During the second half of the special, I went through my rock records. I only cleared out one, and most of them were in pretty good shape organizational-wise. I was hoping to clear out more, but some of these, I've wanted since I was a kid! And some of them I had when I was a kid.
I didn't really trust the weather today. It wasn't raining at quarter of noon, but there were going to be storms later. I called Uber. Thankfully, no trouble there. I got one in 8 minutes going to the Thomas Sharp Elementary School. Only took 5 minutes for the one going home to arrive, and that at the start of rush hour. No trouble either way.
On one hand, there were 8 younger kids on the last day of school, 3 at my table (one went home within ten minutes of her arrival), and 10 older kids. There were so few younger kids, we condensed it down to two tables and took them all together to the bathroom. Good thing they ate pretty fast. We wanted to get everyone outside to the blacktop before the storms came. It certainly looked like rain as the kids played kickball, drew with chalk, and chatted along the chain link fence under the shady green trees. It was gloomy and warm, with air thick enough to cut it with a sharp piece of chalk. We had them out for about a half-hour before the first tiny drops hit our noses. The drops got fatter and fatter as we grabbed the balls and the Lego bin and dashed inside.
On the other hand, they got pretty crazy once we were inside, and not just because of the loud storm. The head teacher broke out Play Doh, but the older boys kept throwing them around, and one of the younger boys got upset when a younger girl grabbed his color and mixed them. The little girl kept wrapping her Play Doh in paper and coloring her "dumplings," even when we told her not to. Two of the older boys fought and wouldn't listen to anyone all afternoon. The head teacher pulled out the projector and tried to run Rio. No sooner would we get the kids sitting down and watching it than the internet would cut out, or the head teacher would be called somewhere and would take her phone and its power with her.
(Incidentally, I reviewed Rio at my Musical Dreams Movie Reviews blog back in August 2024. I go further into the film itself there.)
The storm finally subsided around 3:30, long enough for us to get the kids back on the blacktop again. I was supposed to be done at 3:30, but I stayed a little longer to help with the remaining younger kids. Fortunately, by that point there were only two younger kids left. I watched the boys shoot baskets and the other kids draw with chalk on the rapidly-drying blacktop. When the last two younger boys left with their mothers and older siblings, I left, too.
I was originally going to watch Superman: Doomsday when I got home. When the DVD I bought from Goodwill didn't work, I ended up going with another Bowery Boys movie instead. The guys are Ghost Chasers when Whitey and Sach become interested in spiritualism. Slip makes use of this to convince Louie that his deceased Uncle Jake wants him to give the Boys $100. He then uses the $100 to expose a phony medium who was conning one of the ladies in their neighborhood. The medium ends up pointing the finger at another phony female spiritualist. The guys go after her while Sach gets help from a real ghost (Lloyd Corrigan) whom only he can see.
Switched to Match Game '75 during dinner after the Boys ended. They're well into the New Year now. Cool cat Greg Morris joins Brett and Gary on the top tier. Richard wonders what he's gotten himself into when he finds himself between daffy Joyce Bulifant and whimsical Fannie Flagg on the lower tier.
Finished the night at YouTube after a shower. In honor of Buzzr running a long-lost episode of Password Plus from 1982 with Lucille Ball and Dick Martin, I ran a few other episodes of shows that are mostly lost or not well-known now. Plus isn't the only game show with episodes missing. Before videotape became cheaper in the mid-80's, game shows were among the genres mostly likely to be wiped and reused by networks. NBC wiped the entire run of the original 60's The Match Game, before CBS revamped it to the wacky format that's still in use today. This all-star episode from 1964 featuring Betty White, Bennett Cerf, Robert Q. Lewis, Henry Morgan, Joan Fontaine, and Peggy Cass is one of three surviving shows currently online.
The Richard Dawson Family Feud is missing a lot, too. ABC erased shows into the early 80's. Episodes before 1982 are sort of scattered, including this one from 1981 where Johnny Gilbert does the announcing. Poor Gene Wood had an accident with a chainsaw and was out for several weeks.
Individual producers didn't do so well with keeping their shows around, either. NBC had ended erasing tapes by the time Sale of the Century debuted in 1983...but producer Reg Grundy would erase them until the end of the decade. That's why you're more likely to see a syndicated episode from 1985 or one of the episodes from the show's final year in 1988-1989 on Buzzr than an early episode...and probably why the premiere episode seen here is in such horrible shape.
Some later flops are hard to find as well. Nickelodeon still has most of its older shows around and has re-run them on its channels and on Paramount Plus. Splat! is one of the few that's mostly missing. Between shows in 2004, kids at Nickelodeon Studios in Universal Florida would compete at messy tasks. Winner got slimed. It was cute and the kids look like they're having fun. Too bad the interstiles only lasted five months, and this was the last show to be filmed at the Nick Studios before they shut down. Only two episodes and a lot of fragments exist today.
Not everything that's lost stays missing. Within the last six months, someone posted almost all of the episodes from the long-vanished 1975 music game show Musical Chairs on YouTube. This one is significant in several ways. It boasted the first black game show host, super-hip singer Adam Wade, and an all-star array of performers on their way up, like country singer Linda Hargrove, or down, like Bobby Rydell and Broadway star Gretchen Wyler, along with an extremely mid-70's geometric set. Too bad it only lasted a few months. The game play is complicated, but there's some great songs here.
Learn more about our TV history with these long-lost episodes that are finally out of the vault for all to enjoy!
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