Junking Tapes

No Home Release for You is a total letdown for people who want to experience the show legally. But hey, at least the masters are still around...

Then there's *this* trope. Back before media preservation became a concern among the networks, networks were more concerned about storage *space*, which lead to the inevitable "we're running out of space" bit that gets fans angry. Network executives then came up with an idea: this trope refers to the wiping (or junking, hence the trope name) of many shows from the early days of TV. Basically, if you lived when TV was still new, you can only watch the shows once, and never again.

This is less of an issue with animation (mostly), because animation is expensive and people don't want good cartoons permanently lost.

With the advent of home media, this has become less of an issue until, by 2000, short of a few accidents, this trope became obsolete.

No Home Release for You is the modern version of this trope; for that trope, the masters still *exist*, but nothing's being done with them in terms of physical media releases.

The Write-off is a downplayed version of this.

Now has a page to play with the trope.

## Examples

* Just about any television show from the DuMont network. Its organ soundtrack, energetic crew, *and* the stories would brighten your day... if there were any surviving footage, that is. That said, DuMont was all for media preservation despite their money issues. Other people weren't too keen on the idea, as after DuMont shut down, people began destroying most, if not all, of the tapes. Because of this, only a handful of the network's programming actually survives.
* Many episodes of *Doctor Who* have been lost because of this method.
* *Assault! Human!!* is a Japanese tokusatsu show... or rather, *was*. The whole show is now lost.
* The 1973 run of *Doraemon*. TV Asahi later learned *not* to do this for the 1979 anime (the 2005 anime didn't have to worry about this either).
* Many early network shows were done live, because of this trope being in full force for *all* shows in the US at the time. When *I Love Lucy* debuted, this practice stopped.
* Early soap operas also had this trope in full force. Some were lucky, and became archived at the UCLA. The rest... there's a reason this trope exists.
* RTE (Raidió Teilifís Éireann) has similarly junked many of their earliest shows, especially newscasts.
* From the Philippines, ABS-CBN's pre-martial law archives were lost.
* The BBC often overwrite shows, including shows from when they switched to color. After 1978, the BBC stopped doing this.
* In-universe example in *SpongeBob SquarePants*: Patchy accidentally ruins the lost episode, making it "lost forever". (The real episode was obviously saved by Viacom and Nickelodeon, who even released it to DVD.)
* FlexPlay is a downplayed version of this, rotting after 48 hours. Meanwhile, the film still exists in the studio's archive. Is it any wonder the format failed to gain traction?
* *Astro Boy*: The 1963 series had part of the episodes' masters junked because Mushi didn't want them (they were going through bankruptcy at the time). NBC was left with no choice. Luckily, collectors were able to track down dub masters, and Nozomi gave it a release later on. The Japanese version, meanwhile, had to be redubbed from scratch for re-broadcast.
* Vanilla Ice did this to the master for the music video of "Ice Ice Baby". He also destroyed much of the set.
* It's not just video productions that are subject to this. The album masters for Milli Vanilli's debut album were destroyed after a scandal where they were caught lip-syncing their songs.
* Happens in-universe in one episode of *Ned's Newt*, when Newton accidentally destroys every single bit of the station's programming *before it was set to air*. This results in Ned and Newton having to recreate the entire schedule from scratch.
* Another in-universe example: At the end of the *Regular Show* episode "Do Me a Solid", one of Rigby's solids to Mordecai was destroying the tape of Mordecai doing his solid.