As you may know, almost all the early, pre-1972 episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson are lost and gone forever. But one "new" one has turned up — a 16mm kinescope that was made so the show could be shown overseas to U.S. military personnel. It's been turned over to Carson Productions and if there's anything there, I bet they put it out on DVD. Or something.
Last time I wrote about this loss of the old shows, a few folks wrote in to ask me about certain classic clips — like the oft-shown one of Ed Ames teaching Johnny how to throw a tomahawk. How did they survive? Answer: They survived because they were classic clips, included in some anniversary show which survived.
It's fashionable to bash the networks that lost all those old, classic shows…and they deserve some bashing. But as a couple of exec-types have pointed out, there's at least a little culpability for folks like Johnny Carson and Steve Allen who didn't insist on their shows' preservation or even ask if that was being done. If either had made it a contractual demand, it would have been done.