thorough and engaging, it also highlighted several elements that contributed to the Dork Age the franchise found itself in during the early 2000's: lots of jockeying between members of the TNG cast (notably Brent Spiner) for increased screen time, the scuttling of several scripts that had the potential to be much, much better than the final product, and a detailed breakdown of Paramount's policies and correspondence regarding test screenings and film reshoots. The manuscript was left unreleased, apparently due to Paramount not agreeing with the content in the book, and it remained lost for many years until a source close to Piller passed it to some of the notable Trek fan sites. Almost immediately, the sites were all forced to remove the manuscript due to a cease-and-desist order from Piller's family, and it has once again fallen into obscurity (save for the few fans who downloaded a copy when it was still available).
The original manuscript of Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll included a character called "the wasp in a wig" (Alice would have encountered the wasp at the end of Chapter 8, after her meeting with the White Knight), but the character was cut before publication, possibly because illustrator John Tenniel found the character superfluous and could not see a satisfactory way to draw it. The galley proofs of the missing section (which included a previously unpublished poem) were reported to have turned up at auction at Sotheby's in 1974; they are widely believed to be authentic, but not universally so as no tests have been carried out to prove their age.
Dead Souls, the masterpiece of Nikolai Gogol's career, survives in fragments. It was going to be a three-volume work; Gogol had completed the second volume and started the third when he succumbed to severe depression and burned a lot of his drafts. What's left is volume one and some fragments from volume two.
J.T. Edson completed a fifth novel of his Bunduki series, titled Amazons of Zillikian, that was never released due to a dispute with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate. Fans hold out hope that it will one day be released.

