favorite lost media search (that you were apart of)?

I was all alone for it, but discovering Uccidere in Silenzio. I only found it by complete random chance, through a  "recommended for you" YouTube music playlist of all things. That music was so hauntingly beautiful that I immediately googled the film's title to learn more about where it came from. All I found were a few random posters, and an imdb page with exactly ten ratings. (The lowest total I've ever seen for a real movie that played in theaters.) I scoured the internet for a copy of the film, clips, screencaps...nothing. Only like two reviews, both of them less than four sentences long. It was a film that had came and slipped into complete obscurity.

I checked every possible permutation of search results until I found a vendor selling copies. I learned it had a limited run on vhs in Italy, and was never brought to later formats or imported to other countries. (The tapes even have a weird, creepy red label and no pictures from the film on the sleeve.) Even though the film itself is definitely flawed, it does have a strange charm about it. Mostly that's because of Stelvio Cipriani's score (what attracted me in the first place) but also because it was clearly a labor of love, however misguided. This is a movie that balances cute dating montages with a scene of a baby wandering around an abandoned department store display, unbuttoning a mannequin's top and suckling her plastic nipple. It begins with a cute, symbolic sequence of a baby wandering the city streets alone and ends with a creepy freeze frame of the same baby celebrating his mom's decision not to get an abortion! There's a compelling combination of wholesomeness, tastelessness and randomness about this film which, in my opinion, perfectly encapsulates the appeal of lost media--nobody knows what you're about to see, so anything can happen.

Anyway, the whole search lasted maybe 2 months: just long enough to be agonizing but still ending on a satisfying conclusion. And it led me down an even bigger rabbit hole of lost media, since about half of the Director's entire filmography are unavailable to the public as well. It may not have been one of those big publicized search efforts, but to me it will always remain the definitive lost media experience.

Yep yep

nice! i haven't heard of that; i'll definitely check it out.

One of the searches that I had started; finding the lost original ending/missing footage from MGM’s 1932 film Freaks, by Tod Browning.

Mine, me and a few other people have been discussing a piece of personal lost media that I was in

Clockman was a once in a decade search.

*INHALES DEEPLY FOR LONGWINDED POST*

I know that I sound like a broken record, but I have been digging for Yeah Yeah Beebiss I like an obsessed asshole with OCD for more than a decade. Because I am one. (twist ending)

Ironically I have mentioned before, I kind of ran through some of the other theories, and discussed here that they lack any real solidity but I still have no idea what the fuck it is, so in hindsight I think I made matters worse. To reiterate a previous thread that I was, conincidentally, no joke reading twenty four hours ago--the chances of it being some kind of a "copyright trap" or an "in joke" collapses under even the slightest scrutiny because of outside things you have to account for, and the idea it was some kind of insane mistranslation for that Rai Rai game is highly unlikely because it was never released here and this was an ad for RESALE so why would they list the poorly translated name of a game never intended for release or even MENTION in the west? I took a cue from an LSuperSonicQ video and genuinely just picked three random titles, I literally just pointed at three random ones with my finger and googled them, and it came up with several titles released HERE or that were intended to be released HERE that were either shelved, renamed or released under a name that was basically one letter off in all three cases and several other "tests" I did. So my best guess is that this was actually some kind of game that was actually made and likely had that actual title or some variant of that title. For example one game had basically an identical title to what was advertised, just shortened down, which flows perfectly with the SECOND ad where the title was cut down to just Yeah Beebiss I. Another was a game, fully made and with roms already available online today, which was never commercially released but certainly was made and with the identical title in the ad. I believe BOTH ads.

So my best guess is at some point there literally was a game with some variation of the title Yeah Yeah Beebiss I (likely meant like "Yo! Noid" as an exclamation) and was fully produced, possibly with roms available even now, but no one knows what they have or even doesn't care. From what I gather, there appears to be a kind of Cold War in the realm of classic, "lost" games where some people want them publicly available and some want to buy them and then hide the roms away in some kind of vault/flashdrive. See the infamous "Collector" and the nonsense that went down with that Resident Evil prototype. So it's possible someone found it and just decides to keep it underwraps as some kind of impotent display of their importance, like a rich art collector. Another possibility, as I told my GF, the title it was officially made/released under was such a wild variant that finding it becomes even more of a labor  ;_;)

Or as I told her, it's literally within reason this was the original prototype for Sonic the Hedgehog (consdier for a moment Anthem was originally titled Bob Dylan and no I'm not being sarcastic) and given the psychedelic, out there nature of the Sonic series Yeah Yeah Beebiss I probably would have been a more on-point title.


Also,I was involved with Cartoon Lost and Found.