Ian is now going silent: Sincere to stop 'hurting' more people or coincidence he did it shortly after the BBC announcement...?
Maybe the Sierra Leone Archive loss in the Civil War was a feint? Maybe the engineer was smuggling the film cans out, and used the Civil War as a cover and he actually blew it up himself when he was done Or, we're back to Somali Pirates hijacked the Singapore shipment, and the Engineer was a frontman for the Pirates
This isn't the first time he's acted like a prima donna (so I've read). According to the folks over at Gallifrey Base, he did the same thing after he let the cat out of the bag in regards to Matt Smith leaving.
Sierra Leone's Doctor Who shipment was last known to exist in their archive in 1999, which was destroyed sometime over the following three years. If the films had been moved out prior to the archive's destruction then the documentation discovered in 2010 may not reflect this. You can only follow the last breadcrumb you find, not the full path.
Like I said in my post (which you might have missed at the end of the last page), I think it's more likely Radio Times got their facts mixed up.
No I saw it, merely commenting that the established story of Sierra Leone may not be true. Which I doubt, I'm just suggesting.
I'm now almost convinced that SOMETHING has been found. The BBC just don't want to announce anything right now.
Personally I think the only thing holding back an announcement IF something has been found would be an arrangement with the BFI (who "barefaced" lied to Ian) about screening something at this year's Missing Believed Wiped event. Only problem with that is the event is normally held in December. I can't see what else would hold them back. It wouldn't take two years to sort through a stockpile of file cans, and I have no idea what negotiations would be going on (unless the owners of the "TIE archive" which was found are being picky about something; although if the films are already back in the UK...??). Don't know. Will see. I still don't think it would be 90 episodes. If it's Zambia then 71 at most...
Yep, think you're right Candelight. Back when this all started, I'd assumed that the Sierra Leone near miss had led to a similar lead and we might get season three back. If TIE comes into it, then it could be more. But... if you're putting 2 and 2 together to get 5, then TIE is one of the 2s you'd put in. It's one of the best avenues to explore in the hope of a big find, but that makes it the sort of detail to add in to make sense of a rumour...
I've no idea where Sierra Leone or TIE suddenly came from with that Radio Times article. It makes the most sense having someone found a TIE archive (which amazingly survived a couple of decades longer than it's parent company). On the fence still. And I don't think we're gonna get any kind of announcement confirming it for a long time, especially if the BFI played a big role in their return. If they have said they want to surprise everyone like they did two years ago (which was big for them from what I hear) then it could be months before we get someone saying "right, you know that rumour that went batshit crazy back in June..."
I imagine we'd just continue to see stories trickle out at a rate of a few per year, just as they've been doing to varying degrees since they started the DVD releases in 2001. We know the archive in Sierra Leone was lost but do we know that the Doctor Who episodes in question were there at the time? Lots of weird stuff has happened in the long saga of missing episodes. The reason why we have most of the episodes that we still have is because people were too negligent to return the prints to the BBC where they could be disposed of in an orderly fashion. Didn't Hong Kong swear up & down back in the '80s that they didn't have any missing Doctor Who, only to suddenly come up with all 4 parts of "The Tomb of the Cybermen" in 1992? I'm always dubious about rumors of recovered episodes. But considering how evasive some of the involved parties have been and how the rumor just won't go away, I'm starting to think that they've found SOMETHING. Now, maybe it's not 90 episodes like some of the rumors are suggesting. But ever since we learned about Sierra Leone, the notion of a large number of episodes being recovered in Africa has at least had the ring of plausibility to it. Even if they've only found 1 missing episode, that would be a miracle and well worth celebrating. I just think it's funny that, at one point, Ian Levine was saying that there will always be 106 missing episodes. Didn't he say the exact same thing about 108 episodes a few years ago before the 2011 rediscoveries of "Air Lock" & "The Underwater Menace, Part 2"? Doctor Who in the '80s seemed to attract eccentric rich folk. From what I've heard, Anthony Ainley was independently wealthy, didn't need to work, and the only time he ever did work was when he played the Master.
Hearing "TIE archive," I have this mental image of a library with hexagonal solar panels on the sides strafing the Millennium Falcon....
LOL, yea, me too, that's why I wanna know what it actually stands for, so, I can get the right image in my mind.
http://gallifreybase.com/w/index.php/TIE_Ltd The company closed down in 1975. It's long been assumed that all film prints held by TIE were returned to BBC London or destroyed. IF a TIE archive had been found it would theoretically contain thousands of film prints if they ignored the junking order.
Honestly, even if an official announcement that all (or any) of these 90 episodes were found were made today, the soonest you should expect any potential DVD release would be 2014. In my uninformed opinion, or course.
They may have been quietly progressing a group of episodes or serials through the "Preparing for Release" process for the last year already
Any release before the anniversary would have to be submitted to the BBFC by late September at latest, and once there, the BBFC would put the details on its website.