Live Action TV

The Honeymooners: One of the most noteworthy sets of "Lost Episodes" belongs to the legendary Jackie Gleason series. Seventy-nine episodes were missing for several decades and thought to be lost ... until they were "recovered" in the mid-1980s (shortly before Gleason's death). Many, but not all of the "Lost 79" have now been recovered.
- Many of the "lost" episodes were produced by the Du Mont Network, which was on the air for a few years in the late 40s and early 50s. Almost all of the Du Mont programming is long lost - in fact, most of the then-surviving reels were dumped in the ocean in the mid- 1970s. Only a handful of shows remain today - a sizable run of Life Is Worth Living (an early show featuring talks by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the films coming from his private collection), spotty selections of Captain Video (the first sci-fi television series), Rocky King, Detective, and a few others.
- One account held that The Honeymooners shows were never truly "lost" — the kinescopes were sitting in Gleason's vault, and he just waited for an opportune time to capitalize on them. Also, these were not self-contained sitcom episodes per se — they are sketches from Gleason's variety show, and vary in length from 7 or 8 minutes to nearly an hour. It was thought for a long time that they would not be marketable in a world where viewers expect "sitcoms" to be a be a normal 30 minutes long (all right, 22-24 minutes with commercials), but they were eventually edited and cobbled together to fit normal broadcast time slots.
Bonanza: When the long-running western entered syndication in 1973, there were 14-1/2 years (430 episodes) available for syndication. The initial syndication package offered to TV stations contained 260 episodes — the first six seasons (complete, minus one 1965 episode), plus select episodes from the eighth through 11th seasons (1966-1970, those considered to be the "most popular" amongst fans); this is the package that airs currently on TV Land. For years, the remaining episodes — a single show from the 1964-1965 season, the entire 1965-1966 season, the remaining 1966-1970 episodes and the last three seasons — were never shown in syndicated reruns, and to some appeared to be "lost." However, they had not disappeared, but were rather packaged into a second syndicated package; these episodes have aired on CBN and the Hallmark Channel. To date, there are no known instances of the entire run of 430 episodes — from the premiere to the final episode — being aired as part of a single rerun package on a TV network or station.
Just try to look for excised footage from season one episodes of The Muppet Show. The only known sources they are available in are either bootlegs or Betamax tapes. If you try to find them on DVD, think twice.
The Danny Thomas Show (aka Make Room for Daddy): With 11 years and 343 episodes in the series, TV stations only made room for the final seven seasons (1957-1964) of the show when it entered syndication in the mid-1960s. The status of the 1953-1957 shows is unknown.
My Three Sons: Although all episodes exist and have been aired, the CBS color episodes spanning the sixth through the first half of the 11th season (1965-early 1971) were for years the only episodes shown in syndication. The ABC black-and-white episodes from 1960-1965, along with the final 1-1/2 color seasons (spring 1971-1972) were included in a second syndication package that was not nearly as widely distributed.
I Love Lucy: The legendary CBS comedy starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had a Christmas episode, aired in 1956 and never seen again on terrestrial TV ... until December 1989 when it was rebroadcast. Although the episode is in TVLand's library, it is rarely shown.
You Can't Do That on Television has a couple of missing episodes.
- The very first season from 1979 on Canada's YTV is gone because it was done live and never recorded for future reruns.
- YTV also banned the episode "Divorce" (though there have been claims that it has aired on Canadian television).
- Probably the most infamous example is Nickelodeon banning the episode "Adoption" out of fear that children from adopted families (or rather, their parents) wouldn't like the jokes about adoption (most of which involve treating adopted children like cheap labor). In a shining example of how much more liberal Canada is in airing TV shows compared to America, Canada did air the "Adoption" episode, but edited it to remove a character named Lance Prevert saying, "Damn bureaucrat!" after the adoption agency tells him he can't return adopted kids after using them to do chores.
- A fire at the main CJOH production facility in February 2010 destroyed many of the master tapes of the earlier episodes.
A 1971 episode of The Dick Cavett Show was never aired (and probably never will be) because a guest, Prevention Magazine publisher J.I. Rodale, died of a heart attack during taping. The story about the guest's death was told by Cavett himself.
Many, many, many early Soap Operas have episodes that are presumed lost (i.e. As the World Turns, Guiding Light, and Search For Tomorrow) by the producers of the programs (Procter & Gamble for the most part). Most soaps, according to The Other Wiki, began preserving the episodes by 1976 to 1979. However, some soaps already began preserving early episodes prior to that time. For example, The Young And The Restless still has all the episodes since its premiere in 1973 intact, and Search's episodes that aired during the NBC run (after it was canceled by CBS) are still said to survive. Black and white episodes of Guiding Light are also said to still exist through kinescopes, though the picture for the episodes began deteriorating. The quality for the audio was fine.
- Some soaps even have all of their episodes gone. For example, Procter & Gamble erased all the episodes of Search For Tomorrow's CBS run.
- Even when episodes survived, good luck seeing any re-runs. With few exceptions (such as the odd re-runs of the first two episodes of Days of Our Lives), soaps aren't re-run anywhere even when the tapes survived.
Puttnam's Prairie Emporium has not been rebroadcast since its national run on YTV in the early 90s, and the master tapes have been long since destroyed.
Perhaps the most famous example of a TV series with missing episodes is Doctor Who. In the 1970s, a large number of episodes from the show's early years were destroyed to clear out room in the BBC archives. Every so often, a syndication copy of one of the episodes turns up, but it is likely that many of these episodes are gone forever. Doctor Who fans have joked that, ironically, the only way to watch every episode of the series would be with a time machine.*
or get lucky and have something shiny in space reflect the signal back : http://www.themarysue.com/lost-doctor-who-episodes-found-in-space/
These purges resulted in the loss of episodes of other BBC series as well, but none seem to have similar notoriety.
- The missing episodes (currently standing at 106) are all from the first six seasons from 1963-69, the eras of William Hartnell as the First Doctor and Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor. Of the first six seasons, the hardest hit by the mass erasure were the third (28/45 missing), fourth (33/43 missing), and fifth (27/40 missing) seasons (by contrast, the first is missing 9/42 episodes, the second 2/39 episodes, and the sixth 7/44 episodes). There are no complete serials from the fourth season, while the fifth season has only one complete serial, The Tomb of the Cybermen - and that was lost until the 1990s. The missing episodes from this era include some significant firsts for the series:
  - The final episode of The Tenth Planet, the only missing episode from the serial, features the Doctor's first ever regeneration scene, from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton. Famously, a few seconds' footage of the regeneration exists because it was broadcast during an edition of the BBC children's show Blue Peter (at a time when one of its presenters was Peter Purves, who had played First Doctor companion Steven). *
    The reason why the episode was "supposedly" lost was because Blue Peter wanted to use a clip from it for a TV Special and never gave it back, even though the BBC archives didn't suggest there being a copy there at that time. The Daleks' Master Plan was never given back, however, suggesting this episode's absence.
  - Episode 3 of the Second Doctor serial The Web of Fear, one of five lost episodes from the serial, includes the introduction of the series' longest-running recurring character, Colonel (later Brigadier) Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart. (Moreover, in something of a case of a missing scene within a missing episode, the first meeting between the Doctor and the future Brigadier takes place off screen.)
  - Episode 1 of the completely lost Fury from the Deep features the first use of the Sonic Screwdriver (which, in its first appearance, was just that, a screwdriver which operated using sound waves); indeed, in the absence of episodes indicating the contrary, Jon Pertwee said in an interview in the 1980s that he believed for many years that he had been the first Doctor to use the Sonic Screwdriver until being told that Patrick Troughton had been the first.
- Some of the First and Second Doctors' companions were hit particularly hard by the purges:
  - Only 18 of Steven's 45 appearances have survived, including three complete stories (four if "The Chase" is included).
  - Of Dodo's 19 appearances, only 11 survive, including three complete stories (in one of which she is absent for two episodes).
  - Just 12 of Victoria's 41 appearances are known to exist, including just one complete story (The Tomb of the Cybermen (see above)).
  - A mere 12 of Ben and Polly's 36 appearances have survived, including just one complete story (The War Machines, in which they were not yet considered "companions"; their most complete story as companions is The Tenth Planet (see above)).
  - In absolute terms, Jamie was hit hardest of all, but only because he had the most to lose; of the 113 episodes in which he appeared in the Second Doctor era, only 55 have survived, including six complete stories.
- Fortunately, audio for all of the lost episodes and many telesnaps still exist (although quality varies wildly), which have made reconstructing episodes possible. Loose Cannon Production offers most of them for free (VHS only), complete with bonus materials and interviews.
  - Some of these have been released on CD, with linking narration by some of the surviving actors (William Russell, Frazer Hines, etc).
- The BBC commissioned Cosgrove Hall to reconstruct the two missing episodes of Second Doctor serial The Invasion for DVD, in an animated format similar to Scream of the Shalka and The Infinite Quest. In June 2011 it was announced that "The Reign of Terror" would have its missing episodes animated for DVD, with animation by Theta Mation.
- Luckily, the Australian ABC (equivalent of the BBC) kept its copies of a number of episodes. The kicker? Australians didn't have color TV back then, so a lot of episodes from the Third Doctor era which originally aired in color are only available in black and white. Most of the episodes in question have since been subjected to color recovery technology using color information in the chroma dots in the black and white copies; most notably, the 2009 DVD release of Planet of the Daleks and the (pending) 2012 DVD release of The Ambassadors of Death mark the first time the full stories have been available in color for over 35 years.
  - As of the beginning of 2011, only seven Third Doctor episodes have not yet been subjected to color restoration: the first episode of Invasion of the Dinosaurs and all six episodes of The Mind of Evil. Ian Levine is rumored to have assembled an unofficial team to work on the former; the latter is being worked on by the official team, but the available copy of the first episode has no chroma dots and so cannot be re-colorized using the technique, while there has been some difficulty producing stable re-colorizations for the other episodes, meaning it will be some time before the serial is released on DVD. (A short color clip of the last episode exists courtesy of an American fan who recorded a color broadcast on Betamax in the 1970s but unfortunately taped a football game over most of it, not anticipating its future value.)
- Also of note is the Fourth Doctor serial Shada, written by Douglas Adams, which was abandoned when filming was 2/3 complete due to industrial action at the BBC. It was later shown with Tom Baker filling in the missing gaps, which are sadly significant - especially towards the end. It was later re-made in animated format, but starred the Eighth Doctor. (This is available for viewing on the BBC Doctor Who website.) Adams later largely recycled the plot of Shada for the novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
- The losses almost didn't end there, either! In one of the Doctor Who retrospective specials, one of the crewmen related a story about a time he was in a BBC warehouse and happened to pass a cart containing master tapes due for erasure. Among these tapes was the second ever Doctor Who serial "The Daleks". Think about that, one of the most iconic monsters in sci-fi history, and we almost lost their entire introductory story!!
Probably the second-most-famous victim of the Great BBC Purge was Dad's Army. It's very surprising, given the BBC's criteria for dumping, that only four episodes, all from Series 2, were lost in the first place. A few were later recovered and broadcast. At least some of the episodes which remain lost exist in audio-only recordings.
- One episode, however, is usually only rebroadcast in graveyard slots, since one of the jokes concludes the with the line 'be quiet, you silly old fakir.' You can probably guess how Jonesy pronounces 'fakir.'
- Another Dad's Army episode that is now not re-broadcast is "Absent Friends", which centers around Mainwaring, Pike, Jones and Godfrey attempting to capture an IRA suspect. It was initially pulled from schedules in the 1980s because of The Troubles; twenty years on it still can't be shown because of its potentially offensive portrayal of the Irish.
Though Dad's Army is perhaps the most high profile example due to its otherwise high survival rate and frequency of re-runs, many British sitcoms from the 1960s have numerous missing episodes:
- Twelve of the twenty episodes of The Likely Lads are missing. Its 1970s sequel series, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, survives intact.
- Sixteen episodes from the early black and white series of the hugely influential Till Death Us Do Part (the British forerunner of All in the Family) are either partially or completely lost, although audio-only recordings do exist of some of the missing episodes. The colour episodes of the series survive intact.
- A notable aversion to this is Steptoe And Son, which has no completely lost episodes. However, the only surviving copies of the seven episodes from the first colour series from 1970 are in black and white.
British television featured two long-running police dramas in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s - Dixon of Dock Green (1955-76) and Z Cars (1962-78). The vast majority of episodes of both have been wiped (Dixon was hit hardest - out of 430-odd episodes only 30 still survive - while around two-fifths of the 800-odd episodes of Z Cars still exist in some form), which, among other things, means the loss of early television appearances by the likes of Sean Connery and Michael Caine (both of whom appeared in guest roles in (different) episodes of Dixon of Dock Green in the 1950s before finding fame as film actors).
Another prominent victim of the BBC's practice of tape-wiping was Top of the Pops. Most early episodes of TOTP were wiped by the BBC; only four complete episodes exist from the 1960s (one and most of another with the presenter's links mute), and the show's archive only exists in full from 1977 onwards.
- Many of the Beatles' performances on the programme in the 1960s are lost; ironically, a 25-second clip of a 1965 performance of "Ticket to Ride" on an otherwise lost episode is preserved in the Doctor Who episode "The Executioners" (the first episode of the story collectively known as "The Chase"). The scene featuring the Beatles is noteworthy for companion Vicki's surprised reaction to hearing them play "classical music".
Among the many other mostly lost pop music showcases on 1960s British television is Juke Box Jury, which aired from 1959 to 1967 and featured a panel of guests, often from the pop world themselves, voting on which of a series of new singles would be a "Hit" or a "Miss". One 1963 episode featured all four Beatles on the panel; another from 1964 featured all five members of the Rolling Stones. These episodes were among those lost in the purges, and are high on the BBC's recovery wish list for the programme.
BBC Television's commercial rival, ITV, did its own (less well-known) archives purge at roughly the same time as the BBC. The most notable victim of that purge was The Avengers, which is missing a good portion of its first series.
- At the time of the purges, ITV was a loose collection of regional broadcasters rather than a single organisation, and individual stations had widely varying attitudes toward programme preservation. On the other hand, it's quite possible that a few shows which might otherwise have been wiped, have survived by being re-recorded down the line by regional stations for timeshifting purposes.
Many fans of Monty Python's Flying Circus may not know that the series came very close to being completely wiped. According to the most recent Monty Python documentary "Almost the Whole Truth (The Lawyer's Cut)", the BBC had designated the show for "wiping" after the first season aired, as they believed the show had no shelf life whatsoever for re-runs. However, Terry Gilliam was alerted to this and cut a deal with the BBC to buy the corporation new tapes to use in exchange for the master tapes of season one and all future Python episodes. This would create a major irony, as Gilliam stated that when the BBC decided to re-run the series after all due to its runaway popularity, they had to approach him to borrow the master tapes he now owned in order to strike their own prints for the re-runs.
The pre-Python sketch series At Last the 1948 Show ran for thirteen episodes in 1967 and was the first TV series to star Graham Chapman as well as Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman, and the second to star John Cleese (the first being The Frost Report - see below). Aside from some sketches compiled into specials for Swedish and Australian television, the series was wiped and believed lost for many years. However, kinescopes of three episodes from the first series and two from the second series were recovered in 1994 and 2003, with a third episode from the second series cobbled together from the aforementioned compilations, and a fourth (mostly complete) episode from the second series (containing the famous "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch, previously only available as part of the compilations) returned to the BBC from a private collection in 2010. Various isolated sketches exist from each of the other six episodes except for the first episode of the first series, probably adding up to the length of three or four episodes, so that between sixty and ninety minutes' worth of material is still missing. Most of the missing material exists as audio recordings, except for part of the last episode of the second series and possibly some of Aimi MacDonald's link segments. (Audio recordings of these episodes and many other programmes mentioned on this page were returned to the BBC in 2008 from the collection of BBC Radio WM employee Ed Doolan, who made audio tapes of many BBC programmes from 1967 onward.)
- After At Last the 1948 Show, Marty Feldman headlined a number of sketch programmes in the late 1960s and early 1970s (concurrent with his former castmates' more famous projects, Monty Python and The Goodies), starting with Marty (re-titled It's Marty for its second season) in 1968-69; only seven of the series' fourteen episodes are known to have survived.
Rather less fortunate in terms of preservation is the other proto-Python series, Do Not Adjust Your Set, which was the first series to star Eric Idle as well as David Jason (later of Only Fools and Horses and Danger Mouse), and the second to star Terry Jones and Michael Palin (after Twice a Fortnight - see below); barely nine full episodes of the 27 episode run remain, all from the first series from 1968. The lost second series from 1969 includes all of Terry Gilliam's animated segments for the programme. As with At Last the 1948 Show, audio recordings do exist for some, but not all, of the missing episodes.
- Terry Jones and Michael Palin's follow-up series, The Complete and Utter History of Britain, ran for six episodes in 1969, with the first broadcast episode having been edited down from the first two production episodes. The series was believed completely lost until the discovery of both the first two broadcast episodes and the first two production episodes. The film segments were also recovered from the other four episodes by Terry Jones (the videotape segments are still missing). Interestingly, the only reason the surviving episodes were not wiped was because they were filed in the archives as history programmes rather than as comedy programmes!
Years before he interviewed Richard Nixon, David Frost got his start in television by fronting a series of satirical sketch shows - That Was the Week That Was (1962-63), Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life (1964-65), and The Frost Report (1966-67) - which launched or boosted the comedy writing and performing careers of many British comedians, including all five British Pythons, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Antony Jay, Jonathan Lynn, Barry Cryer, and Willie Rushton. The broadcast runs of the first two series are mostly complete (TW3 is missing just one episode of 37, while only two of the 62 episodes of Not So Much a Programme are known to be lost; each series is also missing one pilot episode), but The Frost Report (which featured John Cleese, Ronnie Corbett, and Ronnie Barker as regular sketch performers) is missing 14 out of 29 episodes, all but one from the second series (fortunately, audio recordings exist for every missing episode).
The Goodies' early television careers are similarly poorly served by surviving recordings.
- The sketch series Twice a Fortnight, which ran for ten episodes in 1967, was the first TV series to star Graeme Garden, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, as well as Bill Oddie (who had already made some appearances in TW3 and the also mostly wiped BBC3; the latter is now mostly remembered for an episode in which Kenneth Tynan dropped the first F-bomb heard on British television) and future Yes Minister co-writer Jonathan Lynn. The videotape segments from the series have been completely wiped, leaving only the outdoor film segments. As the programme featured regular musical guests, this also means the loss of appearances by the Who, Cream, Cat Stevens, the Small Faces, and the Moody Blues.
- Only about ten or twenty minutes survive of the follow-up series Broaden Your Mind, which ran for thirteen episodes across two seasons in 1968-69 and was the first TV series to cast Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, and Bill Oddie together, though Oddie only jumped on board for the second season, and does not feature in any of the surviving footage. (Audio-only recordings exist for all thirteen episodes.)
- Even two episodes of The Goodies itself only exist in black and white editions for export (a third only existed in this form until a tape surfaced at BBC Scotland in the late 1990s and was restored to broadcast quality) - one of them, the first season episode "Caught in the Act" AKA "The Playgirl Club", only exists as a low quality studio master. The original version of the classic episode "Kitten Kong" was also wiped when the episode was re-edited for submission to the 1972 Montreux TV Festival (at which it won the Silver Rose); only the Montreux edit exists now.
  - The other B&W-only episode of The Goodies, the second season episode "Commonwealth Games", had had a scene cut by the censors (involving administering a sex test to the potential Commonwealth Games athletes) and the only existing version of the episode featured a noticeable jump cut. Video of the scene was recovered in 2009 from the National Archives of Australia. The following year, a missing spoof advertisement for "Dreaded Wheat" from the otherwise complete second season episode "The Lost Tribe" was also recovered from the NAA.
Following Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett's rise in prominence on The Frost Report, David Frost executive produced a series of vignettes under the title Ronnie Barker's Playhouse, which ran for six episodes on ITV in 1968 and was intended to test possible sitcom pilots starring Barker. Only one episode, "Alexander", still exists in the ITV archives.
- Among the missing episodes is "Ah, There You Are", the only one to get a spinoff series in the form of Hark at Barker, in which Barker played bumbling aristocrat Lord Rustless, presenting a sitcom/sketch show from his ancestral home of Chrome Hall. The series ran for fifteen episodes across two series in 1969 and 1970 and featured writing from Eric Idle, Graeme Garden, and Bill Oddie as well as Alan Ayckbourn and Barker himself writing under assumed names; though all fifteen episodes have survived, the second series episode "Rustless at Law" only exists as a low quality, off-air black and white recording (ITV had made the transition to colour in late 1969).
- Following the two Ronnies' return to the BBC in 1971, Barker revived the character of Lord Rustless for His Lordship Entertains, a sitcom which ran for six episodes on BBC 2 in 1972 and in which Chrome Hall had been converted into a hotel (prompting Barker to describe the series as "Fawlty Towers mark one" in later years). All six episodes were wiped and thought permanently lost until the recovery of the first episode in 2009. (Barker was the sole writer for the series (using a pseudonym) and published the scripts for the series in book form; some of them have occasionally been re-enacted on stage.)
Spike Milligan's Q sketch series is often cited by the Pythons themselves as having had a significant influence on the Monty Python television series, due to its often anarchic style, swipes at the BBC, and avoiding ending sketches with anticlimactic punchlines in favour of simply rushing into the next sketch. The first series, Q5, consisted of seven episodes which aired in the spring of 1969 (Python debuted the following autumn); only three episodes have survived, and only one is in the original colour (and is not present in any fan collections). Audio recordings exist of at least three of the missing episodes. The remaining five series have survived intact, but have not been re-run in decades.*
The most readily available fan copies of Q6, Q7, and Q8 were ripped from home video recordings of the series' Australian television premieres in the late 1970s!
- Between Q5 and Q6, Milligan wrote and starred in the sketch series Oh In Colour, which aired for six episodes in 1970. Copies exist of all six episodes but, ironically, only in black and white!
Milligan's former Goon Show co-writer, Eric Sykes, wrote and appeared in a number of comedy programmes in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Sykes and a... (1960-65), Sykes and a Big Big Show (1971), and Sykes (1972-79), in all of which he co-starred with Carry On grande dame Hattie Jacques. Only 25 of the 59 episodes of Sykes and a... are known to exist, while only two of the six episodes of Sykes and a Big Big Show have survived (one in black and white only). Sykes survives in its entirety, though the first series episode "Journey" only exists in black and white.
All of the videotape footage from the 1970 colour series of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's Not Only... But Also was wiped. This despite the fact that Cook and Moore not only actually offered to pay for the series to be preserved, but also offered to do a one-for-one swap — for each tape the BBC gave them, they'd give the BBC a replacement in virgin, unused videotape. The BBC still turned them down and wiped the series. The exterior film footage has survived, as have eight of the sixteen black and white shows from 1965-66 (including the pilot but not the 1966 Christmas special), shows which were transferred to film. Audio-only recordings exist of at least half a dozen of the wiped episodes of Not Only... But Also, as do the scripts of the second and third series.
- Their 1968 ITV series Goodbye Again didn't fare much better - although all episodes have survived, some of the interior footage only survives as black and white copies.
Cook and Moore's Beyond the Fringe castmate Alan Bennett appeared in an acclaimed sketch variety series called On the Margin, which ran for six episodes in 1966 and featured future political commentator John Sergeant alongside Bennett, as well as guest appearances from Fringe cast member Jonathan Miller, readings by poets John Betjeman and Philip Larkin, and clips of old music hall routines by such performers as Arthur Askey and Max Miller. The tapes were wiped in the 1970s, although the music hall clips survive (in their original contexts), as do the scripts. Audio clips exist of some episodes, and an audio compilation was released by the BBC in 2009.
The British series Adam Adamant Lives!, about an adventurer in Edwardian England who is cryogenically frozen and wakes up in the 1960s, ran for 29 episodes across two seasons in 1966-67 and was one of the inspirations for the Austin Powers movies. Only 17 episodes survive, all but two from the first season.
United! was a BBC soap opera about the fortunes of fictitious struggling Second Division football team Brentwich United. It ran for 147 episodes from 1965-67 and featured many writers and producers who were concurrently working on Doctor Who (such as Gerry Davis, Derek Hayles, John Lucarotti, and Innes Lloyd). After the series was axed, the episodes were wiped, and not a single one has survived.
The BBC were still conducting purges as recently as 1993, when then Archive Selector Adam Lee ordered the wiping of numerous videotaped children's series from the 1970s and 1980s, believing they were of no further use and not bothering to consult the Children's Television division first. Series thus affected included Play School and its sister show Play Away, storytelling showcase Jackanory, and art programme Vision On (specifically geared toward deaf or hard of hearing audiences).
- Supernatural sitcom Rentaghost was another victim of the 1993 purge, but as the series had been sold for re-broadcast on UK Gold, copies of the missing episodes were later returned to the BBC. However, it has not been re-run in many years and, apart from the first season, is unlikely to see a DVD release any time soon due to contractual disputes with the surviving cast members and rights problems with music clips used in the programme.
Multi-Coloured Swap Shop was a seminal BBC Saturday morning children's programme which aired from 1976 to 1982 and either launched or boosted the television careers of Noel Edmonds, John Craven, Keith Chegwin, and Maggie Philbin. Believed for many years to be a victim of the 1993 purge, it was instead wiped in the late 1980s as the Quad tapes onto which the series was recorded were no longer the standard in Britain but were still widely used in Australia, and so Roy Thompson, then Deputy Head of Children's Television, ordered the tapes wiped and sold to Australian broadcasters. Most surviving episodes only exist as off-air domestic recordings.
- Tiswas aired opposite Swap Shop on ITV from 1974 to 1982 and launched the television careers of Chris Tarrant and Lenny Henry, but although the episodes were taped in case of investigation by the Independent Broadcasting Association, most of the tapes were eventually wiped on the assumption they would have no future value, and many of the episodes which were not wiped were stored in conditions which led to deterioration below broadcast quality. Of over 300 episodes, only 22 are known to exist in their entirety in watchable quality, mostly from domestic recordings.
In 1973 the BBC produced an extremely gritty hard-science fiction program called Moonbase 3, which was canceled the same year. All the tapes of it were destroyed, and the program became semi-mythical to science fiction fans. Twenty years later, NTSC copies of the program were found at an American PBS affiliate, and made available in DVD format. Excellent series.
Timmy and Lassie happen upon a crashed, radioactive satellite in a Missing Episode of Lassie, never shown because people were already scared enough by the prospect of nuclear material falling from the sky. Finally shown in the 1990s on Nickelodeon.
After 9/11, several episodes of Power Rangers which featured the destruction of skyscrapers were pulled from syndication.
- A "Lost Episode" example: the original Pilot for Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers was advertised as such. Notable changes include the casting of the Yellow Ranger as Audri DuBois as opposed to Thuy Trang, Zordon being known as "Zoltar", and the Zords being referred to as "Droids".
The Star Trek episode "Miri" was only shown once by the BBC (at least until the 00s). Three other episodes, "Plato's Stepchildren", "The Empath" and "Whom Gods Destroy" were also omitted. It was not until the advent of home video that British viewers were able to see these episodes - they weren't shown on UK TV until the 1990s! And "Patterns of Force" wasn't shown on German television for decades, for obvious reasons. (Hint: Planet Of Nazis)
- A color copy of the original series pilot, "The Cage", was lost; the complete episode only existed in black-and-white, except for segments that had been chopped up and reused in the first season two-part episode "The Menagerie." When "The Cage" was first released on videocassette in 1986, it combined color segments from "The Menagerie" with black-and-white segments. A complete color copy was eventually discovered and released in 1990.
- The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The High Ground" wasn't screened by the BBC until 2007 (and satellite channel Sky One edited their showings until 2006) because of references to terrorism in Northern Ireland.
- Another Next Generation episode, Conspiracy, was similarly delayed due to the (rather uncharacteristically) graphic depiction of a man pretty much literally exploding, guts and all.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation "Masterpiece Society" was not rebroadcast for many years in the United States, just because it wasn't very good.
While not an entire episode, a scene from one episode of Three's Company disappeared in 2001 when, after 17 years, someone noticed that John Ritter inadvertently exposed his scrotum while changing position.
Since Best Brains failed to license the rights in perpetuity, many episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 can not be rebroadcast now, and indeed may never see the (legal) light of day again (especially the Godzilla episodes, due to Toho denying them the rights). Also, the first three episodes and the unaired pilot of Mystery Science Theater 3000's "season zero" (on local television station KTMA, before it was picked up by The Comedy Channel) do not exist in any private fan collections (though the master tapes do exist; see below).
