I hope that didn't come across condescending. I was wasn't trying to mean "Do you understand me?". More like, "I'm not sure what I'm saying is actually coherent" lol
There may be differences that may be undetectable to the average person, although I believe that there would be differences that are detectable by an expert examiner. They lie somewhere between obvious to everybody and atom-to-atom perfection.
Are such differences meaningless? Well, they're used as evidence of an object's inauthenticity, and that's enough to make them less valuable.
You responded while I was editing my previous post.
I think we agree here. Creating a copy of an object is not the same thing as having the original object. No arguments there.
But that's why physical objects are different than the kind of Lost Media this wiki is concerned about. If you have a digital copy of a film, nobody would call that film lost. But if you have a hyper-accurate replica of a lost toy, then you still don't have the lost toy.
Forgive me, I'm not sure what the misunderstanding is.
You said that one can create a perfect replica, after I talked about how replicas will inevitably be imperfect. I thought you were responding to me.
Did I misunderstand?
I'll be honest, at this point, I kind of lost the train of thought here. lol
I guess if "perfect" is the word your honing in on, then you're correct in that it would be impossible to create a literal atom-to-atom perfect replica of a physical object. But surely, we can agree that under ideal circumstances, a toy or other kind of physical object could be recreated authentically enough that the average person wouldn't be able to distinguish it from the original without intense scrutiny. But when you get down to that kind of granularity, you would have to say that it's impossible to create a "perfect" copy of anything, and you start to get into philosophical arguments about existence, or overly technical details about lost bits of data, or whatever. But if your taking the meaning of words that literally, then they lose all meaningfulness and purpose when discussing things. The truth is, you can make a replica of something that the average person would call "perfect", even if it's not technically true by some hyper-specific definition.
ETA: I went back and looked at your previous posts, tjs9udfe , to make sure I understood what we were talking about. And I'm pretty sure we're on the same page. My point is much like a previous post you made. While I think it's feasible to create copies of physical objects, they're not really the same thing as the original. I think scans and photos and archiving of physical objects are things that people should be doing, just like you said. But using those to recreate an object, isn't the same thing as "finding" a lost object.
I don't get it. Why would you have to mean it hypothetically if it's actually possible?
Forgive me, I'm not sure what the misunderstanding is.
What I mean, is that, hypothetically, if you had the right materials, the right scans, the right plans, and the skill to do so, you could make a replica of a rare prototype toy (or any toy, for that matter).
I'm not a toy collector, or really in that scene, so I can't think of any examples of that happening in real life. The closest thing I can think of are people who recreate movie props. In those cases, there was probably only one prop ever made, but people still create screen accurate replicas, often with just images taken from the screen
Post by stintergalactic on Jun 13, 2022 16:41:42 GMT
I mean, yes, you can create a perfect replica of things like toys. And you can also document and archive prototypes with pictures and 3d scans. We should be doing all these things. But it's still kind of different.
Let's imagine they made a prototype ThatGamingAsshole toy that was meant to be part of an MLP line of toys. It was scrapped, only 1 was ever made. If I have detailed scans of it, I can make a replica, but it'll never be the actual, one of a kind, toy. It's cool that we have the scans, but making a replica doesn't mean you "found" the "media". That's not the same for films and such. We all want to find the film Him, but we don't necessarily need the original negatives for the movie to be considered "found". If someone transferred the movie to VHS back in the 80s, and uploaded it to the internet, yeah there'd be some loss of information in the process, but the movie wouldn't be "lost" anymore.
Post by stintergalactic on Jun 9, 2022 20:09:29 GMT
I mean, anything we could find would be great. It's just that most of the Play It Again and FHUVG ads don't have lists. There were usually just 2 inch ads with a little ad copy and a mailing address.
Those lists they sent out would, I think, would probably hold the best chance of finding more evidence.
I've said this before, but I think that physical objects count as lost media, such as lost prototypes or rare action figures. Because, no matter how many logical rings you leap through...and believe me, I've seen people leap through WORMHOLES...to say otherwise, by definitional all forms of media is physical because without a physical vessel it can't exist. Or put another way, the only reason that we know London After Midnight was ever even made is because tons and tons of pictures, posters, reviews, scripts etc have been found. Otherwise it would at best be an urban legend and possibly forgotten all together. And since the hope of negatives surviving, PHYSICAL negatives, has become a lost media Holy Grail sitting around and pretending physical media "doesn't count" is bordering on absurd.
