classicmovieguy
Senior HTF Member
The search is ongoing.
Fingers crossed!classicmovieguy said:The search is ongoing.
Julie Newmar is always easy on the eyes!I guess I didn't buy the MY LIVING DOLL release in 2012 because there was promise (or hope) of more to come and I wanted to wait a bit. (I cannot believe the DVD release was 6 years ago now and that I waited this long!)
Anyway, I finally picked this up not too long ago and finished watching it all. I enjoyed the available 10 (plus 1 extra) episodes and the extras included on it. I guess after 6 years the search for the rest of the episodes hasn't been very fruitful, but am thankful for this.
I did a search for any possible further information about it, but there isn't any. The most recent info of any kind I came across was the "Pop Colorture" website. A post from Nov. 2016 has the author colorizing the title sequence and that while he was doing it, he was informed of an audio file done of the theme song with lyrics for it:
My living doll, made to order
She is perfection in a girl
She’ll always do just what she’s told to
And this holds true anywhere
The perfect figure put together
No robot ever looked so real
She’s no ordinary kind
AF-709 is my own genuine living doll.
You can see the colorized opening credits and
hear the theme song at this link:
http://pop-colorture.com/tag/my-living-doll/
P.S.: For anyone familiar with this, I recall that the old Video Yesteryear company sold a VHS tape with two episodes
of this series on it. I'm assuming those two episodes would probably have been on the DVD release, but I don't know that
for a fact as I can't find out what two were on that Video Yesteryear release. Does anyone here know?
Yes, he donated elements to UCLA and destroyed the rest, including the prints from the extensive syndication.I thought 50s Dragnet elements existed but was a case of being too cost prohibitive to remaster.
Julie Newmar is always easy on the eyes!
Although Jack Chertok destroyed all the elements in his possession, it cannot be denied that episodes were still in existence (unless the dvd I am holding is invisible) LOL! We're talking 11 episodes were found for this dvd release not just 1 or 2. So there is definitely the possibility that episodes exist somewhere out there.
Last report I had heard the final 5 episodes of the series were still out there in the hands of a private collector. We were all hoping they would be found to release a "Volume 2" but so far that hasn't happened.
Thanks MartinP! That pretty much explains the whole situation and I actually believe what Peter has said about "willing to pay". I wish the collectors looked at the situation from the point of view of preserving instead of letting something rot in a closet lost forever.In that link I posted earlier it is written: (from a NOVEMBER 7, 2016, post)
The real tragedy of My Living Doll is that out of the twenty-six episodes produced, only eleven have publicly surfaced, with the remaining fifteen thought to be held in private film collections today. How the show’s original negatives became lost in the first place remains unclear, even to Jack Chertok Television, its parent studio. “Two sets of 35mm master negatives were struck: one for the CBS archive in Los Angeles and one for the archive in New York,” Peter Greenwood tells me. As licensing manager for Jack Chertok Television, he has been on a quest to find the final fifteen episodes so that they can be restored, preserved and released to the public. The Los Angeles negatives were destroyed in the 1994 Northridge Earthquake and the location of the New York negatives remains a mystery. After an exhaustive search of the CBS archives, the negatives were nowhere to be found and nobody seems to know where they went. It is rumored that Jack Chertok ordered the negatives destroyed because he became tired of paying storage fees on the series. Sadly, this is a possibility, since the show never saw syndication or further profits from licensing agreements, and with no negatives to be found in Los Angeles or New York, protection prints are arguably the only chance My Living Doll has for survival.
Unfortunately, some film collectors refuse to provide existing prints so that they can be properly scanned for preservation. “There are rumors that I am demanding the films for free, which couldn’t be further from the truth,” Peter tells me. “I am willing to pay for access to these films because I want this show to be restored, and I want to make it available. I don’t make money from this project; In fact, the first Living Doll DVD set has yet to break even. This is absolutely a passion project.” What makes finding this show even more difficult is that it never went into wide-run syndication, leaving few original prints. “I know the episodes are out there, but they aren’t doing any good sitting in a closet or a basement. These films need to be preserved and restored before they degrade completely and are lost from the world.”
I really hope that the remaining fifteen episodes of this series are one day recovered, both for my personal curiosity as well as for the sake of preserving an historic television series that has hardly seen the light of day since it first aired, over fifty years ago.
I wondered the same thing myself. I know it's a "he said/she said" type of thing, but how would the rumor get started that he was wanting them for free/peanuts if there wasn't some truth to it. Personally I'd love for someone that has the missing episodes to put them up for free on YouTube like I've did with Hank Williams stuff I've acquired that hasn't been released by the record companies.Other than one person's dubious word, there is no evidence whatsoever to back up any of his claims.