DOCTOR WHO MISSING EPISODE SOUNDTRACKS GET!
...Today I got several audio soundtracks to old
Doctor Who episodes from
Amazon.co.uk. If you're wondering why I'm so excited, these are soundtracks to some of the "missing episodes" - in the early 1970s, before the advent of consumer video, the BBC assumed it wouldn't ever really re-show its programs again and started wiping the master videos so they could reuse the videotape (in what's known as the "BBC Purge").
Doctor Who was one of the programs most affected, and a little under half of the episodes from the first six seasons of the show (1963-1969) just no longer exist. In the late 1970s the BBC realized what a mistake this was and stopped the purge (it probably helped that home VCRs were on the horizon, and so they realized there was marketability for old episodes), and they've been trying to find copies of the missing episodes ever since, mostly from other countries to whom they sent copies of these episodes to air. They recovered a decent amount (originally about 150 episodes were missing, now only 108 are), and new copies of episodes that had been sitting around in people's basements or that they'd bought in the British equivalent of garage sales are occasionally turning up; the only complete story in season 5 or 6,
Tomb of the Cybermen, was found in Hong Kong in 1992, and an episode of the season 2 story
The Crusade was found in, I think, 2004.
(
Here's a link to more info on the missing episodes from Wikipedia, if anyone's interested. Interestingly,
there's a possibility that more of these missing episodes may exist in the Zambian broadcasting archives; here's hoping they manage to raise the money to audit/preserve this, and hopefully find a few missing eps.)
HOWEVER, this still leaves us with a lot of episodes that are just gone. Fortunately, some young fans at the time used reel-to-reel audio recorders to record the soundtracks of these episodes when they first aired. It's a good thing they did, because now that the episodes themselves are gone this is the only way we can experience these older stories. They've been released on CD, so I now own audio recordings of six major missing serials; that's 37 episodes, of which exactly 4 survive in episodic form.
(The stories I got, in case any of you are at all wondering, are
The Myth Makers,
The Daleks' Master Plan [including its prequel episode
Mission to the Unknown],
The Massacre,
The Highlanders,
The Abominable Snowmen, and
The Web of Fear; I also have
The Evil of the Daleks coming, but it was on backorder and so had to be sent separately.)