- Jim Mallon, MST3K's producer, said in an interview that he still has the master tapes of the lost episodes, so they still exist, just not in a form anyone can actually watch (Mallon excepted). Proof of the tapes' existence can be found in the form of high quality videos of some of the host segments which were posted to the Best Brains website, and the unaired pilot has been shown in its entirety during MST3K and/or Cinematic Titanic panels at the odd convention (at least one such screening was captured on camera by an audience member and posted to YouTube, although anyone seeking an uploaded copy should bear in mind the usual caveats about the dodgy quality (and legality) of bootleg recordings).
- It's widely stated that one of the main reasons why MST3K ultimately got bounced from Comedy Central was due to Best Brains not wanting any of the first season episodes to ever re-air on the network, due to them largely disowning the episodes. Best Brains has also stated that they have no intention on releasing the KTMA episodes onto DVD, though this stance has largely softened since the DVD rights have switched to Shout Factory!, who has made a huge push towards increasing the extras on their MST3K releases. In particular, they've announced that they will be culling the best "host" segments from the KTMA episodes for a new bonus series that will spotlight the rarely seen "Season 0".
- Many of the unreleased episodes can be viewed in their entirety on YouTube. However, due to YouTube's 10 minute limit, the episodes are posted in parts. The admins over there have taken the odd tactic of pulling different parts of episodes claiming copyright infringement while leaving most of the rest of the episode posted.
  - This may be due to the attitudes of Best Brains ("Keep circulating the tapes", except for the legal releases) as opposed to the copyright holders of the movies mocked on the show.
- The season 9 episode with the film Gorgo is notable because it only aired once (technically twice, but the other was just a repeat broadcast later the same day) before rights issues forced Sci-Fi to take it out of rotation.
Three episodes of Firefly were never broadcast and did not see the light of day until the DVD release of the series, and later on Sci Fi Channel. Why? Well, it was aired on FOX....
ABC Family aired a long-lost episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway? from the first season (it got preempted by coverage of the Lewinsky scandal).
- FiveUS in the UK aired a handful of never-before-seen episodes mixed in with their usual reruns a couple years ago. (They're mostly notable because one of them is a Greg/Denny episode—one of the only American episodes without Wayne.) Since there was only one actual "missing" episode, it's assumed that FiveUS somehow got a hold of the original taping footage and used it to cobble together their own episodes (since a large chunk of episodes were made like that, it's not exactly noticeable). Nobody knows why.
The X-Files episode "Home" was so disturbing that executives vowed never to air it again, in rerun or syndication. An Internet campaign led to it earning the top spot in a viewer-selected marathon on FX some years later, and the episode has since been added to the regular rotation.
The Married... with Children third season episode "I'll See You In Court" (which had the Bundys and the Rhoades suing a motel for videotaping couples having sex and using the videos as porno movies for other couples who check in) was banned due to pressure from Terry Rakolta (the mom from Michigan who protested against the show's crude and sexual humor after seeing the season three episode "Her Cups Runneth Over"), which wasn't aired until June 2002.
- This episode was advertised in the DVD release as "never before shown episode"; of course, the DVD was released in 2005, years after the fact. Especially hilarious since this marketing lie was copied verbatim for the Region 2 release — where the episode was shown in regular syndication, over a decade before the DVD release.
There's a tasty little tin-foil-hat theory making the rounds to the effect that abbreviated seasons of TV shows — early cancellations — are increasing in frequency lately due to the fact that season-collection DVD sales are pretty brisk for sets that have multiple un-aired episodes. Firefly, Wonderfalls, and Day Break are all cited as possible evidence, with the success of Firefly DVDs as the instigating factor. Who knows? The numbers do sort of add up.
The third-season The Man From UNCLE episode "The Pieces of Fate Affair", written by Harlan Ellison, was hardly ever seen in syndication for many years, because of concerns about possible lawsuits over unflattering parodies of various literary figures in that episode.
George Lucas has said that he will do his best to make sure the Star Wars Holiday Special is never seen again, anywhere, and that he would happily destroy every last copy if he could. But while the special will likely never have an "official" Lucasfilm re-release, it is very widely available from unofficial sources.
An episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation, in which female student Manny goes to have an abortion at the end of an episode after discussing it with her boyfriend and parents, was not shown on the 'N' Channel during its original broadcast run (on CTV in Canada). It was only due to fan pressure that the episode was added to the channel's rotation. In a similar vein, a sequence from the premiere of the original Degrassi High, in which student Erica goes to have an abortion, and pushes through angry protesters at an abortion clinic with her sister, was not shown after its original airing on television.
- Although the DTNG episode about Manny's abortion is now in rotation in the US, it's usually shown during the late night hours.
- The first season final, in which Ashley takes ecstasy and kisses Sean, was skipped over in Australia and the US. This caused confusion the following season.
Two episodes of Seinfeld were lost from the show's syndication run until 2002. One, "The Invitations," was pulled due to the death of Susan by toxic envelope glue being too close to the anthrax scare shortly after September 11. The other, "The Puerto Rican Day," was pulled because of a scene where Kramer accidentally burns the Puerto Rican flag. The episode aired once on network and was not seen again on television for four years. But after a few years it was quietly removed from the syndication package again.
- During season 2 an episode called "The Bet", which involved Elaine buying a gun, was all set to be filmed. But during rehearsals most of the cast objected to the script, saying it was way too dark and not all that funny, so production was halted. Since they quickly needed another script to fill the slot, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David borrowed the premise from a rejected sketch that David wrote for Saturday Night Live and hammered out "The Phone Message" in two days.
The FOX sitcom Titus had a lot of episodes that either came close to being banned and one that was banned, but aired after the series finale. These episodes are:
- "Intervention" (almost banned because the censors thought the show was glorifying alcoholism [since the episode is about Titus's dad, Ken, being urged to drink again because of how boring he is when he's not drinking])
- "The Wedding" (almost banned, but ended up being shifted in the schedule, due to the plot point where Juanita, Titus's Ax Crazy, schizophrenic mother kills her abusive second husband during her son's wedding)
- "Insanity Genetic" parts 1 and 2 (temporarily pulled due to the September 11th attacks [the plot focused on Titus having a mental breakdown on an airplane following his mom's death and, through many misunderstandings, the FBI suspecting Titus and his friends of being terrorists]; aired in August 2002)
- "The Protector (originally supposed to air in the middle of the third and final season; was banned because the episode dealt with child molestation [Amy discovers that the boy who harasses her in school is the son of the man who molested her as a child while her parents were in jail] and ended up airing as the series finale, even though the true last episode is the two-parter episode "Insanity Genetic". Because of this, the references to Amy being molested that were shown in "The Session" and the aforementioned "Insanity Genetic" two-parter don't make a lot of sense, and viewers end up not getting a good insight as to why Amy is such a bad kid (besides the fact that her mother is a drug addict, her stepfather is an abusive alcoholic, and both of her parents are never around to care for her).
Max Headroom was cancelled with 3 completed episodes left unaired. 2 were shown 6 months later when a writers' strike left a shortage of new programming, while the last episode had to wait until the Sci-Fi Channel showed the series 8 years later.
Heroes had one of the most stunning examples of this: a lost season premiere. The last episode of season two was supposed to end with the virus being released, but the Writer's Strike stopped that. But not until they filmed the first episode of the third season. They started over from scratch, but the episode is still out there somewhere.
Friends had an episode that had to be scrapped and reshot after 9/11 — about to leave on their honeymoon, Chandler and Monica get stopped in airport security when Chandler jokes that he has a bomb in his luggage. The two are dragged off to have their luggage searched, jokes about underwear ensue. The episode was reshot with Chander and Monica trying to sneak into the superior private lounge (or something like that) at the airport. The original storyline never aired.
- The scenes that were reshot were eventually made available on Youtube.
Many of the early episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, including his first episode as host, were lost due to tape reuse.
- The Tonight Show was originally hosted by Steve Allen between 1954 and 1957 and was titled Tonight Starring Steve Allen; the episodes which he presented have long since been wiped, as have most of the other series Allen presented during the early years of television.
Due to changeovers in the front office of TNT, 11 episodes of the Wall Street show Bull have never been shown in the United States. These changes delayed the showing of the series Breaking News until Bravo picked it up in 2002.
The Prisoner episode "Living in Harmony" was not broadcast in its original American run on CBS due to its plot, which involved Six rejecting a call to arms. It was felt that, with an active draft for Vietnam, which many had protested and sought to escape, it probably wasn't a good idea to show it. An explanation offered at the time was the use of mind-altering drugs to a far greater degree than elsewhere in the series (the call to arms is presented through a "waking hallucination"). In all later runs, the episode has been shown in its correct place.
The Twilight Zone episodes "Miniatures", "Sounds and Silences", and "A Small Drink From a Certain Fountain" were caught up in litigation over possible plagiarism when the series was first put into syndication. The lawsuits were eventually settled, but the episodes vanished for decades.
- "The Encounter", which starred Neville Brand and George Takei, is one of the others, but not because of possible plagiarism. Takei played a Japanese-American man, whose father had been a traitor to the U.S., during World War II. It provoked an angry reaction from the Japanese-American community and was not rebroadcast or included in syndication.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Earshot", about Buffy trying to find out who's behind a plan to kill every Sunnydale High student and climaxing with Jonathan taking a rifle to the school clocktower, was quite understandably pulled when the Columbine Massacre happened four days before it was to air. Somewhat less justifiable is that season's finale was delayed for the same reason. Was a giant snake monster really hitting too close to home?
- It probably had more to do with the episode having high school students rig their school with explosives and blow it up.
- Once More with Feeling was not aired in syndication (e.g. on FX) for a while because of its longer than usual run-time. A trimmed down version of the episode is sometimes shown (indeed, many episodes are trimmed down slightly for time).
Are You Being Served? has been airing multiple times per week pretty much continuously for the last 20 years on many US public television stations. This is a series which ran for ten years and produced 69 episodes. If you guessed that the one episode that isn't in the regular rotation in US markets was the one involving an elaborate blackface number, you'd be right.
- Also, the episode "Top Hat and Tails" wasn't aired in the US for years simply because it had been misplaced.
- Are You Being Served's pilot episode was (like other shows above) originally recorded in colour but wiped, with only black-and-white copies surviving. However, the original colour was restored in 2009 via an ingenious technique. It's worth catching the restored version to see the results even if you're not a fan of the show.
This concept is played with a little bit in the Red Dwarf special "Back to Earth" by explicitly stating that there are two more seasons to the show, and that the special takes place after 'series 10', while we have no episodes of those seasons whatsoever. Perhaps this is more Lampshade Hanging in that more shows could have been made had the creator not been trying so hard for The Movie, but it's an interesting twist.
- Oddly enough, there will be another series, so perhaps this was a way of campaigning the network for a full series order...
Tru Calling's final episode wasn't aired on the original broadcast, but it was shown when the series was being rebroadcast on The Sci-Fi Channel.
JAG has a unique example of this in "Skeleton Crew", the last episode produced for the show's first season and a Cliff Hanger. While the episode was completed, NBC didn't air it and ultimately cancelled the series. CBS picked it up again, but opted not to finish the story out. What sets it apart is that the episode eventually did air via syndication on USA, was included in the DVD release, and was re-edited into an episode from the series' third season, "Death Watch".
The final episode of Dollhouse's first season was not aired on TV during the initial run. The FOX network paid for 13 episodes and counted the unaired original pilot as one of them and did not wish to show a 14th episode. However, 20th Century Fox, the show's producers, had DVD contracts requiring 13 episodes, so Whedon created "Epitaph One". Oddly, it is considered one of the best episodes in the series and is quite possibly the reason the show got a second season. It was eventually aired as between seasons one and two. It was shown as the season one finale internationally.
- The original pilot episode has also never been aired.
VR5 had three: "Sisters", "Send Me An Angel" and "Parallel Lives". One was dropped because of preemption, another due to sexual content, and the third because it didn't make any sense without the first two. Aired in Canada, but never in the United States.
Thirteen episodes of Wonderfalls were produced, but the show was cancelled after four episodes. All thirteen are on the DVD release.
A strange version of this is the Eurovision Song Contest. Depending on who you ask, the 1964 edition, which took place in Copenhagen, is lost due to an archive mishap at the Danish broadcaster's, or has never been shown again because of a Spanish anti-Franco protester showing up near the end. There are bits of it that are still shown, including the winner's reprise by Gigliola Cinquetti.
Parodied in Mr. Show with Bob And David; at the beginning of the episode, the hosts declare to the audience that the episode being filmed is intended to be the "lost episode" of the series, which will be trotted out years later to much fanfare. At the end of the episodeBob and David give the only tape of the episode to a uniformed security guard, who walks outside and tosses the tape into outer space in a 2001 parody.
If the MythBusters episode where they see if a cereal box really is more nutritious than the sugary cereal inside seemed a little odd... well, that wasn't the originally planned test. It was supposed to be a mouse test, one cage of mice getting cereal and one getting cardboard pellets. One of the blooper videos that Adam and Jamie show at lectures has the unairable result: one of the "cardboard" mice decided its cagemates were much more appetizing, so it killed and ate them. Adam holds a partly-eaten mouse up to the camera for the producer's benefit.
The first 20 stories of Ace Of Wands are missing.
At least two episodes of Home and Away have never been seen in the UK. One involved the students of Summer Bay High being confronted by gunmen and ITV felt it was Too Soon after a similar incident in Ireland. Another banned episode involved Duncan making a bomb.
Hardly anyone has seen the earliest examples of the wildly popular Mexican sitcom El Chavo del ocho because it originated as a sketch on an hour-long variety show "Chespirito", named for Chavo's creator. Some of the sketches that were judged to be high-quality enough were edited together into half-hour episodes (resulting in a short season zero), but because of Old Shame, the earliest Chavo sketches haven't been seen in decades.
When rerunning Cagney And Lacey, Lifetime omitted the first season episodes featuring Meg Foster as Cagney. The DVD release does likewise, labeling the second season (featuring Sharon Gless as Cagney) as the first season.
A lot of early Japanese television shows from NHK are lost. To give an example, there was a popular children's puppet show that ran for 8 years (from 1956 to '64) called "Chirorin Mura to Kurumi no Ki" (Chirorin Village and the Chestnut Tree). There were over 800 episodes produced. Of those episodes, how many survive? No more than four, from the show's final year. Another puppet show, "Hyokkori Hyotanjima" (ran daily from 1964-1969), has a bulk of its series lost, too, with only eight (out of 1,224) episodes surviving. Years later, in the early 1990s they tried remaking the missing episodes using the original puppets and any actors still alive at the time.
Sesame Street has a few of these. For example, the unaired episode unoffically known as "Snuffy's Parents Get a Divorce".
- The full story is here.
- The infamous clip of a scantily-clad Katy Perry singing a bowdlerised version of "Hot n Cold" with Elmo.
- An episode from the 70's featuring The Wicked Witch of the West was only aired once, due to the heaps of Accidental Nightmare Fuel.
The 1983 "Conflict" episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood were originally created to help children cope with the war-related themes of The Day After miniseries, but were deemed inappropriate to air after 1996 due to real-life wars happening. This week has not been released on Amazon.com, unlike most of the 1979-2001 episodes. Interestingly, it did re-air once—following 9/11, ironically enough.
The great BBC archive pillage also affected Hancock's Half Hour - All of the first series of the TV series are missing, as well as all but one episode of the second series and approximately half of each of the third and fourth series. See below for the radio episodes lost.
- That was not due to archive pillage, but simply because the early episodes were broadcast live and most weren't recorded. Those that were, survive on film either because a technician or actor wanted a viewable copy. All the later videotaped episodes were subsequently transferred film copies.
For some reason, ITV does not air these episodes of Police, Camera, Action! (year of episode airing in brackets):
- Police Stop! (also full unedited version of Danger Drivers Ahead! from 1994 pilot version of series)
- Helicops (1995, but the 2007 episode of the same title does get aired. Never happens to the episode Safety Last which was part of the 1995 series, and the original 1995 episode does get aired, as well as the unrelated 2007 series episode).
- Don't Look Back In Anger — uncontroversial road-safety episode from November 1997, rarely if-ever aired.
- Learning the Hard Way — series finale of 1998 series, last seen on ITV 17th January 1999, but not aired since then.
- Danger Ahead — from the 2000 series, but bizarrely never aired in syndication. Last aired on ITV 7th August 2000
- Ford (alternate title The Fords) — last seen on ITV 7 January 2002 but never aired since then.
- Police in Pursuit from 2007 series with Adrian Simpson - never aired on ITV 4, and not even on ITV 1, so a literal Missing Episode.
  - However, all episodes exist in some form or another, so there's no lost episodes in the way Doctor Who has them, but the fans are still not satisfied. Leading to fan campaigns happening.
- Given the show's high levels of Fandom, which is on a par with Twilight - albeit in a more subtle way - it's surprising that the missing episodes were not lost.
The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, the first TV series to star an Asian-American actress (Anna May Wong, who, incidentally, was also the first Asian-American film actress), is lost because the master tapes were dumped into Upper New York Bay back in the 1970s along with the rest of Dumont Network's tapes because nobody wanted to keep them. A few publicity shots did survive, but that's it.
Much of the early material from The Guiding Light has been lost, particularly serials from the radio years and the early television era. Since GL has roughly 18 solid months of material, this is not surprising.
The last four (of six) parts of The Quatermass Experiment are missing because technology to record TV programmes for posterity was in its infancy at the time and the results for the first two episodes were so bad they gave up. Many TV shows from before the 1960s don't exist nowadays for this reason.
TBS stopped airing the Mama's Family episode "Gert Rides Again" sometime in the early 2000's, apparently because their master tape of it was somehow destroyed. Fans were able to see the episode again when ION began airing the show in 2006.
The Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (featuring a mentally disabled man who believes himself to have the power of the magician he works for, who ends up cutting a woman in half during a poorly prepared trick) was skipped during its original run, the result of the sponsor feeling it was too dark. It was later seen unedited in syndication.
Several episodes of WCW Monday Nitro have not been rebroadcast on WWE Classics when they would have normally been included in the schedule of programs. In the case of at least one episode (the episode originally aired on 9 June 1997), the master tape for that show contained several problems with the audio, and was unfit for broadcast. Other episodes have been heavily edited (or omitted entirely from rotation) due to Chris Benoit appearing prominently within them.
My Family has an episode in which Susan is temporarily blinded from the shock of catching Michael in bed with a girlfriend, and struggles to hide her condition from the rest of the family. This episode is considered offensive to blind people and, while it reportedly received only four complaints from viewers, it is now banned from British TV (but can be found on the Series Four DVD.)
"Bored She Hung Herself", a 1970 Hawaii Five-O episode about a deadly yoga technique that bears more than a passing resemblance to Erotic Asphyxiation, has been banned since its original broadcast, allegedly because a viewer accidentally died while imitating the technique. The episode was never syndicated, and it's not included on the second season DVD box set.
- 20 years later in Japan, popular anime show Sazae-san had to remove a skit involving the main character doing a dangerous stunt involving a bean that appeared at the end of each episode and replace it with another one after a child almost died imitating the stunt, in a similar fashion to this incident. More info on this can be seen in Anime and Manga.
iCarly has a pilot episode about how the webshow came to be. Nick has never bothered reairing it inside the US but it has been seen in Canada a few times.
- It's reaired in the US, but very rarely. Also very rarely airing is iGo Nuclear.
Neighbours episode 4175 was accidentally skipped over when aired in Australia. It was later shown in New Zealand and the UK.
A number of Iron Chef episodes are now considered missing, namely the Ishinabe and Nakamura era battles, due to Food Network not dubbing those episodes for some arbitrary reason. (The most likely explanation is they stopped because they got the go-ahead to do Iron Chef America.) Sadly, this includes the Beijing Special, where four chefs of different Chinese cuisines go head to head in the Forbidden City. There's a website dedicated to finding copies of these missing episodes from VCR copies.
In the episode "Koi Pond" of The Office, the cold open featured Michael pretending to hang himself in the office's haunted warehouse in front of several children. This scene was cut in subsequent re-airings and was surprisingly absent from the DVD release.
Masters Of Horror episode "Imprint" was never aired in the U.S., due to rampant Squick. It did get released on DVD.
The last season of Get Smart was pulled from a majority of television circulations after a dispute over the copyrights (after the season was canceled by NBC and picked up by CBS). Yeah, even Get Smart DVDs did not have these episodes, too.
12 live action segments for The Super Mario Bros. Super Show went missing from DVD releases, apparently over legal reasons. Several of the missing segments (9001: A Mario Odyssey, Baby Mario Love, and Texas Tea) were later reinstated on the internet.
- After the show ended its circulation run in 1991, DIC ordered almost all of the Club Mario reprints (excepting "The Unzappables", which later was picked up by internet distributor Hulu and iTunes) destroyed. Most of the destroyed segments are available for viewing on YouTube. You can see one here.
For almost forever, fans of the 1966 Batman TV series have been waiting for a proper DVD release. Much of the reason for the wait is a countless amount of disputes between Fox (the producers and copyright holders for the show), DC Comics (owners of the Batman comic book character), and probably co-producer Greenway Productions. Other issues may include clearances for the many celebrity cameos, music, or even the unique design of the show's Batmobile. The above issues mainly seem to affect "new media," as the show is still available for traditional syndication, and currently shown on cable's The Hub.
When Japan aired The Monkees TV show, they made two additional special episodes appropriately titled “The Monkees In Japan" (parts 1 and 2), which highlighted the Monkees’ visit and concert in their country. The episodes aired only in Japan, and were shown only once, on October 11 and 18, 1968 respectively. The episodes have not been aired, in Japan or anywhere else, since. The video footage from both parts is thought to be lost, however a low-quality recorded audio track from portions of the episodes still survive, and is known among fans as the bootleg CD Made In Japan.
Much of Square One TV, 3-2-1 Contact, and many other PBS shows from the 70's and 80's. Only a handful of episodes were released to VHS, and no full episodes have been posted on YouTube so far. Good luck finding tapes.
When Nickelodeon in the UK screened Gilmore Girls, they were happy not only to cut episodes in its 6pm Sunday slot but also to drop the odd episode, most notably "The Big One" (in which Paris loses her virginity, fails to get into Harvard, and has a meltdown live on C-SPAN as a result of the latter). Unsurprisingly the channel dropped the show itself after the first three seasons.
Due to its 6pm Wednesday slot, Channel Four screened all but one episode of My So-Called Life ("Weekend," in which Rayanne handcuffs herself to the Chases' bed). The series was only repeated once (in an even earlier slot) and has never been shown on British television since.
A majority of episodes from The Jack Benny Program are missing. Out of 257 episodes (by the IMDb's count), about 30 have survived and slipped into the public domain (and thus released often from multiple home-video sources.) CBS owns the masters for about 25 additional episodes (also believed to have lapsed into the public domain), but thus far has refused to release them or to allow access to third parties.
The Eerie Indiana episode "Heart On A Chain" was never rerun when the show was syndicated on Fox Kids (it's unclear whether it was ever run when syndicated on The Disney Channel). It is, however, available on DVD.
Much like the Buffy example above, an episode of Bones was pulled because the plot included a boy being killed on a college campus, and it was set to air right after a similar, high-profile event in real life. It was eventually aired later in the season, but some of the side plots, such as Hodgins proposing to Angela and being rejected, were cut because they didn't fit the show's established timeline.
Similarly, Leverage pulled The Mile High Job, which was set on a plane and devoted much of its comedy to making fun or water landings after the Miracle on the Hudson. The episode was later aired in its original form after the media frenzy had died down.
The Too Close for Comfort episode “For Every Man, There’s Two Women”—the plot of which attempted to milk laughs from Monroe’s rape by two large women—only aired once in 1985 and never again...until Antenna TV aired the show in 2011. More on this “lost” episode in this Kindertrauma post.
The Law & Order franchise had some type of instance with this. Based on news reports, rumours were going on that some episodes from the franchise's incarnations were destroyed by the 2008 Universal Studios fire. This has been dismissed as speculation, as (according to Universal) the original copies may have been saved in another vault.
- "Sunday In The Park With Jorge", from the 11th Season, was never reran on NBC since its initial airing after complaints about the very negative portrayal of the Puerto Rican community, though it was later shown on TNT.
At least two episodes of Quincy were never repeated on NBC (although they were, and are, still shown in syndication):
- "Nowhere To Run," in which a teenage girl is killed in a fall which proves to be a suicide triggered by her incestuous relationship with her father and subsequent pregnancy.
- "Never A Child," dealing with a runaway falling into the clutches of a child pornographer.
The Dutch TV Series Pension Hommeles and Ja Zuster Nee Zuster from the late 50s launched (or reinforced) the career of many Dutch singer/actors. The songs were written by Annie M.G. Schmidt and several amongst them are considered to be classics. Unfortunately most of the original tapes of the series were lost in the intervening decades, and the first episodes of Pension Hommeles were broadcast live so there were never tapes of it in the first place.
The Nickelodeon original movie Cry Baby Lane aired on the night of October 28th, 2000, was deemed so excessively scary that it was never re-aired or released on home video. The network officially denied the thing ever existed, leading many to wonder if the entire concept was a Creepy Pasta taken to the next level. A full version has been found and uploaded to YouTube, however.
- After years of denying its existence, TeenNick finally re-aired the movie on October 31, 2011 as part of its late-night block The '90s Are All That.
The Miami Vice episode "Too Much Too Late" was not aired on NBC because of the controversial child-molestation storyline, though it was later aired on USA network,
Saturday Night Live has a few episodes that have only aired once and were either never seen at all (or in full) after that point:
- The season four episode hosted by Milton Berle was so frought with cast tension over Milton Berle overrunning the show (which he did, if the Texaco Playhouse cold open is indicative of anything) that Lorne Michaels barred the show from being rerun on TV (the episode does appear on the season 4 DVD set).
- The season five episode hosted by Strother Martin was scheduled to rerun during the summer of 1980, but the summer of 1980 was also when Strother Martin died (the fact that the episode contained a sketch with Strother Martin filming a video will didn't make matters any better).
- All of season six's episodes haven't aired on American TV since 1980-1981 due to how poorly received the season was, and a DVD release of the entire season is out of the question due to music licensing issues and the fact that the season was an Old Shame for the show.
- The last episode of season 6 (which was the first episode helmed by Dick Ebersol after Jean Doumanian and most of her cast were fired — the only Jean Doumanian cast members in this episode were Denny Dillon, Gail Matthius, Eddie Murphy, and Joe Piscopo) hasn't been seen in its original form on American TV since it first came on. All reruns (including the 60-minute cable ones) have most sketches replaced with pretaped sketches from the Dick Ebersol episodes (and a couple from the Jean Doumanian episodes) to fill the void left behind by the original sketches that were removed.
- The 1981 season seven Halloween episode hosted by Donald Pleasence (with musical guest Fear) was banned after its first appearance due to Fear's raucous performance and the dark, disgusting humor of the sketches (though the ones displayed are nothing compared to what was supposed to air: one sketch about Nazi soldiers thinking of "good reasons" for killing Jewish people, another sketch in which Donald Pleasence drains the blood of his date and serves the drained blood as wine, and a third sketch featuring puppets cannibalizing Jane Fonda).
- For reasons unknown, the season 27 episode hosted by Alec Baldwin (with musical guest POD) never reran after its premiere (though some of the sketches featured can be found on the DVD release of the special Saturday Night Live: The Best of Alec Baldwin).
When the Disney Channel aired reruns of Boy Meets World they didn't air several episodes from the later seasons that dealt with more mature subject matter, including one about teen drinking and two that focused more on sex.
The Drew Carey Show had an unusual example in the episode "Two Drews And The Queen Of Poland Walk Into A Bar"; the episode itself wasn't banned, but the original opening of the episode (Mimi meeting the King of Poland, her aunt dying and Mimi stealing her aunt's ring in order to claim her title) hasn't been seen since its original airing due to complaints of the sterotypical portrayal of the Polish community. Every other airing of this episode in the U.S. uses the opening from the episode "It's Your Party And I'll Crash If I Want To" in addition to removing all references to Poland and Mimi's Polish heritage, though other countries like Australia have aired the original version of the episode.
The A-Team gave us "Without Reservations", which was meant to be the second-to-last episode of the series, but was lost and never aired in syndication. It was found a few years later and aired as the last episode during reruns. It continues to be listed (on the DVD sets, Netflix, etc.) as the last episode, but it is canonically the second-to-last. Murdock's t-shirts (which read "Almost Fini" in this one and "Fini" in "The Grey Team"), as well as their conversation at the end of "The Grey Team" both make it pretty clear that "The Grey Team" takes place some time after "Without Reservations."
Unlike virtually every Disney Channel Original Movie, the 9/11-centric Tiger Cruise is hardly ever shown on television (while this is a given for older DCOMs, it applied to this one almost from the start) and it would seem has never been screened internationally (certainly not in Britain) - and although two of its stars have become better known since then, it hasn't been released on VHS or DVD (it wouldn't even be a case of Billing Displacement to prominently display Hayden Panettiere on the cover, since she does in fact star in the film. Jennette McCurdy as her sister, on the other hand...).

