How could we try to obtain "unreleased" cartoon in high quality?

[Eating]

There are a lot of cartoons that were aired but never released (that is, no DVD release, iTunes purchase, etc.) and are no longer shown. Fortunately some shows have TV rips made but they are often, by nature, low quality and distorted.

Essentially, these shows are valuable to us but probably not that valuable to the network that owns rights to them. Since these are unlikely to fall into the public domain (at least for a few decades), it might be worth figuring out ways to get them. Legal methods are obviously preferred.

Some of my own suggestions:

1) Mass targeted requests. Some networks have a suggestion box of which shows to air, or a method of requesting shows. We could attempt to take advantage of this to get the wanted cartoons aired and record it in very high quality. The only issues I could see with this is that it would have a network logo/ads and there is a possibility they may change the aspect ratio or something due to current 16:9 standard.

2) Ask to purchase a copy of the show. Probably not going to be effective, especially for more recent shows, but worth a try.

3) Petition a release of the show. This would require a lot of people to be interested but should be effective in at least getting a reply.

It would also be useful if we could find contacts to figure out the best people to ask and what the best possible quality we could get is. It seems the hardest part of dealing with a big company is getting a reply.

[ElementalCards]

I'd probably ask the network or company if the materials still exist and if they warrant a possible digital release.

[altlabrat]

I have tried requesting owners of productions to release their shows on alternate media instead of sitting on them, with stuff like amazon you can upload your shows for sale at almost no cost, but for some reason old men who tend to own these things are not into that, so I have gone either completely ignored and got a rude mail back once.

 

Take for example D'Ocon, as far as I know none of their stuff has been ripped and uploaded anywhere, and it seems like the guy is still trying to hustle his 20+ year old cartoon shows to networks on kidscreen and the like.

http://www.docon.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=284&Itemid=21&lang=en

 

Networks rarely own the rights to productions, unless you are talking about Disney, Nick or CN, they are usually owned by the studios that created them or to media distributors like Mediatoon, so contacting the networks in bound to do nothing.

 

Sadly, there's lots of stuff out there that's bound to become lost media eventually.

[Eating]

20 hours ago, altlabrat said:

[...] unless you are talking about Disney, Nick or CN [...]

I'm used to seeing cartoons that are owned by those networks, but yes that's an important distinction to make. I can see why distributors rather than broadcasters would be more reluctant to release their products to the public. Possibly fear of piracy.

 

20 hours ago, altlabrat said:

so I have gone either completely ignored and got a rude mail back once

That's a bit rough. Uploading to those services is actually a reasonable idea if they aren't being shown any more. The least they could do is respond (civilly).

 

On 6/24/2018 at 1:38 PM, ElementalCards said:

I'd probably ask the network or company if the materials still exist and if they warrant a possible digital release.

It's a great idea, but it seems the hard part is knowing where to ask and getting a response.