How much footage remains of pre-late 70's soaps??

[ER Tosh]

For example pre-Gloria Monty 70's GH.

[Chris B]

If you consider soaps that were saved: Ryan's Hope, Y&R, DAYS, Dark Shadows--all complete, I believe there is more around than we realize. I know if you look in the UCLA archives there seem to be hundreds of episodes from GH in the 1960s. Of course none are in circulation to the public.

If people in the US cared about soaps maybe we'd see these things. In the UK the big soaps are all on DVD. Corrie released the top ten episodes from each year going back to the 60s. Crossroads and Prisoner are being released in complete collections (depending on whats available).

Considering many of these soaps are still on air DVDs would be easy to promote, but they don't seem to care. Also easy for extras with the actors still around. Doing NOTHING at all is just stupid.

[ER Tosh]

I always wondered why ABC or somebody don't start some type of Soap on-demand channel where you show old soaps in order.

[ghfan89]

That's a good idea. Soapnet used to show some old soaps, still shows RH. PGP tried an AOL soap channel, don't know what happened with that. There are some old PGP episodes on Hulu, but most are 1 or 2 years old for ATWT, GL. There some episodes of AW from circa 1991, I believe.

[Chris B]

It's weird that of all the soaps PGP was streaming, they only kept AW going on Hulu and besides the recent episodes of ATWT/GL they haven't attempted anything else. Especially GL. Why not capitalize on it's cancellation with classic episodes? Even if only from the 90s.

[DRW50]

The line is usually, "These don't make a profit, so we're not going to show them."

There's a fair amount of GL stuff from the 50s and 60s that is/was on Youtube.

[SFK]

I'm speaking for myself, but I'm assuming there are others like me... I think another problem, which speaks to TV released on DVD in general, is the idea that so many things have become available for free on the net on sites like YouTube and Hulu. There's no sense of urgency to go out and throw down your money and grab these things while you can because we're living in an age where we think we can get whatever we want when we want it. Or it'll eventually turn up for free. It would make my year if early OLTL was somehow miraculously released on Hulu, but I could totally see myself watching an ep or two then skipping around out of impatience and "getting back to it later" because I'd assumed it would always be there. I think these are the types of factors that need to be taken into consideration if people are tracking hits and downloads and basing the "demand" for these shows on such numbers.