Music

An endless list of compositions by almost any composer from the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical eras (including Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, etc.) are considered lost or an autograph has never been found to confirm whether it has been rightly attributed. These range from small works to larger scale works such as operas.
- To name an example, several unique manuscripts of Haydn were lost when the opera house at Esterhaza (where he was employed) burned down in 1979.
The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius published very little in the last twenty years of his life, and he indicated an interest in adding an eighth symphony to the seven he'd already done. To this day it's unclear whether he finished or even started this work, and it remains one of the biggest mysteries in classical music. See here.
What is now known as Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No.9 in E-flat major is actually the second version of the work. Shostakovich told Beethoven Quartet first violinist Dmitri Tsyganov that the first version was "based on themes from childhood", but he became dissatisfied with the work and destroyed the manuscripts in a fit of depression in 1961.
The French composer Paul Dukas, best known for "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", was an ardent perfectionist and destroyed the manuscripts of pieces which he felt were not up to standard; his surviving works only constitute around half of his total output. Among the lost works are several operas and ballets, a symphony, and a violin sonata.
Many works by Alberic Magnard (a contemporary of Dukas) were also destroyed, albeit not directly by the composer's own choosing. In the early days of World War One, Magnard spotted German troops marching by his home. He opened fire on the soldiers, killing one of them. The Germans responded by burning down Magnard's house - without letting Magnard out. Several unpublished works, including at least two operas and a song cycle, were lost in the blaze.
Green Day recorded the album Cigarettes and Valentines in 2003, only to have the master tapes stolen. As it turned out, the band wasn't all that happy with the album anyway, so instead of re-recording it they elected to write an album's worth of new material. The whole thing turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since the new album became American Idiot.
The release of happy hardcore group Dune's planned 2000 album Reunion and the single "Heaven" were cancelled due to a lawsuit from A7(not to be confused with Avenged Sevenfold) accusing them of plagiarizing their song "Piece of Heaven". A couple years earlier, while Verena was on hiatus from the band, they had another cancelled album, Five, due to poor performance of the singles.
Self's Ornament and Crime was supposed to be released in 2004, but was indefinitely shelved once Universal Music Group acquired DreamWorks Records. The unreleased album did leak, however, and the band themselves put up a collection of its outtakes for free download under the title Porno, Mint, And Grime. The album is probably never to see official release, but the band are slowly working another album, Super Fake Nice. The story of that album is another trope.
This can be extremely common in the music industry. If an album has produced repeated unsuccessful singles, or if the label goes through a restructure and ends up firing some key people, it can end up unreleased. In some cases, advance copies may end up at radio stations, but no copies show up in stores. Some examples in the Country Music industry include:
- Amy Dalley released seven singles between 2003 and 2008 but never got an album out because, at the time, the label had a policy that leadoff singles had to hit Top 20 before the album dropped — when most other country labels are satisfied if a new artist even makes Top 40. Along the way, she hit #23, #27 and #29.
- This same policy screwed over Steve Holy, who had five singles between his biggest hits "Good Morning Beautiful" and "Brand New Girlfriend". None of the five songs made it higher than #26.
- David Nail's debut album got axed at the last second because its producer, Keith Stegall, had just gotten fired from the label (Mercury Nashville). Promotional copies had already made it to some radio stations.
- Eric Heatherly also had his first Mercury album go woefully under-promoted (although its leadoff single made #6), and his second album go unreleased, for the same reason. He later had a second unreleased album for DreamWorks Records after its lead-off single tanked. As with David Nail, Eric's DreamWorks album had seen release of promotional copies.
- James Otto ended up subverting this. While his debut album had a few advance copies dropped around in 2002, the actual album didn't see the light of day until 2004. He had to change a couple tracks because another artist wanted to release one of them (specifically Montgomery Gentry with "Gone") as a single.
- John Berry also had two unreleased albums in a row: the first, Crazy for the Girl, was dropped (and its single withdrawn after only a couple weeks on the chart) because he was having vocal cord troubles and couldn't finish recording it. After recovery, he recorded Better Than a Biscuit, which didn't get released because he asked out of his contract the week before it was supposed to come out.
- Yet another example of this happening twice to the same artist is Jessica Andrews. Also signed to DreamWorks at the time, she was slated to release Ain't That Life in 2005, but it never saw release due to the label abruptly closing only months after the second single hit the charts. She eventually moved to Lyric Street, where she released the single "Everything", only to get screwed over by that label closing.
  - Indeed, Lyric Street has not been kind to its artists in that regard. Besides Jessica Andrews, nearly 1/3 of the label's roster has had at least one unreleased album, even if it had a charted single, and Josh Gracin's second album was delayed for two years (although that one was mostly his choice since he was unsatisfied with the first draft). Bucky Covington perhaps got the shortest end of the stick, due to his 2010 single "A Father's Love (The Only Way He Knew How)" having hit the charts just as the label went under; another label pushed the single to #23 but he still didn't get the album out.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor's first album, All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling was limited to a release of 33 cassette tapes. To this date, none of the songs have leaked to the Internet and all that's known are the album title, song titles, and the album art.
Some of the songs from The Beatles' 1962 Decca session were included on the first Anthology compilation, but many are still only available as bootlegs.
Hawkwind's 1975 album Warrior on the Edge of Time, arguably their most psychedelic and inventive, has not been included in the remastering programme because the copyrights are owned by all the participating band members, making royalty negotiations difficult.
The Enid's debut 1976 album In the Region of the Summer Stars was not reissued in its original form for many years because of an apparent dispute between the band and EMI records. With only the multitracks for side 1 available, the band were forced to remix and overdub side 1 and completely re-record side 2 for the 1984 reissue. It was not until 2010, when a bootleg of the 1976 version appeared, that EMI finally supplied the band with a digital transfer of the original 2-track masters and the band were able to re-release the original album officially on CD.
Twelfth Night's self-titled album was released in 1986, but because of a dispute over royalty payments no CD version appeared until 2005, nineteen years later.
The film version of "Lapti Nek" from Return of the Jedi was never included on any soundtrack albums, and has since been only available on the VHSs and the 2006 Limited Edition DVD. There was also an unused piece of Source Music composed by Joseph Williams that was lost.
Bob Dylan recorded Blood on The Tracks in New York in September 1974 and was planning to release it in early December. Almost literally at the last minute he postponed the release, then went into a Minneapolis studio shortly after Christmas and re-recorded 5 of the album's 10 songs ("Tangled Up in Blue", "You're a Big Girl Now", "Idiot Wind", "Lily, Rosemary & The Jack of Hearts" and "If You See Her, Say Hello"). Despite Dylan's many rarities and outtake collections, only the original New York take of "You're a Big Girl Now" has been officially released. Alternate takes of several of the others have been released, but the takes that were chosen for the original album are only available in bootleg form.
Prince has a bevy of unreleased material that he's expressed no interest in ever releasing, to whit: fifty music videos, well over a dozen full albums, and about three documentaries.
According to music historian Tom Graves, Robert Johnson is known to have recorded 59 tracks in his career. Only 42 of these are currently available.
The Beach Boys have quite a few unreleased albums stashed away. The famed "SMiLE" was finally released in 2011, but the others (including "Landlocked," "Adult Child," "Lei'd In Hawaii," and the oddly-titled "New Album") will probably never see release - primarily because they're mostly horrendous.
The Bee Gees intended to follow their snore-inducing 1973 album "Life In A Tin Can" with a similarly-styled-but-far-superior album called (believe it or not) "A Kick in the Head Is Worth Eight in the Pants." Both the group and their manager deemed this album terrible, and it was scrapped, prompting the group to start experimenting with the black-funk sound that would define their late Seventies hits. Given this album's popularity among fans, however, it has been bootlegged a number of times in its entirety.
David Bowie's Toy — which would have primarily featured new versions of some of his earliest songs — was going to be his followup to 1999's hours... but was shelved by Virgin Records, his label at the time. Two new songs he wrote for it were rerecorded and released on 2002's Heathen, and several of the other tunes became single B-sides/special edition tracks. In 2011, the original album was leaked online; because Bowie hasn't released a new album since '03 and has been a Reclusive Artist since '06, this made waves in the music press and even got a formal review by Classic Rock magazine.
All of Venom now that Chamillionaire and his record label have been released from Universal Records.
The Butthole Surfers' 1998 album After The Astronaut had promo copies sent out, but the official release was pulled due to negative reception both from reviewers and from their label. About half of the album's songs would get reworked for their next album, The Weird Revolution, which was released on a new label a few years later. Also, bizarrely, the back cover of After The Astronaut ended up becoming the front cover of Marcy Playground's Shapeshifter.
Powerman 5000's Anyone For Doomsday? similarly got pulled from official release after review copies were sent out (two weeks before its official release date, in fact). In this case though, the band themselves decided not to release it. Rumor had it that this was because the title started seeming Too Soon after 9/11, but frontman Spider has said it was just because he felt it was too similar to their previous album.
- Currently, Anyone For Doomsday? is available on iTunes.
When The Minutemen's double album Double Nickels On The Dime was released on cd, it was missing three songs from the original release ("Mr. Robot's Holy Orders", "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love", and "Little Man With A Gun In His Hand"): The album ran too long to be compatible with all cd players, so the band personally picked their three least favorite songs and cut them. The songs aren't available as digital downloads either, at least not the versions that were on the album. To hear these missing songs you have to either buy the still-in-print vinyl version, or settle for different version of them on other albums (live versions of "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" and "Mr Robot's Holy Orders" are on Post-Mersh Vol 3 and Ballot Result respectively, while an earlier recording of "Little Man With A Gun In His Hand" is on Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat). Or of course you can find digitized versions of the record out there.
Jason Aldean narrowly averted this when the studio holding the masters to his second album, Relentless, caught fire but stopped just shy of the room holding the masters.
Kraftwerk's Techno Pop. A few of the songs were moved on to Electric Cafe, and the single "Tour de France" became the basis for its own album nearly two decades later.
Happens quite a bit with almost any artist you can mention. When they record an album, a lot of them start off with about 20-30 songs to choose from, which is then whittled down to the 10-20 that actually make it on to the album. A few of them become B-Sides, but a lot of the rest simply disappear, either unrecorded or as rough demos. For one example, when Rachel Stevens was recording her second album, Come and Get It, a song called "Nothing in Common" was recorded but didn't make the cut, which led to a few whispers among Rachel's fans about wanting to hear it, since her previous collaboration with producer Richard X had given Rachel her biggest hit, "Some Girls." Six years later, Richard X, leaked the demo on one of his websites.
For a couple of years, Red House Painters' last album, Old Ramon had become one of the most famous lost albums of all time. Recorded in the summer of 1998 and originally slated for a 1999 release, Island Records dropped the band before the album came out and cancelled the album's release. The record company absolutely refused to let the band have it back claiming copyright issues. After several companies tried to buy the rights for the album and got denied, Sub Pop finally offered enough money for it and the album was released in 2001.
Between Tin Planet and Suburban Rock 'n' Roll, Space made an album of songs with the working title of Love You More Than Football. The provisional tracklisting was published on the band's website, and song titles were leaked to magazines. One of the songs, 'Diary Of A Wimp', was released as a single in 2000, while 'Gravity' was premiered at gigs on the Bad Days Tour in 1998 and included on the Greatest Hits Album. However, due to problems with the record company and increasing delays, the album was never actually released and is now only available on bootleg. It's also the last album with Jamie Murphy on it, and also the last album with lead vocals by other band members besides Tommy Scott (or instrumentals).
KMFDM's 1984 debut album Opium only saw an initial release of 200 cassettes in Germany, and the master tapes were lost for nearly two decades before being salvaged from a house ravaged by fire and water damage. It finally got a full release in 2002.
Jinkaku Radio's song "Hikizan" will probably never be released simply because one member criticized a seiyuu for the show it was supposed to be the closing theme for.

