Post by zxtheproto on Sept 11, 2020 21:09:44 GMT
Synopsis (from Wikipedia):
The Secret City Adventures was a series of television programs designed to teach children how to draw.
Originally produced by Maryland Public Television and airing on PBS and TVOntario in the late 1980s, the series starred Mark Kistler as Commander Mark, who led viewers through various drawing exercises and examples. It also featured other characters, including Zebtron, Metaman and Cindy the Dragon. Occasionally, guest artists would appear on the show to demonstrate other art forms.
Originally produced by Maryland Public Television and airing on PBS and TVOntario in the late 1980s, the series starred Mark Kistler as Commander Mark, who led viewers through various drawing exercises and examples. It also featured other characters, including Zebtron, Metaman and Cindy the Dragon. Occasionally, guest artists would appear on the show to demonstrate other art forms.
I've been working on trying to find decent quality episodes of The Secret City for a while. However, many episodes are completely missing, and several others are almost impossible to watch as intended.
The largest archive of episodes for the series exists here:
www.youtube.com/channel/UCw8rIExNvhgV4vUDTbMdUXg/videosHowever, these are notably quite incomplete, and some episodes (especially the earlier ones) are so deteriorated that they're almost impossible to watch. Here's an example:
In addition, assuming the series was 65 episodes, only 48 exist in any format here (meaning 17 episodes are currently lost). I don't have any form of original episode guide, though, so take that specific number with a grain of salt. Looking at the episode numbers posted by the user, it seems like there are at least 64 - and I have a hunch that these numbers are accurate (see below with E26).
However, that doesn't mean it's all the episodes. The original pilot (not to be confused with Episode 1) is available here on PBS's website in a (comparably) excellent 720p upscale, presumably from original tape masters:
As well as, oddly, Episode 26:
This also matches up with Episode 26 in the YouTube set, implying a strong possibility that the episode numbers of both episodes are likely correct.
There is also this video, which I believe to be from a VHS tape titled 7 Magic Words of Drawing:
This tape can be found in the WorldCat library database here:
These don't appear to be in the order of the other set, and are likely from various episodes within the series' run. Any help with identifying these would be amazing, as they seem to be in much higher quality compared to the other available set. They could likely be used to reconstruct the original episodes, as long as the sources overlapped.
