This is a wick check for Keep Circulating the Tapes, which currently has a confusing and ambiguous definition and a potentially problematic "lost media" redirect.
The ambiguity seems to be between:
- The work is unavailable legally, so fans react by circulating unofficial copies
- The work is unavailable in general, so fans react by circulating whatever's left
- The work was officially released, but is hard to find
- The work is just unavailable (may be covered by Missing Episode, which might have an unclear name itself)
Checked: 34/77
Correct use, fans are sharing archived copies of unavailable work (8/77)
- Webcomic.Kid Radd: Though the original site is dead and gone from the face of the internet due to AT&T discontinuing their Worldnet service, the site was previously packaged into an archive which is still circulating.
- Music.Nine Inch Nails: Never officially released. VHS tapes of the film exist, torrents of the film were made by Trent in 2006, and the film was put up by download, also by Trent, in 2013.
- DoingItForTheArt.Video Games: Nintendo would issue a DMCA on the project once it was finished, leaving it a case of keep circulating the torrents.
- Trivia.Potatoes And Dragons: The show never got a full home media release and its currently not on any streaming service. While the whole series is available on YouTube in French, only half of the English episodes have been found as of now.
- Music.Whatever People Say I Am Thats What Im Not: The band actually began to encourage the circulation of their bootlegged material after it began to spread on MySpace and other sites, which led to the debut's massive success.
- Trivia.Computerized Conflict: The old version of "End Process" was not included in the 1.5 update, meaning people who want to play that song will have to resort to mirrors of a previous version of the mod.
- Trivia.Julia Jekyll And Harriet Hyde: To date, this show has not had one single release on home media, however all episodes of the series have been uploaded to YouTube.
- UsefulNotes.Game Boy Advance: However, all is not bad, as this also allows for quite a number of GBA ROM Hacks and Fan Translations of games that never left Japan, as well as making sure games that never got released for the Virtual Console don't completely disappear forever.
Work is unavailable, no mention of fans "circulating the tapes" (13/77)
- Trivia.Afterfall Insanity: After the legal controversies surrounding the game's developers came to light, the game was quickly pulled digital distribution platforms with no chances of the game ever coming back.
- YMMV.Angry Birds Stella: Due to the game getting removed from app stores in 2016, many people are more familiar with the show than with the game.
- Oddball in the Series: ...(This may explain, along with music licensing issues, why this film hasn't been reissued on DVD.)
- EarlyInstallmentWeirdness.Web Videos: Generally averted, but in the first Dead Zone abridged movie (made before the official formation of Team FourStar and not on the channel), Gohan was portrayed as mentally handicapped ("I know how many toes a fish has!"). In the regular series, he's probably the most intelligent character of the bunch.
- Trivia.Mighty Aphrodite: The movie is one of several of Allen's films that have gone out of distribution in The New '10s.
- Manga.Wedding Peach: The manga was licensed in full by VIZ Media, though it's now currently out of print, while the anime was licensed and dubbed by ADV Films and is similarly out of print.
- Film.Metropolis: It was available on VHS and laserdisc at first, but was later taken out of production due to issues with music licensing.
- Creator.Group TAC: One of the first digitally animated Japanese shows, now mostly unavailable.
- Pinball.The Addams Family: Unfortunately, after the licenses to the Williams and Bally tables expired on July 1, 2018, the table has been removed from sale.
- Trivia.Mixels: Mixels was removed entirely from the schedule as soon as the final episode aired, as if it never existed. The final two episodes were only aired once.
- The Moral Alternative: On top of that, Amerika has never been available on video, unlike The Day After.
- Characters.Eminem: His album was promoted with a few tie-in pieces of media that are now no longer available and provided extra backstory for the character and what happened during his stint in rehab - an Alternate Reality Game, an Adventure Game called The Relapse (which won an FWA award), and an iPhone game.
- Trivia.Nelipot: It has been taken down as of 2023.
Content was never meant to be available in the first place (2/77)
- EarthBound.Tropes N To S: Despite the first Mother game ending on a painful To Be Continued (less painful if the player played the unreleased English prototype and the much-later Mother 1+2, the only direct connection with prequel is Giygas.
- BrokenBase.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic: A massive Content Leak two days before the series finale leaked the script-work (among other things) of every episode, from the in-progress plans to the final work. While for obvious legal reasons we won't link them here, looking through them provokes the question
Work is just hard to find (6/77)
- PortingDisaster.Consoles: The Sakura Flamingo Archives., a very sought-after (and expensive) compilation of MileStone, Inc. shoot 'em ups released after the company's dissolution, also introduces problems to half of the games featured in this collection on top of being barebones arcade ports lacking extra features and options from prior conversions and compilations. Just hard to find
- Literature.The Plague Dogs: ...the original print of the film was censored for wide release and was considered rare until recently, as now at least one Blu-Ray release includes both the theatrical and full versions of the film.
- Rugrats.Tropes R To Z: The special Vacation takes place here. However, it's rather to find these days, most likely due to music licensing issues. It did air on Nickelodeon on February 3, 2013, even after being skipped several times on the NickRewind block on Teennick, and it is available on the Season 4 DVD and the Complete Series set, but digital releases lack the episode.
- Trivia.Emma A Victorian Romance: The CMX release of the series is hard to find nowadays, and any volumes that do appear on the used market come with a hefty price tag. While Yen Press rescued the series in 2015, Volume 4 of that release has since gone out of print too.
- Trivia.Give Yourself Goosebumps: Since the line has gone out or print, many of the books can only be purchased second-hand. Unfortunately, many of the books from the latter half of the series (after Craig White took over as cover artist) and almost all of the Special Edition entries are ridiculously expensive with most people trying to sell them for nearly a hundred dollars on websites like Amazon and eBay.
- Trivia.Teen Power Inc: While the series remains fairly popular, it has yet to receive an ebook release and many of the books only got one or two printings, and most of those were in Australia, making copies of a little over half of the books in the series difficult to buy even in Australia, let alone other countries.
Work is officially available (4/77)
- Trivia.Battle For Dream Island: In countries where the Scholastic Book Fair isn't a common thing, getting your hands on a copy of the Battle for Dream Island: Official Character Guide may be extremely difficult thanks to it being exclusive to those. If you're in a school grade that's too old for the book fair, you may also be plum out of luck. However, it became available to purchase from jacknjellify's online store in January 2022.
- Trivia.Golden Axe: Unfortunately, The Revenge of Death Adder is the only installment in the series that has never been ported to any home console or download service, which is a shame as it would've been a great launch title for the Sega Saturn or Sega 32X. Goes on to say game was later made available
- Trivia.Mario Party 3: This game didn’t see a re-release of any kind for over two decades, likely due to Game Guy's minigames going against some countries' laws against simulated gambling. It was finally re-released in October 2023 as a part of the Nintendo Switch Online’s library of N64 games.
- Trivia.Roller Coaster Tycoon: In 2017, due to an ongoing lawsuit between Atari and Frontier Developments, all digital releases of RCT3 were pulled from sale. It was eventually rescued with the release of RCT3 Complete in 2020, which was self-published by Frontier (and thus removed all references to Atari).
Unsure/Unclassifiable (2/77)
- Trivia.Pink Panther And Pals: So far, this series hasn't seen a known home or streaming release and the termination of KidsClick means the show is hard to find. Full episodes can be found on the official YouTube channel
, though. - Creator.Paramount Plus: This also applies to various seldom seen, or short-lived Nickelodeon cartoons and sitcoms that were stuck in Keep Circulating the Tapes purgatory. Even KaBlam!, House of Anubis, Ride, The Other Kingdom and Hunter Street, just to name a few.
