Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.
Every Daily Show episode since Jon Stewart took over as host in 1999? Disappeared. The historic remains of The Colbert Report? Disappeared. Presumably, one hopes, those materials remain archived internally somewhere, but for the general masses, they’re kaput. Instead, the links redirect visitors to Paramount+, a streaming service whose offerings pale in comparison. (The service offers recent seasons of the Daily Show to paying subscribers, but only a fraction of the prior archive.)
Such digital demolitions are becoming routine. For fans and scholars of pop culture, 2024 may go down as the year the internet shrank. Despite the immense archiving capabilities of the internet, we’re living through an age of mass deletion, a moment when entertainment and media corporations see themselves not as custodians of valuable cultural history, once freely available, but as ruthless maximisers of profit. Those of us who believe in the historical value of accessing media from the past are paying the price.
TV Guide and a fresh pack of 5 VHS tapes. My parents knew exactly what to get me for my birthday.
“TV Guide” is still a phrase in our household. Mostly because I used to have a cat with… personality - he loved to push the limits of what was acceptable kitty behaviour. So my go to became ‘threatening’ to throw the TV Guide in his direction (not actually at him!) and saying firmly, “TV GUIDE!” He would always immediately stop what he was doing when he heard “TV GUIDE!” LOL. Fun times and fond memories!
Where you rocking the vcr+ codes or manually recording?
I forget the model, but I had a Sony black VCR (probably from the early 90s or late 80s, whenever Sony moved away from the silver aluminum enclosures to the black plastic style) with the spring loaded wheel that let you FF or RW. The remote also had the wheel at the bottom. At first I programmed the timers using only the onboard display, but it also had an on screen menu as well for dialing in the recording on/off times. This and my dad showing me how to daisy chain VCRs in order to record movies definitely set me down a path lol