New Media

The Hire, a series of short films produced by BMW (featuring Clive Owen as an unnamed driver of BMW cars who gets involved in various adventures), was originally intended for Internet broadcast. The series proved so popular that BMW eventually put out a few different DVD versions. But Forrest Whitaker had a clause in his contract that stated that the segment he appeared in ("The Follow", directed by Wong Kar Wai and also featuring Mickey Rourke and supermodel Adriana Lima) would only be distributed on the Internet, so some DVDs lacked that segment. Anyone wanting a complete DVD (and you should, as "The Follow" is one of the best in the series) is advised to be cautious in purchasing it.
Cassandra Clare deleted The Draco Trilogy after she became a published author. "Bootleg" copies can still be found in some corners the Internet, though latter chapters are particularly elusive.

Newspaper Comics

There is a missing strip of Calvin and Hobbes that was printed only in half of the papers running the strip, while the other half had another unique strip, which was never reprinted. Here they are.◊
- Of course, since both strips appear in the published collections, neither is properly "lost" at all, at least now.
At one point in Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse newspaper strip, Mickey, believing that Minnie is leaving him for another man, sinks into a depression so deep he spends a week attempting to commit suicide. After a week of failure, he decides he might be overreacting a little. You can imagine that this sequence is left out in the reprint of the story arc, and it is completely absent from D23's newspaper strip archive.
Traditionally, most newspaper comics were not re-published in complete form when packaged as books, leading to many strips that were published once in papers and never seen again. (Among other reasons, it allowed editors to cull out weaker or more controversial strips.) Peanuts is a good example — a large percentage of strips were never republished in book form until the release of the "premium" complete collections.
Pearls Before Swine may very well be the only work of fiction to have a Lampshade Hanging about a Missing Episode. Pig once tried digging to the other side of the Earth to a fictional country and he says that the original comic strips where he named a country China were removed. They were shown in one of the Pearls books. In fact, many Pearls books contain comic strips that were not printed because they were deemed too offensive or simply not funny by the creator himself. These include one where Pig talks about "ho's" (referring to Ho Chi Minh) or other edited versions where the character Cathy is beheaded.
On April Fool's Day 1997, almost every syndicated cartoonist traded places with another. Bill Amend (FoxTrot) drew that day's Nancy while the Nancy team took that day's FoxTrot. The strip that they drew does not appear in the compilation Welcome to Jasorassic Park, though; in its place are the chewed-up corners of the strip and a flock of "Quincyraptors" (a reference to a Jurassic Park pastiche in that same compilation, wherein each dinosaur resembles Quincy).
For some reason, the Garfield trade books never covered May 2 through May 5, 1990 — Garfield Takes Up Space stops on May 1, and Garfield Says a Mouthful starts on May 6. This is also true of the several reprints of both books, although those four strips are available on garfield.com.

Professional Wrestling

In the era before VCRs and cable television, many promotions (from tiny local promotions to those covering entire regions of the country) had their own syndicated programs. Until the late 1970s/early 1980s, videotape (for those promotions that could afford it) was an expensive commodity, meaning that once a show aired it was reused for taping a future week's show. That, plus the perceived lack of future interest in classic wrestling programs (some stations destroyed the films once aired) probably means that, except for those who are lucky enough to have preserved videotapes/films of the programs, the weekly syndicated programs of many promotions — especially the smaller ones — are forever lost to history.
- That said, World Wrestling Entertainment has hundreds of thousands of hours of videotapes and films of classic matches, including its classic syndicated and cable programs (at least from the early-1980s forward), plus programs and matches from now-defunct rivals including the NWA, WCW, ECW and AWA.
- Some larger independent promotions have syndicated shows that are only shown regionally, and may only be clip shows. Usually this isn't a big deal, but occasionally a really good match takes place, and with the exception of the live audience is never seen in full by anyone. (Usually, the matches are edited for time, placement of commercials and to remove "dull" moments.)
  - Arguably the best example of one of these is an ECW in 2000 between Yoshihiro Tajiri and Psicosis. For some background info - Psicosis was running out his WCW contract and planning to go to ECW, and the mutants were very high on the possible matches. Psicosis and Tajiri outperformed even the mutant's expectations and put on a near-5star match. But... it aired on ECW's syndicated show instead of ECW on TNN, and the whole thing to date hasn't been seen.
Rey Mysterio's WCW career from the point he was unmasked to the demise of the promotion will never be officially marketed by WWE thanks to the fact that they want to keep his face a mystery.
- That's not the only reason. He was forced to remove his mask by WCW or he would be fired, and so he would like to forget that it ever happened. He still has to wrestle without it on his occasional appearances in Mexican promotions, as per their 'once off, the mask stays off' rules.
Several title changes of the WWF's major titles have never been recorded — or if they were, were never shown on television. Two prime examples came early in the history of the Intercontinental Championship:
- Pedro Morales winning the title from arrogant weightlifting hero Ken Patera. The match took place December 8, 1980 — the night of the murder of John Lennon — at New York's Madison Square Garden. It is unclear whether that night's card was televised (as the venue's cards routinely were through 1992) on New York's MSG channel, but if it was the broadcast would have been pre-empted due to breaking news coverage of Lennon's death. (Lennon was shot at about the time of the Morales-Patera match.)
- Tito Santana defeating the evil Magnificent Muraco on February 11, 1984, for the title. The most common explanation for the lost footage was that, in taping matches for later broadcast, there was no more videotape available to tape the Santana-Muraco match. Only brief clips from the match exist today and were later included as part of several video releases showcasing the title's history.
Over The Edge 1999 is one of the few PPVs to not have appeared on video or repeat. This is because Owen Hart died whilst he was making his entrance from the ceiling. The footage of Owen falling exists in the vaults but on the PPV itself it was replaced by a different camera facing the crowd. Owen's wife has filed a lawsuit against WWE to ensure they don't release the footage, so it is unlikely we'll see it.
Most, if not all, matches involving Chris Benoit will likely never be re-aired or — with the exception of supercard releases such as WrestleMania — included in future video releases, due to the circumstances surrounding his death and the deaths of his wife and son.

Radio

American Top 40: The original version of the second-ever broadcast, aired July 11, 1970 (and featuring the chart for July 18) is rumored to be lost; however, some insist that a "reconstituted" version, featuring clips from the July 4 show (AT40's debut, incidentally) and the July 25 program were used to create a "new" July 11, 1970 show. All other episodes from the original 1970-1995 run are known to exist.
- Repeats of Casey Kasem-hosted American Top 40 shows, from July 1970 through August 1988, are broadcast as part of two different radio programs: "AT40: The 70s" (featuring 1970-1979 shows) and "AT40: The 80s" (focusing on the 1980-1988 episodes). Both programs are distributed by the Premiere Radio Network. As both packages include Casey Kasem's name in the title (i.e., "Casey Kasem's 'American Top 40': The 80s"), it is not likely that shows hosted by either the occassional guest host or by latter-day host Shadoe Stevens will be aired anytime soon. (Stevens took over for Kasem after he departed ABC Radio Network in August 1988, and hosted AT40 for the rest of its original run; the apparent exclusion of August 1988-December 1989 shows in the 80s package could easily be resolved by the pre-show announcer simply stating that said program aired after Kasem's departure and Stevens taking over the hosting role.)
- Although few, if any repeats, have been aired since their original airings, it is believed all shows from AT40's country music sister program, American Country Countdown, exist. 1973-2006 has been digitally remastered by Charis Music Group. ACC began airing in October 1973, and has been hosted by Don Bowman (1973-1978), Bob Kingsley (1978-2005) and Kix Brooks (2006-present), with Kingsley starting another countdown show of his own.
The improvised radio sitcom The Masterson Inheritance has The Marooned Mastersons, an unbroadcast episode recorded back-to-back with the last normal episode, though judging by the performer's comments it was never intended to be aired anyway. They quickly made doubly sure of this by sending the story into very un-Radio 4 territory, including homosexual incest and a plan to use someone's enormous penis as a banana boat to escape the island, only for him to die of massive blood loss after they tried to christen their 'ship' and the champagne glass shattered. The episode eventually made its way onto the internet.
Most of the episodes of The Goon Show's first four series were erased, which means almost none of fourth Goon Michael Bentine's episodes survived in any form. (He left after Series 2.) Some of the missing Series 4 stories were subsequently remade for the overseas-broadcast-only "Vintage Goons" series, which have survived.
The first episode of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue was erased and presumed lost forever, until a home recording showed up. The sound quality is not great, but you can make all the jokes out.
Eleven early episodes of Just a Minute (seven from 1968, three from 1969, and one from 1974) have no known surviving recordings. Additionally, the best preserved copies of certain episodes from the 1970s are missing a few seconds (mostly intros or outros, although a few episodes are missing short segments of gameplay), while others only exist in the Transcription Services editions, edited to fit in shorter time slots and sometimes with rounds spliced from other episodes featuring the same panel.
Schadenfreude, by the comedy troupe of the same name, parodied this trope with its missing Episode 39, supposedly removed due to offending someone they joked about in the show. The troupe would again use Episode 39 as the justification for its reunion show, claiming that, by skipping an episode, it violated its contractual obligations to NPR, and had to team back up for one last show.
The radio version of Hancock's Half Hour ran for 102 episodes across six series between 1954 and 1959. Of these, 31 are missing, including three episodes of the second series when Harry Secombe stood in for an unwell Tony Hancock. See above for the TV episodes lost.
Beyond Our Ken was the first of two BBC Radio sketch series to star Kenneth Horne, with a supporting cast comprising Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick, Betty Marsden, and Bill Pertwee. It ran for seven series between 1958 and 1964 for a total of 123 episodes, of which 24 are missing. Its Spiritual Successor Round The Horne (starring the same five core cast members) survives intact.
Apparently, no recordings exist of any of the 1950 Blackhawk Radio Drama's 16 episodes.
There was a 13-episode BBC Radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings in 1955-56 which no longer survives. A 1960s adaptation of The Hobbit only survived as an off-air recording (fortunately of good quality), without individual episode credits.
As late as 1984 The BBC wiped the pilot episode for a planned Dad's Army radio sequel, It Sticks Out Half a Mile, because Arthur Lowe sounded drunk. He was in fact terminally ill. The series was recast with other Dad's Army actors and 13 episodes were made. Astonishingly, most of the series was also wiped - the last known major BBC purge. The pilot and all the lost episodes have been recovered from domestic recordings of varying quality.
Adventures in Odyssey has several, mostly due to the character known as "Officer Harley" a rather buffoonish policeman. Parents thought the character would be a bad impression on the police force, so the charcter was removed. The trope is subverted as some of the episodes reair with Harley edited out of the episode or replaced with another character, such as Eugene Meltsner, but there are several episodes which really are missing, because of Harley being too important of a character or controversial issues, such as abortion.
Dick Barton — Special Agent was a popular adventure series which ran on BBC Radio from 1946 to 1951.*
It is widely perceived as having been axed by BBC executives due to its sensationalism in favour of the more sedate rural soap opera The Archers, which has been on the air ever since.
Of the 711 episodes, only three were preserved by the BBC, as well as a handful of clips. However, in February 2011, 338 episodes were recovered from the National Film and Sound Archive in Australia; though they are not quite identical to the original British recordings, they use the same scripts and music cues edited into a slightly different final format.

Real Life

NASA lost the original recordings from the Apollo 11 first landing on the Moon. The TV signals were beamed to Australia (to a dish in Parkes, NSW, to be precise), and then sent in reduced quality to the USA. All known copies are from the lower quality video. The original high quality ones have never really been publicly seen and NASA has lost them. This, of course, is fodder for those who think the whole thing is a Government Conspiracy.
- All of the data from the receiving antennas was recorded on half-inch tape reels, so the original TV footage almost certainly survives in the archives. The problem is that the tapes were archived without reference to what kind of data they contained. Needle, meet haystack.
  - Not to set of the Epileptic Trees again, but you would think for something THAT important, they would have at least sent a couple of interns down to try and find it. It would seem like that would be a big priority if there was any hope of finding it.
- For the minutia minded, the quality reduction was because the Eagle's video camera used an exotic slow-scan format that was utterly incompatible with network TV. The broadcast version had to be sent out by filming a screen showing the high-quality version.
Many sporting events from the early days of US television broadcasting are at least partially lost, including the first two Super Bowls and numerous World Series games.
- NFL Films (and its predecessor) were at those Super Bowls, and footage from them is seen on various league-produced specials and DVD releases, but the entire games are not available.
- In 2011, an apparently genuine copy of the CBS broadcast of Super Bowl I was found. While it was missing the halftime show and most of the third quarter, and was fast-forwarded and pixelated in spots, it's still about 90 minutes longer than anything previously seen.
- One lost World Series broadcast which must be particularly galling for baseball fans is Don Larsen's perfect game at the 1956 Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The MLB Network reconstructed the game broadcast from existing film and audiotape, airing it as its first broadcast in 2008.
Countless early news broadcasts are long since wiped, including the first televised address from the White House (delivered by Harry Truman), and the first commercial television broadcast, chronicling the opening of the 1939 World's Fair by Franklin Roosevelt.
In truth, no signal is ever really lost. Every broadcast and transmission and reflected light image travels away from Earth at the speed of light, preserved for eternity... insofar as the inverse square law permits.
- Of course, since it's impossible to move faster than the speed of light, and since the signal will eventually be so weak that it's clouded by background radiation, any signal that isn't recorded by some civilization is lost forever.
The 18 minutes of missing Richard Nixon audio tape.
- Maybe not; modern science is getting closer and closer to being able to restore the wiped tape.

Theater

Many Gilbert and Sullivan fans have never heard of their first collaboration, Thespis. The reason is that Sullivan's music is lost except for two songs: "Little Maid of Arcadee" (published as sheet music) and "Climbing Over Rocky Mountain" (reused in The Pirates of Penzance). Since Gilbert's libretto survived, there have been multiple efforts to "reconstruct" Thespis with "Sullivan-style" music.
References to a play co-written by William Shakespeare titled "Cardenio", which is generally accepted to have been completely lost. There are records of another show, called "Love's Labours Won", but it is unknown if this is a lost play, or simply an alternate title for a show that was later renamed.
- It was thought to be an alternate title for Taming of the Shrew, until a fragment turned up that listed them as separate plays. The "lost play" theory is now considered the more likely.
  - It was destroyed after witches tried to use it to release their sisters from their prison.
Countless ancient Greek plays have been lost to the historical ether. To put this in perspective:
- Aeschylus, regarded as the father of dramatic tragedy, is known to have written seventy plays; today, we possess only seven. Among the lost plays are the second and third plays in the Prometheia trilogy, Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, of which only fragments survive.
- Sophocles, the second great Greek tragedian, is credited with 120 plays, but only seven have survived in their entirety. Fragments of a previously lost play of his, The Progeny, were discovered in 2005. The play is part of the Oedipus cycle, and is apparently about the Seven Against Thebes.
- The third great Greek tragedian, Euripides, fares only slightly better, with eighteen or nineteen (at least one play's authorship is debated) of over ninety plays surviving. Notably, he is the only Greek tragedian represented by a complete surviving "satyr play" (a burlesque tragicomedy performed in the middle or at the end of a group of tragic plays), The Cyclops.
- Aristophanes, the greatest of the Greek comedians, has eleven surviving plays out of around forty.
- And these four have the best preserved bodies of work of all ancient Greek dramatists; most of their contemporaries are not even represented by a single surviving play (the vast majority were lost after the fall of the Roman Empire).

