What Got You Into Lost Media?

A Day With Spongebob Squarepants. Seeing that search unfold was really entertaining. It had an underwhelming payoff, but that doesn't change the fact that the search was fun. Even the trolling entertained me.

I first got into lost media in the summer of 2013, after I read some Creepypastas. I thought the Creepypastas were real creepy stories about the author's encounterance with a lost episode of a cartoon or an unreleased director's cut of a film, or even a lost peice of media that was cursed, but then I came across the Lost Media Wiki and it showed the real lost media, not the ones from the Creepypastas (A few years later at the time I had a crush on Michael E. Rodgers, I learned that the Creepypasta stories I read were all made up to scare people for fun). I now visit the Lost Media Wiki often.

Quora? You're much better off here then. 

Longtime lurker, first comment, this seems like the right thread to introduce myself.
     I got into lost media in the early nineties, not that I really new the concept of lost media at the time. I grew up in a small Australian town of about 12 000 that had four video rental stores, and I lived in the horror section throughout my teenage years. When I was fifteen my parents gave me a copy of the book 'Hoffmans guide to Sci-Fi, Horror and Fantasy movies', which listed about three thousand movies in those genres. Now I had a list of films to look for. And so I searched, every time I was in another town I would head to the video stores and look for the films in my book just so I would know what was out there and available in Australia, in the hopes that I would track down a copy to watch at a later date. (for non-Australians, we're an island nation with pretty strict censorship and customs, a lot of films get banned or censored and ordering them from overseas risks them being discovered by customs and your home raided and video collection confiscated)

I also started collecting Fangoria magazine around this time after finding a comic store in the nearest city that had a box of vintage issues for $10 each. One issue I picked up had an index section listing films/film makers, which issue they were in and the page number. Two photos in the index caught my attention, one of the severed head of Fango editor Uncle Bob from the film 'Geek Maggot Bingo', the other was of an alien holding a chainsaw labeled 'The Texas Chainsaw Encounter'. My curiosity was piqued and I started looking for these two films, I tried to track down the issues referenced with no luck.

Jump to 2001 and I start using the internet, one of the first things I search for are these two films, again with no luck. I also discovered Snopes and their article on the "gay Jesus movie", I had a copy of 'The Golden Turkey Awards' so I had already read of 'Him', however at that time Snopes went along with the prevalent belief that 'Him' was the fake movie made up by the Medved brothers for the book. So now with the internet at my disposal I searched for information on all the films I wanted to see but couldn't find.
      A couple of years later while on IMDB I found an entry for 'Him', though it was listed as a hoax film. I checked the forum section (remember when IMDB had a forum for every film?) and someone claimed that the film was not a hoax, and that he had seen it in the mid-seventies. People called BS until the user provided a print ad for the film. I think this may have been the point at which the search for 'Him' actually began, as prior to this the film had been regarded as a hoax. Soon after someone found the review in Screw magazine, other newspaper ads etc. I'm thinking this was around 2005. This revelation blew my mind, that people could think a film was a hoax for twenty five years, only to discover it was real.

So that's when I really got interested in lost media, and started looking more into it, soon finding the old wiki, and all the while still looking for my personal "lost" films. And yeah, I did finally find out that 'Geek Maggot Bingo' was a Nick Zedd horror spoof, and bought it on DVD. And only six months ago I finally found a pdf of the Fangoria issue that referenced 'The Texas Chainsaw Encounter'. It was a joke in an article about the Texas Chainsaw films, and the photo of the alien with chainsaw wasn't even in the article. I spent twenty seven years looking for that film, and it was just a writers throwaway joke...

About five years ago, somebody on Toonzone (now Anime Superhero) made a reference to the wiki. I decided to look it up and I got hooked on it. I seem to go through phases where I’m into lost media and not.

I discovered this wiki through TV Tropes sometime in January 2017, and I was so impressed with the quality of most of the articles that I started being a dedicated reader of the wiki before deciding to make my own account on July 12th, 2017, and contribute making articles and editing existing articles in need of improvement to this wiki.

Ive been a classic film buff since i was 13 and went through an Orson Welles phase. Reading about The Magnificent Ambersons was a big revelation. It sparked an interest in other lost films and unfinished movies like The Thief and the Cobbler. But that was just a passing interest I mostly moved on from.

Many years later, the first search I joined firsthand was for Cry Baby Lane. I wrote the wikipedia article which got posted to the front page of reddit, that got Firesaladpeach's attention. Even though the movie sucked, I was glad to have played a part in saving it. Moreso I was proud that my writing was compelling enough to get linked to the front page of reddit. Since then Ive been a huge fan of lost media, especially after seeing how many political speeches or debates are unaccounted for. (The subject matter may not appeal to many, but its our goddamn history and should be public record!)