As The World Turns Discussion Thread

[Fevuh]

It might be in this thread or somewhere else, but I've read it's not that they wiped them or disposed of them.  I have read in multiple places that almost nothing is left from the 60's and 70's because they TAPED over them.  They didn't just keep taping on new tapes....they would actually re-use tapes from about 5 to 10 years previous rotating them, just because of 'unnecessary' expense of constantly new tapes.  Crazy, but that could be true.  The only thing that makes it seem possibly NOT true is just honest to goodness reasoning - OR the fact that every now and then especially on P&G shows, we would see flashbacks or moments from a decade or more ago.  Not often but some.  And sometimes it could be an obscure scene that you would think - now why would they have saved that little scene?  Which makes me lean toward someone somewhere has ALL of them given they used to do flashbacks.  Or, in the case of Guiding Light (don't know if they did for World Turns), but GL had a series of tapes of 'best of' Reva Shayne moments, and I think there was one for Roger too.  I don't own any of those and so I don't know what is on them....were they whole episodes or just a snippet tape with narration of each piece.  But GL HAD to have had a decent history saved to have made some of those types of series tapes.  

[bboy875]

I've seen the Roger 1 a few times on YouTube. It's Michael Zaslow and Maureen Garrett talking about Roger & Holly and clips are shown. I remember when the tape was announced, they asked viewers to send in episodes they might have. Unfortunately, Roger arrived in 1971, & the earliest clip is from 1976, in which Roger tells Peggy he's Christina's father, and the clip abruptly ends in the middle of Peggy's response. No clip of Lynn Deerfield, the original Holly he cheated with and whom gave birth to Christina aka Blake, and made the decision to lie to Ed, as she passed Blake off as Ed's daughter. No clips of him marrying Peggy, then Holly, no mention or clips of when he raped Rita, and no clips of the ground breaking trial when he was prosecuted for raping wife Holly, and then Rita's revealing that he had raped her too. 

In 1987 when GL turned 50, for 1 week, at the end of each episode, current or former cast members introduced an iconic moment from the show's history. On the last day Ed Bryce (Bill) paid tribute to Charita Bauer (Bert). There was a clip that had to be from 1966 where Bert told off Ed for disrespecting his father. That brief scene was epic! There are great eps on YouTube from 1966 dealing with the fallout of Bill cheating on Bert and falling off the wagon. I can not find the episode with this scene. But someone from the show in 87 had to dig that scene from a tape from somewhere. There was also a clip from 77 when Bert sees Bill for the first time after finding out he's alive. The whole episode hasn't surfaced that I know of, but someone knew the episode existed and where to find it. I truly believe most eps b4 1979 no longer exist, but more survived than we know 

[Mona Kane Croft]

Beginning around 1979, nearly all American soap operas stopped reusing videotapes and began keeping all episodes.  There are exceptions, of course.  P&G had kept nearly every episode of all their soaps from 1979 forward.  Assuming Colleen's statement that all P&G episodes were recently wiped/erased is not true, then P&G still has those episodes in storage someplace.   

[Paul Raven]

There is stuff out there.

Recently a Mary Stuart channel appeared on YouTube with clips from the 60's and 70's all in excellent quality. Where it came from,who knows?

Our only hope is that this sort of stuff continues to turn up on YouTube.

 

[vetsoapfan]

In a Daily TV Serials magazine interview from 1974, Jacquie Courtney said that she had had copies made of many of her episodes of AW. I've often wondered what happened to that collection after she passed away.  Viewers would be orgasmic to see vintage episodes that Courtney valued enough to preserve.

[Paul Raven]

Scrolling through the EON thread I came across this regarding Donald May and the episode where he delivered a monologue.

 I have an interview with him from 1969 and he said the crew had given him a kinescope of that episode (which of course was done live then).  Would love to see that one. 

Further evidence that cast and crew have episodes in their possession.

Wouldn't it be great if just one person connected to a cancelled soap would post episodes, scripts and BTS anecdotes.