Video Games

Video game example, kind of: The entire fourth installment of the seven-part (six-part?) Leisure Suit Larry series was never made, largely because lead designer Al Lowe couldn't figure out how to logically continue the series from the third game on and chose to skip straight to the fifth one. Its lack is a major plot point in the fifth game and it pops up in other series by the same company, never playable.
- Another explanation is that Larry 4 was originally going to be a massively multiplayer online adventure game (in the early nineties!), but development never got off the ground as modem technology was still much too primitive at the time, so in the end the small minigames that were used to beta-test the project's online capabilities were packaged together and sold as The Sierra Network.
  - Leisure Suit Larry 4 turns up as a gag/plot point in Space Quest 4. Vohaul smuggled his consciousness onto a disk of Leisure Suit Larry 4, and the Xenonian scientists are so eager to play it that they load it into the planet-controlling supercomputer. When you're in Vohaul's lair later in the game, one of the programs on his computer is "LSL4."
- Legend has it that Al Lowe had intended to end the series with 3 and thus once said that "there won't be a LSL4". Well... there isn't.
Many computer games, after their initial publishing run, suffer from a problem somewhat unique to the medium. As Science Marches On, it can be quite rewarding to produce a Video Game Remake or Updated Rerelease especially designed for newer computers, except that the source code and other assets of many commercial games are rarely held onto. For example, when the xu4 and Exult projects wanted to make source ports of Ultima IV and VII, Origin admitted that it had lost everything. And when Fallout Tactics was under development just a few years after the previous Fallout game had been released, it turned out that virtually all of the original game's 3D assets had been lost, and nearly all of it ended up being remodeled.
Speaking of Fallout, there's the original sequel to Fallout 2 made by Black Isle, code-named "Van Buren", which was almost more than half done before Black Isle's parent company Interplay went bankrupt and the game was never seen again. Fallout 3 was eventually made 10 years later by Bethesda yet had nothing to do with Van Buren.
- Fallout: New Vegas, however, does reference several concepts that would have been part of Van Buren, specifically Caesars Legion, the Van Grafs and Hoover Dam. It's no coincidence that the development team for New Vegas was comprised of many former members of Black Isle.
Many games that don't make it overseas are this to the foreign fans of a series who are cursed with hearing people who actually did get it talk about it, but will never play it themselves. If they're lucky, it's an old game that will get a Fan Translation. If not, they're screwed.
The excessively violent and knowingly offensive beat/slash 'em up Thrill Kill was pulled from distribution before it could offend, likely to avoid fears of a moral outcry. The game developers were rightfully annoyed by this; leaking a beta version of the game before releasing another fighting game using the same game mechanics, albeit marginally toned-down (i.e., LESS bloody and gory).
Games magazine Amiga Power reviewed Putty Squad, made by Team 17, and gave it 91%. High praise from such a hardline mag. Trouble was, they still hadn't released the Amiga version by the time the magazine folded, two years after the review. Gallingly, the SNES version was released on time.
The fourth game in Atari's Swordquest series, Airworld, was never developed, probably due to The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. One of Parker Brothers' Return of the Jedi games also never made it past the concept art stage(The other unreleased game, Ewok Adventure, was discovered as a prototype).
Similar to the Leisure Suit Larry example above, there was an installment of Sam & Max: Freelance Police made called Sam & Max: Freelance Police!!. However, LucasArts cancelled it and it wouldn't be until another four years before Telltale Games would make a Sam & Max game. Like LSL above, the game is referenced in the Telltale Games series as a "particularly gruesome case".
- The gruesomeness (and bitterness) around the LucasArts sequel is that the game was finished before being caught up in the studio's decision to leave the adventure game business entirely.
The reason why many Sega Saturn classics like Panzar Dragoon Saga and Shining Force 3 have never been re-released is because Sega lost the original programming code for the games. Same for their System-16 (and then some) arcade games.

Web Animation

Web cartoon Bonus Stage never had an Episode 4 - Ep 4 being a number of previews for the artist's other works that was eventually removed. But one day, a "Lost Episode" was hidden behind a fake Internet Explorer 404 page. But the episode was clearly new as could be: references to later episodes and the series' oft-obnoxious fan community were animated half in full, early-series lazy animation, half with frame-by-frame animation. The episode was later re-re-lost in a site redesign.
- Which might have been because of Phil erasing the series from history in the 87th episode.
The Homestar Runner Strong Bad Email series played with this. Sbemail 22 was a missing episode for five months, but not because it had been suppressed or anything; the creators, in the process of creating the emails, had inadvertently skipped over that number. Between emails 40 and 41, they went back and created "sbemail 22" and jokingly promoted it as a missing episode.
- Two cartoons, "Marshmallow's Last Stand" and "A Jumping Jack Contest" are absent from the site, but were both released on the "Everything Else, Vol. 2" DVD.
Several Happy Tree Friends episodes have not been uploaded to Mondo Media's YouTube channel. Among them are a "Smoochie" episode with Cuddles, an entire episode of the TV series, one brief Christmas sketch and two shorts starring Cro-Marmot (one of which is a pastiche of 1930s black and white cartoons, the other being an "interview" with him).

Web Original

Several early lonelygirl15 videos have been removed from the official listing (in some cases, probably due to copyright infringement); namely, "First Blog / Dorkiness Prevails", "School Work in Summer... BLECHH!!!", "Grillz feat. Danielbeast, LG15, P. Monkey and O'n.", "Proving Science Wrong", "My Lazy Eye (and P. Monkey gets Funky!)", "The Tolstoy Principle (and Dad "talks" to Daniel)" and "Daniel, Be Careful". The videos are referenced on numerous occasions in later episodes and still viewable on YouTube.
- The later series 1 episode "Uncle Dan (D-Bone Remix)" is missing from both lg15.com and YouTube, but is viewable on Revver.
The earliest portions of the League of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions were erased from the web (although various posters had offline copies of most of it), the copies were later put up on a Geo Cities site.
- Thanks to Yahoo shuttering Geo Cities in 2009, it is now gone again from the web.
Most of the first season of LoadingReadyRun is unavailable; in the early days, videos would be phased out to make room for newer ones (this was before the existence of YouTube). Most of the episodes have not been reposted, due to some of them having copyrighted music, the crew being busy with other things, and that most of them were just plain bad.
CUT!, a Slender Man blog that was distinguished by its heavy use of Gallows Humor, has been wiped clean of entries.
Limyaael's first Faean novels, the Orlath trilogy, were taken down from Fiction Press due to someone plagiarizing them (Or something). Which is a real shame, because what little is known about the plot of those novels, both through Limyaael's comments and the other novels taking place in the same universe, seem to indicate that the trilogy was an absolutely brilliant Deconstructive Parody of cliched fantasy.
Some Creepypastas are based on this kind of thing. Some examples include "Dead Bart", "Suicide Mouse", "Red Mist/Squidward's Suicide", and "Candle Cove" (which is technically a lost SERIES rather than a lost episode).
Draw Your Own Story episode 1-9 and a good chunk of episode 10, due in part to moderators deleting old threads on the forum where they were hosted, and in part due to the site being hacked and a lot of uploaded files (i.e. images that made up episode 10) ending up lost forever. What little we know of them is pieced together from memories as well as old episodes still on the contributors' hard drives.
Several writers of the original Darwin's Soldiers RP on Furtopia played out scenes via private messaging. Those scenes were never released.
Game music podcast Nitro Game Injection has two missing episodes: #6, which happened but wasn't recorded, and #54, which KyleJCrb isn't sure ever actually happened...
An early website for Back to the Future: The Ride featured a tour of Doc Brown's institute. One page contained some clever blueprints of Doc's post-trilogy inventions, including a personal time travel suit, a hover-bike, and an improved Mr. Fusion. Sadly, the Internet Archive only saved two captures of the blueprints section, and neither one successfully captured all of the blueprints.
The Nostalgia Chick's first livestream, which was unrecorded.
The website PO.B.R.E. is dedicated to archiving translation and romhacks in brazillian portuguese. Unfortunately, the are a few missing translations.

Webcomics

The original form of Strip #43 has only been mentioned in the author's (Scott Ruhl) comments. Even the webmaster of the site has never seen it - although considering the pun involved with the final strip, one can imagine why Scott Ruhl withheld it from publication.
A lot of the original Magiversity strips were lost when Drunk Duck crashed in 2005, as the creator didn't have backups.
This◊ Penny Arcade comic was taken down after a cease-and-desist from American Greetings.
Most of David Willis's "proto-Shortpacked!" strips have been completely removed from his sites. A few were later on brought back when some filler was needed, but the majority are gone.
The Internet era has created a new type of Missing Episode. Increasingly, promotional web-only tie-in stories or games are used on official sites to promote a product, event, or work. Once the promotion has run its course, the official sites may disappear, along with all that tie-in material. And the relative complexity of a web-hosted multimedia work makes it difficult to just Keep Circulating the Tapes. To take just one illustrative example, comics writer Gail Simone wrote a Superman interactive webcomic story for an official Pepsi Superman Returns promotion. Since the Pepsi promotion ended long ago, and its site is now defunct, if you didn't read it at the time, odds are you never will.

