(no subject)

[teddog]

Okay, so I was chatting with my buddy Jesse last night, which burned down into the spamming of TV show openings from YouTube. Ha! Actually it really spiked my interest in more PoG work - Jesse is the guy who got me those Discovery tapes, upon many other things over the years. Great guy.

Now, I finally got my Toronto library card (my local branchs are Northern District, Mount Pleasant and Leaside, pray for them) and have discovered that I have access to a crapload of online magazine archives. This is how I got those Star articles a couple of years back, so I've decided to dig around and see what there is to see.

Turns out the the Globe and Mail has scanned all of their back issues like the Star did, only they scanned a copy with Toronto ads. While I haven't seen an article for PoG, I have uncovered a pile of TVOntario ads! A lot of them don't push PoG so far (I'm at January 1990 at the moment) - the one that announces the series starting is very strange in itself. I'm collecting all that I can find if only because it's so darn interesting to see how promotion was handled there at that time.

No clue what I'm going to do with these. I might just slap the non-PoG related ads up here just for a "Welcome to the 1990s!" trip.

Comments

[slwatson.livejournal.com]

::grins:: I'm DLing an episode of the Outer Limits. I'm pretty sure that it's you guys who would, somewhere, have copies of the old RCMP show, though, that I'm all itchy to see.

[commanderteddog.livejournal.com]

I'll pass a note along to Jesse. He's a lot closer tied to the TV-to-DVD markets (a lot of our chats are about what we've found on DVD). I keep hitting dead ends in my search.

Here's what I know, though:
R.C.M.P. is a BBC/CBC co-production. The CBC was extremely late into the game at releasing what was in their back catalog onto DVD and it's not an easy task to figure out who is putting out what. The rights to releases are all over the place.

As for people you want to put pressure on, here's some companies who are known to have released CBC material in the past:

http://www.morningstarent.com/morningstar/site.php
Morningstar has a mix of older and newer CBC releases

http://acornonline.com
Acorn is hit and miss. They put out Red Green and Da Vinci’s Inquest. Appear to have an interest in older television.

http://www.imavision.com/en/
Imavision. Put out The Forest Rangers, a CBC series from 1963. It's a French company and the English suddenly gives way to French on the site.

http://www.cbc.ca/contact/
The CBC itself. They may or maynot have a better idea.

One warning: Canadian TV show DVD releases have a history of tanking HARD, resulting in high prices, extremely long down times between releases (Red Green seasons come out once a year) or releases stopping after only one set (Cold Squad, Traders, This is Wonderland and many other shows lack complete releases). Many Canadians have very odd thoughts and values on homegrown media and many Canadian series do better overseas than at home.

[slwatson.livejournal.com]

One thing I've noticed in what little I've found out about the show is that it had excellent production values for the era that it was released in. But I didn't see any mention of DVDs, etc, and doubt that I would have enough ass behind me to get them to release it. Still, it looks like it would have been interesting, and of course, I'm really only looking for a couple episodes.

[commanderteddog.livejournal.com]

Sadly, the reason why many older CBC productions had such good production values is the same reason they suffer today - it's government funded.

It doesn't hurt to ask around about the DVDs or even talk to the CBC about what they have. I know that the CBC has archives of material; some of it is known to be destroyed, like the CBC version of Rock and Rule that burned in a fire (not sure what happened there), but to give you an example, they still have watchable copies of This Hour Has Seven Days, which was a current affairs series from 1963. Unlike the BBC and many other stations, the CBC was not known to have wiped large amounts of their collections, if any were wiped at all.