People have been losing media for practically as long as they’ve been making it. Just think of the Library of Alexandria, and its infamous 400,000 scrolls.
Subreddits, social media trends, and general conversation around the subject of lost media have all become more prominent recently. “Lost media” is a catch-all term used to identify media like movies, shows, and so on that are not accessible to the general public.
Lost media could refer to something that was artificially lost. The last season of “Infinity Train” was removed from HBO Max and was never made into a physical release.
Lost media could also refer to originals, like the animation cells for “School House Rock,” which were largely discarded. The show’s original audio was considered missing, too, before turning up in a Connecticut barn.
The movie “Possession” (1981) isn’t specifically lost media, but it had a lot of the same hallmarks. For a while, the film was barely available, despite widespread demand. The DVD release was limited because it was more of a cult classic than an initial hit. Mostly, people could only find it on pirating websites — and even then, it got pulled down, because with attention came accusations of copyright infringement. No one could stream it, which frustrated fans, because it was a beloved horror film that simply didn’t exist anywhere.
Eventually, demand for the film became so deafening that streaming services paid attention, and now it’s streamable on YouTube, Amazon Prime, and elsewhere.
In 2016, lost music made headlines when the shoegaze band Pachinko was essentially discovered at a thrift shop. Someone purchased the band’s EP at an Oxfam shop in the UK and posted it to 4chan, asking if anyone knew what it was. It took the internet four years to track down the musicians, who had been teenagers in 2000, when they recorded the album. The band became so popular online that they started touring again — entirely because people were so interested in this thing that almost didn’t exist at all.
Some media was lost because of the discontinuation of Adobe Flash Player, a multimedia software that was on a number of web browsers. It was deemed too expensive and too much of a security risk. This led to a number of different online media becoming inaccessible, including Tamagatchi TamaTown, “Super Monkey Ball Mini,” and the “Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman” flash games from the pbskids.org website.
Interestingly, the “Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman” games appear to be archived in a number of places. Still, a majority of the archived games aren’t actually playable all the way through. Even media we have attempted to save has been lost.
We have many tools for archiving digital media, such as Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library of websites and cultural artifacts; Flash Games Museum, an organization that archives Flash games; and Lost Media Wiki, which is more of a blogspace that acts as an archive of notable pieces of still missing media. These preservation projects exist entirely because of passionate archivists. The sites have little to no funding and are under constant threat of being shut down.
One of the largest contributing factors to the uptick in lost media is the dwindling production of physical media, like DVDs, CDs, and tapes. So much media is only available through streaming. Most modern TV shows and movies don’t ever go to DVD, so when a Netflix original movie or show gets pulled from the library, it just doesn’t live anywhere anymore.
Artists often get to make decisions about what of their work is worth keeping. So often with larger pieces of media, made by big studios, produced by big producers, artists don’t have control over how their art is distributed and archived.
So why should any of this media be saved? Why should the general public care that the “Super Monkey Ball Mini” demo has been lost? Maybe there isn’t one easy answer to either of these questions, but clearly “Super Monkey Ball mini” matters to someone. It mattered enough to warrant its own Wiki page on a fandom website.
In an age of rampant internet access, where saving files is a simple button click, and sharing files is as easy as a quick email, media should not be inaccessible, let alone lost.