Western Animation

Richard Williams's animated epic, The Thief and the Cobbler, based on the One Thousand and One Nights stories, was in production for almost 30 years before its disastrous release in 1995. The original version of the film was shelved for decades in favor of Williams's other acclaimed works. Eventually, he wanted Warner Bros. to release the film in 1991, but since he was unable to finish the original and that Disney had its own One Thousand and One Nights story, titled Aladdin, in production, Williams was forced out of the project and the deal fell flat. Miramax acquired the U.S. distribution rights and cut a majority of the important scenes and replaced them with Aladdin-like scenes. The film was finally completed and released in 1995. Critics were merciless, panning the film across the board for being an Aladdin rip-off. The unfinished original version is considered to be lost, but has since popped up on bootlegs and YouTube.
- To this day, Richard Williams does not want to talk about this film (possibly because of the way it ruined his career).
Early silent cartoon series like Felix the Cat and Disney's Oswald the Lucky Rabbit have many missing episodes, as the rights holders weren't careful about keeping track of the source materials. Of 150+ silent Felix cartoons, only about two-thirds have apparently survived the ravages of time. Of Disney's 26 Oswald shorts, they've released only 13 on DVD - this is seemingly all they were able to locate.
Two highly anticipated second season episodes of The Boondocks never aired on TV in the US, due to legal threats from various people associated with the BET Network (which was a big target of the two episodes). They WERE released on DVD and iTtunes, but there's still no word on if they will ever see the light of day on [adult swim].
After the Grand Finale movie to Kim Possible aired in 2005, several remaining episodes trickled to air, about one a month. At least one third season episode was held back to serve as DVD bonus material for the finale movie.
The original pilot for the sadly short-lived Father of the Pride never aired on the NBC run, and even failed to appear on the DVD release. It eventually popped up on Sky One in the UK.
- In addition to the pilot, three other episodes were produced but left unaired due to NBC's decision to cancel the series. One of them, like the pilot, ended up on Sky One in the UK.
- Some broadcasts omitted "What's Black, White And Depressed All Over?" from the lineup due to offensive content.
The Ren & Stimpy Show rolled out its own "Missing Episode" just after the end of the show's first run, though this may have been nothing more than a publicity stunt. The countless episodes yanked after one showing would be more serious. (Remember Mr. Horse's presidential bid? Yeah, I can hardly remember it either.)
- A legitimate lost episode, entitled Man's Best Friend, would have aired in 1992, but did not, due to an incredibly violent scene in which Ren beats his and Stimpy's new owner, George Liquor, within an inch of his life with an oar. It did not air in the United States until Spike TV aired it as part of the Ren & Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon series in 2003.
Here's a missing segment of an episode: the Schoolhouse Rock episode "Science Rock" reaired in 1979 and was supposed to air a segment titled "The Greatest Show on Earth", which weather was its main subject. Before the episode aired, the Ringling Bros.-Barnum and Bailey Circus Company objected to using the trademarked name as its title. As a result, ABC left this segment off the episode and also did not include it in the 1995 Science Rock VHS, either. It finally made its first appearance in the 30th Anniversary DVD under the name "Weather Show", but the references to the title were excised akwardly.
Family Guy's "When You Wish Upon A Weinstein" was originally a DVD-only release, and was shown on TV for the first time (three years after it was produced) on Cartoon Network's [adult swim] Block. The episode was pulled by FOX due to fears that the episode was offensive to Jews (despite that Seth MacFarlane brought in an actual rabbi to make sure the episode was kosher. It was, despite what the FOX Broadcast Standards and Practices people say) and Catholics. In the end, only a single line had to be altered for the episode to air on Adult Swim (Peter's line near the end of "I Need A Jew" was changed from "Even though they [the Jews] killed my Lord," to "I don't think they killed my Lord"). After Family Guy was Un Cancelled, FOX themselves showed the episode (with the same line edited as in the Cartoon Network version, and another cut: Quagmire "looking for his keys" in front of Lois was drastically shortened so it wouldn't look like he was masturbating).
- FOX banned the eighth season episode "Partial Terms of Endearment" because it dealt with Lois becoming a surrogate mother and choosing whether to abort her best friend's baby following her best friend's death. The episode was later released as a DVD-exclusive episode (like "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein" did before actually airing on TV), although it has aired in first-run in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
The Very Special Episode of Gargoyles, "Deadly Force" (an episode about the dangers of guns), was removed from the air sequence of the reruns for years, and only returned with certain portions edited out.
Despite what fans may claim, the Transformers: Beast Wars episode "Dark Glass" never got past script form. It is not a missing episode, as it was never actually produced. According to rumors, it was vetoed due to its overly dark content, and would've gone in place of the more lighthearted episode Go with the Flow, had it been produced.
- For some reason, the French dub omitted the episode where Rampage was introduced, meaning that French fans never got to find out his backstory and had a new character apparently appear out of nowhere.
The short-lived Nicktoon Invader Zim had one quarter of a season left unaired and a whole half-season left unproduced. In the UK, the unaired episodes were eventually broadcast after it was pointed out to Nickelodeon that they had used clips from them in an advert.
Numerous PBS affiliates have pulled the Arthur episode "Bleep" from the airwaves due to its blatant use of profanity (which is obviously censored with the old fashioned bleep, of course!). Some affiliated have aired this episode, but rarely. (Evidently, kids don't need to learn about bad words.)
- WGBH and other affiliates have also banned "Arthur's Big Hit" from the airwaves due to a scene where a furious Arthur punches D.W. in the arm for destroying a plane he created. You can see that scene here
  - It is interesting to note that the scene itself has become a cultural internet phenomenon, as many YouTubers have parodied the scene itself.
The Simpsons episode "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson," much of which takes place in and around the World Trade Center, was withdrawn from syndication after 9/11. However, in a reversal of the "Too Soon" situation, fans protested the removal of the episode (since it's one of the most popular episodes of the series) and it was quickly reinstated (with the jokes centered around the Twin Towers either heavily edited or cut entirely on some local affiliates — others have shown the episode uncut and uncensored, save for some time cuts and a man's line about how, "They stick all the jerks in Tower One"); the original uncut episode is on DVD).
- The later episode "New Kids On The Blecch" was removed from syndication in some areas, presumably because of the destruction of the Mad Magazine headquarters by naval seacraft. Though one may jokingly assume it's because of the backlash from having all five members of NSYNC as guest stars.
- The episode "A Streetcar Named Marge" was also pulled from syndication after Hurricane Katrina because of its references to New Orleans being a horrid, run-down hellhole. In the UK, the BBC did unknowingly air this episode around the time of Hurricane Katrina and ended up issuing a public apology for it after being barraged by complaints.
- In the UK, the episode "The Cartridge Family" was omitted from the Sky One broadcast because it showed a violent, town-wide soccer riot, addressed the issue of gun control (which is taboo in the UK), and contains scenes of characters irresponsibly using firearms (particularly the scene where Bart finds Homer's gun in the refrigerator and uses it to play William Tell with Milhouse). Channel 4 showed the episode, but the end where Marge decides to keep the gun because of how good she looked with it was cut.
  - The BBC who previously had UK terrestrial rights for the show (on BBC Two during 1996-2002) were first to broadcast this episode in Britain, and made no cuts. When Sky One regained the broadcast rights for this episode in the mid-2000s, they finally showed this episode uncut.
  - The episode was available on PAL VHS long before it was broadcast uncut, even with a little subtitle stating that it was not for public broadcast on the episode's title card.
- Sky One also partially banned the episode "Weekend at Burnsie's" due to scenes of Homer being assaulted by animals (the crows pecking Homer in the eyes and the drug dog biting Homer in the crotch when he was a teenager) and, of course, the drug themes (Homer smoking marijuana for medical purposes). In contrast, Australia and America have aired the episode, but with higher ratings than normal (in Australia, this episode is rated MA-15 and in America, the rating is TV-14, though it does run with a TV-PG rating in syndication, even though it's not edited for content). Sky have since shown this episode on very few occasions, but only after 9PM and not advertised.
  - Episodes involving lighthearted looks at medicinal use of drugs do seem to draw Sky's ire: "The Good, The Bad And The Drugly" (with its subplot about Lisa being put on anti-depressants after she freaks out over Internet articles predicting that Springfield will be a barren wasteland in 50 years) is also kept for after the watershed.
- The episode “Itchy and Scratchy Land” originally ended with Marge saying, “I get the feeling we forgot something,” followed by a shot of an abandoned Maggie still trapped in the ball room. The deleted scene never turned up in any repeats, nor on syndication and was not restored for the DVD. The people who worked on the episode even fail to mention the offending scene in the commentary.
- In an attempt to prevent controversy from Japanese viewers, Fox never aired the episode "Thirty Minutes over Tokyo" in Japan or released on DVD there. The episode presumably shows the stereotyping of Japanese Culture and a scene which involves Emperor Akihito getting thrown into a box filled with "Sumo Thongs" by Homer.
The images of high-rise buildings fallen over and leaning against each other were so disturbing in the post-9/11 USA that the Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers episode "A Lean on the Property" was stricken from the airwaves; it was also not released on either of the two DVD sets for the show (to date).
- The original movie edit of "To the Rescue" hasn't been aired since 1989, and the five-part version was the one released on DVD.
- The show's later episodes (starting with "Good Times, Bat Times") still haven't been released on DVD anywhere, and it would take - theoretically - only one more release for the show to be completely on DVD (in a mangled, censored version, but hey, it's better than nothing).
  - To clarify, this is the real reason "A Lean on the Property" hasn't been released on DVD yet. The order of the episodes are in the same order as when they first aired, and "A Lean on the Property" aired after "Good Times, Bat Times". Tale Spin's "Last Horizons" was eventually released on DVD, so there's no reason why this wouldn't be on the hypothetical final volume.
Political correctness seems to have forced the Tale Spin episode "The Last Horizon" off air in the USA, with its depictions of a Yellow Peril tinged country of Pandas, although it's available on DVD.
- Another episode- "Flying Dupes" was banned because it had a terrorist-esque plot revolving around a bomb (possibly removed after 9/11).
- In Germany, Tale Spin has got only 64 episodes because "Vowel Play" must have proven impossible to translate sensibly in the first place (due to its plot of Baloo mispelling the skywriting code words he had been tricked by the villain into displaying, rendering the animation incomprehensible in non-Englsh countries.)
In 1968, United Artists permanently pulled eleven Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons from circulation, due to content the studio deemed so racist and so pervasive that no amount of editing could render them suitable for contemporary audiences. (This is in contrast to the many Warner cartoons with brief, and therefore easily cut, instances of now-questionable content such as blackface gags.) To this day, the Censored Eleven cartoons have been neither aired on television nor included in Time Warner's official VHS and DVD collections; however, several have turned up on bootleg video.
- Warner Bros. is seriously considering an official release sometime in 2011 although nothing's confirmed yet.
- A 1990 VHS called "50 of the Greatest Cartoons" that contains All This and Rabbit Stew, one of the Censored Eleven. This cartoon is in the public domain and has been since the year after the list was made. (Two others were in the public domain when the list was made.) And this cartoon features Bugs Bunny. So, if you want a legal hard copy of that one (damn the racism, Bugs Bunny ahead!), look in your local dollar store — you might get lucky.
  - For the record, that's the one that basically has a black version of Elmer Fudd. Actually, he's treated pretty much exactly the same as Elmer Fudd, which shows that Bugs Bunny doesn't discriminate.
- These cartoons are not to be confused with a number of Wartime Cartoons that Warners has also resisted releasing due to problems with depictions of Japanese characters, or Nazi imagery. One of these, Herr Meets Hare, (in which Bugs Bunny matches wits with Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering, and marked the very first "wrong toin at Alberquerque") was finally aired on the Cartoon Network in 2002 as part of a documentary special about World War II cartoons.
  - Head Injury Theater's Jared von Hindman wrote an article describing both the propaganda and the otherwise offensive cartoons.
This trope even crops up in cartoons that you don't expect to be censored. One Dudley Do Right cartoon, "Stokey the Bear", featured a pyromaniac bear in a ranger's hat. The US Forestry Service was, shall we say, not pleased. After finding out that they couldn't sue for trademark infringement (Smokey the Bear is a registered trademark), they pressured Jay Ward Productions to never broadcast it again in the US. It hasn't, but it can be found on the Net thanks to overseas broadcasts.
The 1980s Dungeons And Dragons cartoon had a lost Series Finale. While a script was written for the episode, the episode itself was never produced. It does appear in radio-play format on the DVD, using the original voice actors.
- Until the script surfaced, there was a tinfoil hat theory that the last episode was suppressed due to it being relentlessly grim, with a not-suitable-for-children's-TV shock ending — that the kids actually died on the roller-coaster and that what the viewer is actually watching is their souls in Hell. With the "radio-play" reading of the final script on the DVD set, hopefully those Epileptic Trees can now be put to rest.
Rocko's Modern Life had an infamous episode, "Leap Frogs", pulled out of circulation because the Media Watchdogs finally caught onto the series' sheer amount of stuff that was slipping by. The plot? Mrs. Bighead trying to seduce Rocko. The U.S. Nickelodeon only aired it once, though the Nicktoons channel aired it prior to its 2005 addition of advertising. Though it aired at least twice in Canada (and certainly more, due to YTV's abusive airing of reruns of popular shows), and in Mexico as recently as the summer of 2011.
The Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Elephant Issues" featured a segment titled "One Beer", in which Buster, Plucky, and Hamton drink some beer, resulting in them stealing a car, driving off a mountain, and dying as a result. Because it featured underage drinking and content that was considered disturbing to audiences, this episode was swiftly pulled from rotation after FOX ended their run in the Summer of 1995.
- Ironically, one episode, "Toons From the Crypt", was skipped over the broadcast order by FOX because they found the segment "Night of the Living Pets" too disturbing. The plot? Zombies that turn out to be Elmrya's pets out for her flesh. It did air, however, three years later on Nickelodeon's run of the show. (However, most fan-written episode guides forgot to update their entries of the episode to make note of this.)
- The "Tiny Toons Spring Break Special" aired only just one time when FOX ran the series, and was never shown again. Although the reason for this is unknown, it has been believed that the tape was either wiped or possibly never aired again due to music disputes. The Grand Finale, "Night Goulery", possibly also suffered the same fate (although it did get a VHS release).
- Though they are not missing, two first season episodes did not appear in their original form on the Season 1, Vol. 2 DVD set, and so far only one edit (from "Tiny Toons Music Television") has been noticeable. Word Of God supposedly says these edits may have been an error and a replacement disc program may be executed (though it has not been confirmed).
The Beavis And Butthead third-season opener "Comedians" featured Beavis trying to juggle flaming newspapers and burning down a comedy club. Because it aired only a month before the Ohio mobile home fire that Beavis and Butt-Head were blamed for, this episode was swiftly pulled out of rotation and later heavily censored.
- Other Beavis and Butt-Head episodes were banned or heavily censored for instances of Beavis saying "Fire! Fire!" or flicking a lighter ("Stewart's House", "Kidnapped"), animal cruelty ("Frog Baseball", "Washing the Dog"), inhalant and drug abuse ("Home Improvement", "Way Down Mexico Way") or anything that might be considered poor taste in the aftermath of Columbine and September 11th ("Heroes", "Incognito"). Many of these episodes have aired on Viacom-owned networks overseas unedited.
- There's also the music video segments. Who knows how many of them have been lost forever due to copyright issues? Fortunately, some of the rights have been secured, and over three dozen music videos have made it to the various Mike Judge collections.
Fans of Daria had been waiting forever for a proper DVD release of the show, and the only way to watch the show was through bootlegs and edited reruns on The-N. In 2010, the entire show was released on DVD, but since the costs for the rights to the show's entire soundtrack would have been so staggering as to completely ruin any chance of the set being even moderately affordable (or coming out at all), MTV went ahead and replaced most of the music with soundalikes, generic production music, and cover versions, though they've said that they're taking great pains to make sure that the music replacement is handled with the utmost care so as not to completely destroy the show.
- It should also be noted that, thankfully, the original masters of the show's episodes were used for the set; every episode was released in its original form (minus the music cuts, natch), ensuring that none of the episodes will either be missing OR edited (as they were for airing on The N, a teen-themed Nickelodeon channel).
Comedy Central pulled the South Park episode "Jared Has Aides" from their rotation due to the depiction of Butters getting beaten by his parents. It is still available on the Season Six DVD box set, it (and every other episode listed below, except "Super Best Friends", "200", and "201") is still viewable on the official South Park website, and (as of June 17 2009) it appears to have crept back into the lineup again. Only South Park could make an entire episode with a running gag about AIDS and get in trouble for something completely different.
- The episode "Pip" has only been repeated twice since its premiere in 2000. The reason? The crew doesn't like the episode that much (to be fair, neither did anyone else). Same goes for "Not Without My Anus", the infamous April Fools' Day Terrance and Philip episode, which has never been replayed outside of its original airdate, due mainly to fan outrage - it was aired in place of the conclusion of the previous season's cliffhanger finale. As of 2010, "Pip" started appearing on broadcast network syndication (and only in syndication, Comedy Central has yet to rerun it again).
- "Super Best Friends", an episode which actually shows the Muslim prophet Muhammad, was removed after the controversy regarding the depiction of Muhammad in a political cartoon published in a Dutch newspaper; eventually, the episode made its way back into rotation, then was pulled again (and yanked off the website) after the show's creators recieved death threats from Muslim followers over a scene in "200" (which was also banned) where Muhammad was put in a bear suit. ("Super Best Friends" itself was used to point out the hypocrisy of Comedy Central, who later censored a depiction of Muhammad in "Cartoon Wars".) The same episode made fun of David Blaine and his running of a religion of "Blainetology", which was a thinly-veiled parody of Scientology...
- ...and the episode "Trapped in the Closet", which directly ripped the controversial group apart with damned-near pinpoint accuracy, was taken out of the lineup for obvious reasons (and it was rumored that a repeat of the episode just a couple of months later was pulled at the request of the group and the episode's main celebrity target, noted Scientologist Tom Cruise).
  - Actually, up until the night that "Awesom-O" premiered, commercials WERE advertising a Lemmiwinks sequel. Supposedly, The Return of Lemmiwinks wasn't funny, and was replaced with "Awesom-O". The episode opens with an announcement stating "Due to this week's tragic events in Hawaii, the Lemmiwinks episode will not be shown."
- "200" and "201" were pulled from reruns immediately after the latter's premiere and are currently only available on the season 14 DVD set due to their depiction of Muhammad (see above on "Super Best Friends", which was also pulled).
- Sky One skipped "Cartman Joins NAMBLA" (for its plots of Cartman Joining NAMBLA [the man/boy love association, not the club made up of guys who look like Marlon Brando when he became bald and fat] and Kenny killing his mom's unborn child), Proper Condom Use (due to explicit sexual content), and "Jared Has Aides" (due to the jokes about AIDS [despite that the episode was about how it's okay to make fun of AIDS since enough time has passed where making fun of the disease is no longer considered in poor taste] and the scene of Butters getting beat up by his parents after Cartman crank calls Butters' dad). Channel 4 however aired all 3 a few months later.
The Darkwing Duck episode "Hot Spells" was banned after its initial run on ABC due to the plot revolving around Goslyn making a Deal with the Devil to get magic powers.
The original run of Dexter's Laboratory included a series of supporting shorts called Dial M for Monkey'. The Monkey'' short 'Barbequor' played as a parody/homage to the Silver Surfer/Galactus storyline from Marvel Comics. It was banned shortly after broadcast because the Silver Surfer parody, called the Silver Spooner, had stereotypically homosexual mannerisms. There were other reasons, too, including a drunk Krunk (parody of the Hulk) and a hard-to-miss scene where a background character anxiously waits for the seductive Agent Honeydew to eat a hot dog. Surprisingly it is also not included in the Season 1 DVD set. You can watch it here.
- The pairing episode, 'Double Trouble', had 'Barbequor' replaced with the Season 2 episode "Dexter's Lab: A Story" and the 1995 pilot short 'Changes' (originally titled Dexters Laboratory). As always, this combination was also included in the DVD set. It is highly unlikely that 'Barbequor' may see the light of another day (even though you can watch it in the hyperlink above).
  - Barbequor has been show in latin america though. It's probably still in some reruns.
- There was an episode called "Dexter's Rude Removal", the plot involved Dexter creating clones of himself and Deedee to do their chores but do nothing but swear and other rude gestures, the episode has only been shown at a few Comic-con conventions, very few people have seen it and surprisingly has not been found to view online.
- The episode "Dexter Dodgeball" had been edited for a certain point in time; when Dexter gives the substitute coach a fake excuse the coach cries out "What's this crap?" The offending word was muted in the edited version. Surprisingly, current reruns have kept the word intact.
  - The word "crap" in general seems to be viewed in a less negative light in recent years.
Buzz Lightyear of Star Command had a Very Special Episode that aired exactly twice before being removed from circulation. It used superpowers caused by phasing through radiation as an analogue for drugs, complete with ensuing withdrawal. Presumably, Disney noticed the Unfortunate Implications.
- Though the lost episode in question is currently available to watch on YouTube.
  - The episodes "Inside Job" and "Conspiracy" were also omitted from the Disney Channel run of the series, as they both dealt with terrorist assasination plots.
Cow and Chicken had an episode, "Buffalo Gals", with rampant and blatant examples of Les Yay (and yet, Time Squad was only reprimanded for having an episode that was a whole plot reference to "Scooby Doo" and another episode featuring George W. Bush for all but three scenes). Cartoon Network's censors must've been asleep at the switch (nothing new or surprising, given the other things Cartoon Network's shows have gotten away with) because the episode aired at least twice. Examples include a character busting into the title characters' home and munching on the carpet, handing out a carpet sample-shaped business card with "Munch Kelly" written on it, choking Chicken and — during an impromptu baseball game — Kelly told Cow, "I'll pitch and you catch!" When Cow turned into her superheroine persona, Supercow, Kelly asked her if she'd "like to be on her team". At the end, when the characters return home, Red Guy (the Ambiguously Gay villain) shows up and declares the moral of the story is a secret. Funny? Gut-bustingly. See for yourself.