First, I want to say that I agree with you. I think there are a lot of examples of physical lost media. BUT, I can also see the argument for not including them.
The movie London After Midnight, isn't itself a physical object. I understand that you would need some sort physical object in order to view it, but the movie itself is just a concept. Imagine a hypothetical situation, where it turns out that the last film reel copy of LAM was in the hands of a private collector. Then one day, out of the goodness of his heart, he uploaded the movie in full to the internet. The movie would no longer be lost media, even though we don't have access to the original reels.
The movie is the media, while the film is the medium.
Something like a movie, or a picture, or a song, or the text of a book, can be copied and disseminated ad infinitum. You can't do that with something like a toy prototype. Sure, you could make another, identical toy, but all you've done is create a new unique object.
Post by stintergalactic on Jun 9, 2022 19:02:31 GMT
This would probably be better for the Unidentified Media section. But either way, you said you saw it when you were 5? What year would that have been? Did the show seem contemporary for the time, or did it seem older? You said you might have the DVD, is that how you always watched it, or did it air on television too? If so, what channel would it likely have been on?
That being said, the one thing that would help the copyright trap theory would be finding older Play It Again listings and looking for red-herrings. That would be definitive proof. They're just not easy to find.
What we really need to find is one of the lists that they mailed out to people, as shown in the ad here:
It says they list over 500 titles, so it would be interesting to see if there were fake listings on those. Unfortunately, I find it hard to believe that one of these lists still survives, but who knows, stranger things have happened.
Without wanting to sound presumptuous, I don't need to. How else would they have listed Zeta Gundam on there properly translated? It's not like they had Google Translate back then. The original Zeta Gundam anime came out between 85 and 86 - which is when the game came out. The franchise as a whole was functionally unknown in the United States until Gundam Wing was aired on Toonami a full decade later. The original listing is dated for 1989, so either:
A. The creators of the listing were somehow familiar with this anime series and/or the Japanese language enough to properly list Zeta Gundam: Hot Scramble but NOT YYB1.
Or.
B. They knew a guy who said they kinda knew some Japanese and brought the occasional Famicom cart to them for translation, which resulted in YYB1's title.
It's certainly possible that they had a go to Japanophile guy that could have helped them with stuff, but with the evidence we have so far, there isn't a reason they would have needed one. Bob and Neil had contacts in Japan, and did import games from there. So I'm sure they were at least somewhat aware of things from Japanese culture. And even without Google Translate, there were still ways to translate things back then. When I was still a Rai Rai believer, I assumed it was translated from Japanese-to-English book. To my eye, if your going to believe that the first title was translated to the second, it would make the most sense that someone not to familiar with the language was trying to match symbols on pages.
The copyright trap is certainly plausible but...what exactly would be the utility in stealing the listing in the first place? Was there some sort of company procedure in the event that someone tried to order YYB1? Or any other game that they made up? If YYB1's title fit into a pattern of games that they've listed that are confirmed to be fake then I'd be more willing to believe the copyright trap theory if we had some kind of baseline against which it could be compared. As it stands either way we're dealing with memories from 30+ years ago. They could've had some intern around and just forgot about him. Do you remember every co-worker you've had? Classmate?
I don't have the ad in front of me at the moment, but I'm pretty sure there's language in there to the effect of "items subject to availability", so if anyone tried to order a fake game, I assume the process would be similar to someone ordering a game that was out of stock.
One thing that people seem to fail to notice about the Copyright Trap theory, is that it totally worked! Funco clearly and blatantly copied the Play it Again ad. And what did Bob do with this information? Nothing! There wasn't much he could do, and that was never the intention anyway. But now he knows what his competition is up to, and that was the only point in the first place.
Post by stintergalactic on Jun 8, 2022 16:57:44 GMT
So, the theory you posed is not really that different than current Rai Rai hypothesis. Basically, that is was a very (very) poor translation.
From an interview with FHUVG founder Neil Levin, we do know that they were importing games from Japan at the time. So everything in your theory could potentially vibe with what we know. But in that same interview, he also said that sometimes fake listings made it on to those game advertisements.
And that's what we're left with unless any new information comes to light.
Post by stintergalactic on May 6, 2022 14:33:43 GMT
This does raise a bit of a philosophical question. A live, unrecorded television broadcast is much akin to a live stage play. I guess television is a medium, so anything it shows can be considered part of the "media" as a whole, and any television we don't have a copy of would be considered "lost media". But if it was never recorded or intended to be seen again, it does seem to lose some LM cred.