Just blue-skying here, but Now that the Gizmoplex is going to give everyone everything, I got to thinking it would be cool if they could do a Kickstarter to get the streaming rights to some/all of the missing episodes. (At least in cases where money is the only obstacle.) I doubt we’ll ever see Godzilla, but it’d cool if we could get stuff like Final Sacrifice back.
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I wonder on the ones where “money is the only obstacle” how many is money really the obstacle, or did the rights-holder set a price so high it was designed to never be met. As in, we could raise eleventy billion dollars and it still wouldn’t be enough.
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Yeah, my understanding is that some of the rights holders either a) think they can hold out for nearly limitless cash or b) became deeply offended once they realized what their movie got licensed for and have no intention of even entertaining an offer to relicense.
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I would pledge in an instant if I thought there was a chance they could get them. Sadly I don’t think there is.
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Of the episodes that have never been released, Rocketship X-M and Godzilla are unlikely. Wade Williams, who owns X-M, has licensed many films to MST3K over the years, but feels Rocketship X-M is too important to have been riffed and has even said it’s in his will that MST3K can’t release it after his death.
Similarly, Toho has no sense of humor about their rubber monster movies.
The Five films owned by Susan Hart could be a possibility. My understanding is she just has a very overinflated idea of what her films are worth, and since no one will meet her price, they all sit unreleased.
Fire Maidens, the Deadly Bees and The Space Children are owned by Paramount, which has licensed films to Shout before. I think those three with Quest of the Delta Knights are the most likely for another set.
Who knows what some of the once licensed, but now lost films might go for. I suspect that Shout might have a cap on how much they would want to pay. Let’s say they give Susan Hart a million dollars per episode for her five movies. Suddenly the owner of Pumaman or whatever might say “You were willing to pay $1 million for her movie, so I want that much too!” And price themselves out of license renewals.
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exactly, that’s my concern. It could come back to bite us - in getting some rights back, we’d lose others to rights holders who now want some of that action.
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And really, while it would be nice to get them released officially, it’s not like there aren’t ways to access the episodes where they can’t get the movie rights.
…and before anyone starts thinking it, I have purchased a number of box sets as well as individual episodes through RT. I’m speaking specifically of the episodes that can’t get a real release.
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Yeah, this is a very valid (and very real) consideration.
It’ll be a shame if we can’t get all the episodes officially released, but… thankfully, we have alternate means of scratching those itches.
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There’s also something like 50 episodes that are totally fine on DVD but still not streaming. It’d be cool to get those, at least.
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Keep circulating the magnet URIs… 
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Is there a list of lost episodes?
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The first post in this thread has episodes they’ve not been able to clear, or that they haven’t been able to renew:
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Someone should tell the copyright squatter that he’s not a pharaoh and doesn’t get to be entombed with his stolen treasures. The copyrights will revert to the public domain sooner or later, dogs in the manger notwithstanding.
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Dead people don’t have legal standing, though. His heirs would have to decide whether they want to honor these wishes or not. They probably would, depending on their greed vs. respect for WW’s stated wishes.
For now.
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Many thanks- was panicking over an assessment deadline so properly just read over that.
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Honestly I’d settle for the host segments on their own, copyright holdouts shouldn’t deny us some of those great mstie moments.
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I was wondering if they would ever do a fundraiser to get the rights to the lost episodes. I feel like if enough money was raised, they could get at least a few of them. However, @Majorjoe23 did bring up a great point that if Shout was going to pay a ton for one movie, other companies might try to raise the prices of their films for relicensing. The three Olive Films titles (Fire Maidens, Deadly Bees, and Space Children) are the most likely ones to get the rights for. Apparently, they had a deal to own those movies for five years, and that deal would have expired in 2020. It’s now 2022, and the status of those films is unknown as far as I’m aware. But if it’s not Olive that owns them anymore, then Shout could maybe license them. Funny enough, I believe Attack of the Eye Creatures is technically public domain. It’s just a remake of another movie that Susan Hart owns. So, they would have to still pay her.
I think we’ll have to accept the rest of the lost episodes will never be released. Frank and Kevin’s first episode will never be released. The other Godzilla episode will never be released. The only way that I could see it happening is if Shout decides to give them away for free in secret. It would be illegal, but that’s the only way that the lost episodes will ever be available. Maybe the vault tapes for them will be found in the future. That way, we can at least have copies in better quality than the typical home VHS recording. But we’ll see if anyone ever finds them.
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The Shout Factory/Twitch channels have been running those host segments free of their episodes recently, so I’m hoping they’ll be bonus content in the Gizmoplex somehow.
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This won’t happen. Shout is not some unheard of company. If they did this, it wouldn’t stay secret for more than a few minutes. And then Shout would likely be sued into non-existence.
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