Some people worked on soaps for decades.

[Broderick]

We know they routinely "wiped" tapes pre-1979 and reused the tapes in order to save money.  And that's unfortunate, but understandable.   We're lucky that a few episodes and clips are still floating around that weren't wiped for some reason, or were located at the studio of an affiliate, or were in the hands of a performer.  

But I can't imagine they went to the trouble of "wiping" all the existing post-1979 stuff, when they weren't even planning to reuse the tapes.  Perhaps they SAID they did.  No telling how many stupid phones calls they get a year --  "Hi, I played Paramedic #3 in a March 1981 episode of Guiding Light, or maybe it was March 1982, and I need to get a copy of that episode!" "Hi, I played the Jury Foreman in a trial on Edge of Night, and I said, 'Yes, your honor, we find Draper Scott guilty of murder'.  Can I get someone to make a copy of that for me?"

I'd tell them I didn't have access to those tapes anymore, if I worked there and had to deal with that on a routine basis.  And honestly, there's no telling how many calls and letters they get about stuff like that. 

I expect they're just *saying* they don't have it anymore to people who mistakenly believe they don't have anything better to do than search for old episodes and make copies of them.  That message -- "we don't have them anymore" -- likely got back to Colleen Zenk and others.  

[wonderwoman1951]

to put the pre 1979 wiping of tapes in perspective:

about 10 years ago, i came across this 1957 episode on youtube,

atwt 10 april 1957

which i sent to laurie caso. he told me that he had never seen it, and that there were only about a dozen early episodes the show could access. so while pgp wiped thousands of early episodes, who knows how many were slipped into briefcases, and now, thankfully, onto youtube. 

also — i’m sure the same thing happened at gl, yet there’s been no discussion on the gl board. not sure what to make of that. 

Edited August 12, 2022 by wonderwoman1951

[DramatistDreamer]

Having worked with video archives I can say that it is not as simple or as easy to dispose of archives as some may think. And there is a cost to that as well and it doesn’t come cheap.

That’s all I’m going to say on the matter.

[Paul Raven]

A lot of old soap episodes that turn up on YouTube have the disclaimer-'This program was recorded' at the end.

For a variety of reasons, once in a while a show was pretaped rather than go out live. So those episodes are more likely to turn up.

Mid 70s ATWT aired in Australia so there may be tapes floating around.

 

 

[DramatistDreamer]

Admittedly, even when I worked with video archives, I hadn’t heard of any major institutions destroying their video archives at the end of the 20th or beginning of the 21st centuries, which, in the era of broadcast affiliates and VCRs seems quite preposterous that there would be no remnants left, but if folks want to take the words of folks who pop up on the boards, out of the blue, every now and then to function as crazymakers then bounce…go awf.

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[Vee]

That was my first instinct about this claim, as I said before. Like I said, this ain't the '60s or '70s. It would be a considerable expenditure for material the company does not care about. I think more likely it is somewhere shoved aside.

[vetsoapfan]

ITA. It would be an arduous waste of time and effort to wipe all the material that still existed.

I could see them just throwing everything into the garbage before going through all the trouble of wiping it.

The legendary Dumont Television Network produced more than 20,000 hours of programming durings its 1946-1956 heyday. After the network folded, their archives were allegedly destroyed; dumped into New York's East River because no one wanted to store the material any more. I don't believe P&G could legally do that to the environment these days, but dumping soap tapes into the trash would still be more logical than trying to wipe them all out of existence.

Ideally, P&G would donate their archives to UCLA, Paley, the Museum of Broadcast, the Library of Congress, wherever.

Edited August 13, 2022 by vetsoapfan

[DramatistDreamer]

[Chris B]

I don't think anybody wants it to be true, but I feel like Colleen wouldn't have said it without knowing something. I take the whole wiping to suggest they just threw it away, not necessarily that they wiped each tape. Hopefully it's not true, but we have no way of really knowing.