- The pilot episode of the show was taken off the air and never seen again, because it shows Chicken smoking (and going to Hell for accepting a cigarette from the Red Guy, who openly introduces himself as the Devil).
  - Both of these episodes are show in latin america with no problems. No, we don't know why.
Histeria! didn't have a Missing Episode, but did have a missing part of an episode. In the "Megalomaniacs" episode there was a sketch in which the Spanish Inquisition was portrayed as a game show called Convert Or Die. Moral Guardians complained about it "teaching" kids to reject Catholicism, so for all subsequent broadcasts it was replaced with a sketch in which the kids mistakenly get Custer's Last Stand mixed up with an actual custard stand. The original sketch was, however, restored to its original version in the web broadcast on In2TV; so in a piece of irony, the sketch about the kids at Custer's Last Stand is now the lost sketch.
Teamo Supremo had an episode with two segments titled "Will You Be My Valentine Bandit?" and "Uncontrollable Goopy Substance!", which Toon Disney aired only once, on the morning of March 13, 2004, and was never included in the show's rerun rotation. Confusingly, a few clips from "Uncontrollable Goopy Substance!" were used in the promotional spots for Toon Disney's New For You! show.
The PJs' final three episodes were never aired until two years after the show's cancellation in 2001 when Channel 4 in the UK picked up the series. They were again never shown for another five years. They weren't shown in the US, the show's origin country, for seven years before [adult swim] picked up the series.
The 2000s version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had an entire Missing Season, which was shelved in favor of TMNT IN THE FUTURE! (though even the future season considers the missing one canonical). It was later shown on TV as the "Lost Season" and got a DVD release.
- There is another episode called "Insane in the Membrane" which never aired in the US (though it's available on DVD and the 4KidsTV site). It involves Baxter Stockman cloning his old body and inserting his brain inside. It goes fine for a while but after a few months he begins to fall apart and constantly tries new ways to fix himself including chopping off limbs. Eventually he loses his mind and blames April for all that has happened to him. To be fair, the episode was quite disturbing for kids.
1970s British kids show Mr Benn, in which the title character dressed up as various things and had adventures in that guise: the Big Game Hunter episode fell foul of changing mores and dropped out of circulation. It did show up on the DVD release, however.
An example of a missing series: the late 1960s animated series The Beagles, created by Total Television (the makers of Underdog) and about the adventures of a singing dog duo. The series has been unaired since its original run, with the master copies of the series accidentally thrown away by the family of someone on the production staff, with only a few production negatives and clips (one available on YouTube) remaining today, along with an LP (later transferred by someone to CD) of songs from the show.
Due to the studio making more episodes that the network had ordered, four King of the Hill episodes past the Grand Finale (The episode where Hank discovers that Bobby has a talent for inspecting and identifying cuts of meat) were not in the network run and were only seen in syndication (including [adult swim]). The four episodes are:
- "The Honeymooners": Hank tries to stop his mom from getting married to a man she just met.
- "Bill Gathers Moss": In a plot similar to the episode where Bill uses his house as a shelter for alcoholics, Bill once again uses his house to take in roommates, with Hank angry that Bill is being used. The B-story focuses on Bobby and Joseph hunting for ghosts at their school.
- "When Joseph Met Lori, and Made Out with Her in the Janitor's Closet": Dale has himself committed to a mental hospital after failing to give Joseph the sex talk, and plots an escape to keep his son from going all the way with a girl he likes
- "Just Another Manic Kahn-Day" Hank tries to get Kahn to stop picking up his medication at the pharmacy — only to realize that Kahn is a manic-depressive who needs his medication to level out his mood. In the B-story, Bobby tries to find the humor in a comedy record that only appeal to his parents and other adults.
The Bonkers episode "New Partners on the Block" provides a transition between the two sets of episodes that were made (Bonkers goes from being Lucky Piquel's police partner to Miranda Wright's police partner). Unfortunately, Toon Disney cut this important episode out of their rerun rotation simply because the Villain Of The Day was a terrorist (which, thanks to the September 11th attacks, is a major taboo on American kids' shows), and it's pretty hard to find this episode online.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force had an episode entitled "Boston", which was originally intended as the first episode of the series' fifth season and produced as its creators' response to the Boston bomb scare that [adult swim] caused on January 31, 2007 (with the city itself being a big target of the episode). However, Adult Swim pulled it to avoid further controversy surrounding the events of the bomb scare. The episode has never aired, and has never been released to the public.
Several episodes of Davey and Goliath were presumed destroyed by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the successor to the church that commissioned the series, due to racial and other material that today's mainline denominations would consider unfit for airing on a children's program. They were later found, re-edited and released on DVD.
Because of a very limited VHS release and no DVD releases, it's virtually impossible to get a hold of any of the later episodes of Street Sharks, especially the Dinovengers crossover season. A bit more mysterious is an episode which was said to involve an appearance by their missing father, who fights Paradigm to save a mutant held captive. It is uncertain as to whether this really aired or if it was originally planned but scrapped and modified into a different episode.
HIT Entertainment pulled the Pingu episode "Pingu Quarrels With His Mum" off of PBS Kids Sprout's rotation due to the deciption of Pingu getting slapped by his mother. It is viewable on the internet, is available on VHS and DVD outside the U.S., and (since 2010) has appeared to have crept back up on the BBC lineup again. However, this episode was heavily censored with the slap removed.
- Numerous other Pingu episodes were also pulled or heavily censored in other countries due to other offensive practices, such as "Pingu's Lavatory Story" (Pingu drinks so much juice that he needs to go to the bathroom, only to pee all over the floor), "Pingu Runs Away" (Pingu runs away from home after ruining a pleasant dinner), "Pingu's Dream" (Pingu suffers a nightmare when he encounters a giant walrus), the pilot episode "Pingu is Introduced" (Pingu is bullied by his friends when they steal his ball), and "Pingu at the Doctors" (Pingu causes his beak to bleed after chasing his sister). None of these episodes have ever appeared on US VHS (although "Pingu Runs Away" has gotten a VHS release titled "Antarctic Antics", and "Pingu at the Doctors" has aired on PBS Kids Sprout's rotation).
- And then there's the original Season 1-2 soundtracked versions. Who knows what happened to them a year after HIT bought the character from Pygos? The cost for the soundtracks must have been high. The only way to see these versions are through bootlegs or UK VHS and TV. The original music for Season 3-4 were made specifically for those episodes, so they are kept intact in the reissue versions.
- For unknown reasons, two episodes made for the fourth season before the Grand Finale were made but never aired in the initial run on SF DRS. It was not until a year later that they were aired on a marathon of Pingu episodes (they were only shown once due to the cancellation of the show before HIT took over). Surprisingly, these episodes failed to appear on the episode guide for the Japanese Pingu website and were not shown on the Season 4 Japanese DVD.
- Also for reasons unknown, the second series (seasons 5 and 6) never seemed to air on Sprout at all, despite some Advertisements that showed clips from the seasons. It was not until 2008 when the second series finally appeared in the U.S. on DVD.
The Tick animated series, episode #11 was missing after 9/11 due to the image early in the episode showing the World Trade Center towers being destroyed by an as-yet-unseen force (which turned out to be Proto-Clown).
The Fairly OddParents episodes "Hail to the Chief" and "Twistory" were aired for the first year or so, but Nickelodeon stopped airing them apparently because they were offensive. They are, however, available on the Season 2 DVD available from Amazon.com.
Thomas the Tank Engine has had a couple of sort-of instances of this. Based on a single photo, a rumour had been going around that a story called 'The Missing Coach' was filmed but never aired. This was dismissed as speculation until Word of God from the technical crew confirmed that it had been half-filmed. The other was a number of episodes of a proposed spin-off called Jack and the Pack that didn't get picked up and which were eventually released three years later on DVD as part of the regular series.
Two regular episodes of The Emperor's New School are missing from the Disney Channel's late-night rerun rotation of the series. The cause for this is unknown.
An episode of 101DalmatiansTheSeries, "Alive 'n Chicken" was pulled from broadcast after 9/11 (it's sometimes shown outside the U.S), due to a scene where Spot crashes her airplane into a windmill. "Prima Doggy" was also pulled, but that was only due to that it was paired with the episode and it wouldn't fill 30 minutes on its own.
KaBlam! has a handful of seasons produced, yet they never aired.
- Also, when Nicktoons re-ran the show, almost half of the episodes were skipped over. This was either due to copyright issues with some of the shorts (Angela Anaconda comes to mind), or because Nickelodeon's Standards and Practices changes, making older lines considered inappropriate.
- Looking for Episode 29? Don't count on it. EVER.
Rugrats has sixteen lost episodes. Most of these were planned for the second or third season. One of these lost episodes was the pilot (this was slated to air on Nick around August 1990 but never did) which can only be found on a special VHS.
- In a more traditional fashion ("Made but rarely shown" vs. "not made at all"), there is the half-hour special "Vacation." Although originally released specially on VHS, it was still considered a regular "episode." However, it's not available on the compilation DVDs and, after being shown a few times, vanished from TV. There are likely a couple reasons for this: One may be rights issues associated with the opening using the song "Vacation" by The Go Gos, including the version Angelica sings late in the episode. The other may be a Too Soon bit, involving a pair of Siegfried-and-Roy-alikes losing control of their white tigers.
The animated adaptation of The Mask had its entire second season missing when it aired on CBS (on CBS, only the first and third season aired). The second season was only shown on cable channels such as Cartoon Network and the syndicated animation block, BKN (Big Kids Network), which showed a lot of cast-off cartoons that never made it to network TV, like Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog, Extreme Ghostbusters, Captain Simian And The Space Monkeys, Street Sharks, and Extreme Dinosaurs. The only explanation that can be given for this is that season two's episodes of The Mask are a lot racier than those of seasons one and three, particularly the episode "Flight as a Feather" which features a strip- er, "exotic dancer" named Cookie BaBoom threatening to kill herself with a suicide bomb because the Mayor broke up with her, and a scene where Cookie ends up naked (though no nudity was shown, Kellaway and Doyle's reactions to seeing Cookie naked tell the viewers more than if any actual flashes of breasts or genitalia was shown) after The Mask uses her suicide belt bikini as the main ingredient in an explosive cocktail drink.
- And speaking of "Flight as a Feather," when FOX Family (ABC Family back when FOX owned it) aired old reruns of The Mask in the late 1990s-early 2000s, "Flight as a Feather" was always skipped over because of that part with Cookie BaBoom (it would be easier to just edit out the entire sequence, but then that would ruin the continuity, because later in the episode, Cookie BaBoom [clad in her trenchcoat] is seen in the angry mob that has The Mask cornered at the Bavariaville golf course).
The artbook "Dofus - Les mains d'Eniripsa" presented the plot of an unseen episode of Wakfu, going as far as providing a full summary, character design, and even background design. The episode was about Yugo and friends trying to save a village from complete dryness. For some reason, the episode was scrapped and never produced. The only remaining bit is the titular character of the episode, a charming Enirpisa called Mey d'Elongrot, who was present in the crowd as a cameo in episode 10.
Dialogue was recorded for an Angry Beavers series finale, but it was never finished or aired, due to a rule by Nickelodeon for finales not to show awareness of the show's end.
- In addition to the unaired finale, six other episodes were left out from the original run, and they were not shown until the six episodes aired on Nicktoons (the finale, or parts of it, has yet to see the light of a day).
The eighth episode of the first season of Canadian cartoon Kevin Spencer was only broadcast once, after a viewer wrote an angry letter to the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the FCC) over the episode's content. This content, including having Kevin's father getting his finger bitten off by an alligator, accidentally drinking the beer containing his finger and then vomiting it up, and finally getting into an extremely violent fight with the gator and ending up gashed and bruised, was apparently so ~~funny~~ offensive that it was never broadcast again.
The Penguins of Madagascar was all over this trope but has come out averting it. No fewer than ten episodes were originally a.) exclusive to Nickelodeon's website, b.) exclusive to one of the four DVDs of the series, c.) supposed to air in early 2010 but pulled at the last second, or d.) some combination of the previous three. However, these "missing" episodes (including two 23-minute specials) were finally aired in mid to late 2010. The last two to be "missing" were "Truth Ache" and "Command Crisis", which were initially exclusive to the first DVD but finally aired in November 2010.
- It's starting to happen again: "Alienated/The Otter Woman" was supposed to air in late 2010 but was pulled at the last second.
Just try to find more than a select handful of episodes from The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat. Only one VHS release was ever sold in the USA, and the only DVD release was marketed in China but not the country the show originally aired in; besides, many episodes weren't available for sale in any way, causing a majority of them to become Lost Episodes. The surviving episodes are only kept in existence because some YouTube uploaders that had the foresight to record a few episodes continue to Keep Circulating the Tapes.
Supposedly there are a number of Minerva Mink shorts that never got released due to excessively risqué content. Knowing the shorts that did get released, this is understandable.
The Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog episode "Mass Transit Trouble" was never again shown on Toon Disney after 9/11 because of Robotnik's terrorist plot: bombing the Mobian transportation system. The episode was later reinstated on the Volume 2 DVD.
- A pilot for the show that was made months prior to the show's premiere was left unfinished and never aired on its original run. When the unaired pilot showed up on YouTube, all of the music and sounds (with the exception of a screech in the also unaired "Sonic Sez" segment) were left out and muted, and as a result, only the voices were left intact. A scene from pilot where Robotnik tries to squish Sonic but gets himself squished was recycled for the show's ending credits.
ABC's Sonic The Hedgehog had an entire season that was scheduled to air around the 1995/96 season, but never did. The season would have had the Freedom Fighters attempt to finish the job and liberate Robotropolis from Snively (who would have taken over in the end), however the group and Snively would be forced to work together when Nagus reappeared (free of the Void's influence and holding King Acorn and Robotnik hostage). It is not a missing season, as it was never actually produced. According to animator Ben Hurst, the season was vetoed because ABC was disappointed with the ratings Season 2 recieved and ABC executives were no longer interesting in making another season. There were other reasons, too, including the firing of ABC's President of Children's Entertainment and failing competition with FOX's Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. The unproduced season has been mentioned in "The Complete Series" DVD box set.
The 1980s version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles suffered heavy editing in Europe due to controversies over ninjas and nunchucks at the time. The show was released under the title Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, the opening lyrics for the theme song removed all references to ninjas, and every scene that features Michelangelo weilding his nunchucks were deleted from the intro, and were replaced with random clips from the show. In addition to ninja references being cut, BBC airings removed quotes like "Let's kick some shell!" and "Bummer!" from the episodes. Later European airings, however, aired their respective original versions.
- Ironically, Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation also had their title changed to Hero Turtles: The Next Mutation, however, it was actually changed to separate it from the live-action movies.
When the Tom And Jerry Spotlight Collection Vol. 1 was released in the U.S. in 2004, many of the cartoons on the set (excepting those made post-1951) were in poor quality. This was because the original negatives for most, if not all, of MGMs pre-1951 Tom & Jerry cartoons were destroyed in a vault fire. As a result, Warner Bros. needed to find uncut prints of the cartoons, irrespective of quality. Some original prints of the pre-1951 Tom and Jerry cartoons (such as "Puss Gets the Boot" and "The Night Before Christmas") are said to still survive.
- Political correctness seems to have kept the Tom and Jerry cartoon "His Mouse Friday" from re-airing on American television. The cartoon featured Jerry in blackface trying to eat Tom. The cartoon did manage to be released on video, but all the releases (including T&J Spotlight Collection Vol. 3) had an edited version instead.
- Meanwhile, "Mouse Cleaning" and "Casanova Cat" were left off the spotlight collections entirely, due to Black Face gags, and rarely if ever appear on TV (always edited of course). Someone at Warner promised they'd appear on the next Tom and Jerry DVD release, however.
Teen Titans's "The Lost Episode". It featured a villain named Punk Rocket who used a weaponized guitar. Punk Rocket would later show up in a very minor role near the end of the 5th season as part of the Brotherhood of Evil. Originally only available to be viewed online as part of a cereal promotion, it is included as a special feature on the Teen Titans: Trouble In Tokyo DVD.
The pilot episode of Spongebob Squarepants, "Help Wanted" was oddly absent from the Season 1 DVD. The reason? The producers could not get a copyright clearance for the song Livin' in the Sunlight, Lovin' in the Moonlight. Fortunately, subsequent DVD releases have reinstated the episode along with the aforementioned music.
- The episode "Procrastination", though otherwise complete, does have a missing scene. The last few years it has aired, there have been a few random seconds of Spongebob's eyebrows doing calisthenics very choppily removed. This may be because a few frames got lost and went unnoticed.
- The episode "Just One Bite" has a questionably blatant reference of dangerous gas materials. Nickelodeon must have been asleep at the censor switch, because the sequence aired at least until a year after the episode's showing. The sequence features Squidward trying to enter the patty vault at the Krusty Krab to get another bite of the krabby patty, but finds a bucket thinking that it's water. However, when he knocks it over and smells it, he finds out that it is actually gas. A random robot hand appears and drops a match on the gas, and Squidward is heard off-screen screaming in pain, he quickly escapes into the kitchen just when he spills another bucket, and the same process happens again. Although the actual reason for the sequence being pulled is unknown, it has been rumored that 9/11 was the reason for the edit. This sequence however can still be shown on YTV in Canada.
- In-universe example (see page quote): Patchy the Pirate laments that the "Lost Episode" is truly lost forever after his VCR spits out video tape while he is attempting to rewind the tape. (But of course, it's not really lost in Real Life.)
- The season 2 episode "Shanghaied" was originally shown in 2000 and was aired as a Patchy the Pirate special (Despite the fact that it was the same length as the other Spongebob episodes) and before the conclusive ending, a poll was held to let viewers decide three possible endings to the episode. The endings included Patrick wishing for gum before they are eaten by the Flying Dutchman, Squidward wishing that he had never met Spongebob and Patrick before they are eaten, and Spongebob wishing the Dutchman was a vegetarian only to have themselves turned into fruit as well and placed intro a blender. After the episode aired, it was paired with "Gary Takes a Bath", and only Spongebob's ending was shown. Eventually all the endings luckily turned up in 2002 with the release of the "Sea Stories" DVD.
The 1998 pilot for The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron was taken off the air and was never shown again on TV due to a scene where King Goobot's assistant Ooblar comments on Jimmy's hair and then saying "Oh, my God!". This pilot was reinstated on the "Confusion Fusion" DVD.
There are three lost episodes of Ed, Edd n' Eddy. One ("Look Before You Ed") was eventually aired, simply having never been shown stateside. What became of two missing Season Five episodes—"Luck Be An Ed Tonight" and "A Room and an Ed"—however, is unknown. The two were either never shown, or simply never made. Slightly more info here.
The Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures episode "The Littlest Tramp" was a Very Special Episode that wasn't considered missing, but however has a missing part. After Mighty Mouse finds crushed remains of a flower, and decides to sniff it. The creator of the show apparently did not want to air the scene, because he thought it inspired cocaine use. John Kricfalusi disagreed, stating that the sequence was harmless, and the episode aired without, initially without controversy, in 1987. A year later, Media Watchdogs accused the creator for the cocaine-inspired scene, and as a result, subsequent airings pulled the scene out of the episode. However, fearing that the show would lose popularity due to the scene, CBS axed the series after only 19 episodes.
Captain N: The Game Master had episode #14, "When Mother Brain Rules", missing from "The Complete Series" DVD set because DIC did not provide the tape to Shout! Factory.
The American broadcast of Code Lyoko's fourth season had the worst luck with this. First, "Lab Rat" was skipped over in the broadcast order for reasons unknown, and was never shown on television. The kicker? The episode that aired in its stead, "Bragging Rights," was the second part of a two-episode mini-arc that "Lab Rat" began. The fandom was saved from confusion by an eerily coincidential leak of a version subtitled from Hebrew some weeks earlier, but the skip is still baffling to this day. Then, Cartoon Network pulled the show from its airing schedule before the last seven episodes of the series had a chance to air. The episodes, including "Lab Rat," were released on the network's online video service and then removed after some months, all without ceremony or fanfare. The missing eight and the entirety of Season 4 will likely follow the first three seasons to iTunes eventually.
The (tragically) obscure Australian animated series The Adventures of Sam has yet to be released on DVD (and probably never will be), and the VHS edition is missing at least one episode.
The House of Mouse animated short "Minnie Takes Care of Pluto", in which Mickey Mouse leaves Pluto at Minnie's house while he is on vacation, and Pluto's conscience convinces him that Minnie is out to get him. About halfway through the short, Pluto has a brief nightmare about him being buried alive by Minnie, who zips up his grave, and later imagines himself going to Hell. The offending short only aired on the ABC run and was never shown on Toon Disney or Disney Channel.
Two final season episodes of Class of 3000 were left unaired from the broadcast order. They are not (yet) available on DVD.
Reportedly there is an entire second season of TV Making Fiends episodes however the show was Too Good to Last - abruptly ending after six episodes despite being the highest rated (original) program on Nicktoons.

Lower Deck Episode

Episodes

Multi-Part Episode

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Examples: