Shada is only famous for it's history, other than being the last six parter in the series' history it's not a great story. I liked the bicycle chase and the location shooting in general, but like the rest of that season the story is a bit of a mess.the sad thing is that Graham Williams tried to save money for the serial by taking money away from The Nightmare Of Eden and The Horns Of Nimon, which in the end only served to make those stories even worse.
I absolutely love the story, myself. Easily the third best Graham Williams DW story - Horror of Fang Rock and City of Death being the other two. It is memorable, funny, fun, charming, amusing, and its also well shot and overally, well made.
By the way, Netflix finally made "The Enemy of the World" available, and I just finished watching it. I'm really glad it was rediscovered. It's one of the best Troughton stories, an effective thriller with some neat character bits (I love Astrid's exchange with the Doctor about what kind of doctor he is), a terrific dual performance by Troughton, and some ambitious action and effects sequences directed by Barry Letts and foreshadowing his producership of the Pertwee era. And I was surprised to realize that it takes place just three years from now!
The Enemy of the World was one of my favorites and I could watch it just to see Troughton do the Salamander accent alone. Stories like this and The Mind Robbers were a great change of pace from the constant "base under siege" stories of the Second Doctor era.
This is hardly unique to the BBC, however. Until maybe 25 or 30 years ago, most film simply didn't have what you would consider to be proper preservation. MGM was early to catch on and started on a huge preservation program in the 1960s that continues today under WB and Turner. WB generally kept good care of their films or had the right backup elements. Columbia started in the late 1980s, Universal since the mid-1980s (of course, beginning right after an archive purge), Fox junked most of their pre-1951 library in 1976 to free up storage, Disney junked most audio elements from before 1950, etc. If you really want to get sad, no camera elements survive for movies such as Dr. Strangelove, Citizen Kane, Becket, The Producers, Manhunter, Seven Samurai, Sunrise, Rashomon, Tokyo Story, Sunset Blvd, Stagecoach, Cabaret, MASH, All About Eve, Singin' in the Rain and about a third of The Godfather. On the other hand, camera negatives survive for silent films like The General, The Big Parade, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and The Great Train Robbery. Film preservation is a relatively recent development, culturally speaking.
Just imagine if all existing copies of Rashomon were lost and we had to rely on various people's differing recollections of what it had been about....
About the "hoarding of missing episodes" trope... I do know of some people in radio who have treasure-troves of early Top 40 radio jingles (such as KEWB, Oakland, on record disks, no less) and other broadcasting nuggets that they will NOT dub and share with others. It is the feeling of those that I know of guarding those broadcasting treasures that if dubbed copies got out, then the value of their collections would be diminished. There's one collector who has the only complete set of recordings of the 1927 Dempsey-Tunney "long count" championship boxing match as it was covered by NBC. This is one of only four known actual airchecks from that year that still exists. And said collector still won't release a tape of the thing to _anyone_...
This is why I have so little respect for that kind of collector mentality. "Value" in what sense? How do works of art and entertainment have any value if nobody gets to experience them? The monetary value of a scarce resource is nothing but a number. It's a shallow and empty thing to be motivated by. Heck, even money has no real value unless it circulates. It's really more just about hoarding and being smug that others have less than you do. Don't get me wrong -- there are certainly collectors who do it for the love of the thing they collect. But collectors like that are usually willing to share it with others who feel the same love. I'm talking about the kind of collectors who are just in it for the hoarding, for the bragging rights of owning things that nobody else gets to see. That's just pure self-absorption.
City of Death addresses this, with the theft of the Mona Lisa, and Scarlioni being able to sell it 7 times to seven different hoarders
^I'm still wondering which of those Mona Lisas was the one in that Sarah Jane Adventures story where the Mona Lisa came to life.
Christopher: Knowing what i know about hoarding collectors, I would place pretty safe bets that some of them will have missing BBC/ITV material and enjoy the "expensive gloat" to quote City of Death.
My guess is that is what happened to the missing episode of The Web of Fear, as the missing episode is the first one with then Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart in it.
I wouldn't be surprised. Recently, the second reel of the legendary Laurel and Hardy short "The Battle of the Century" was found in the home of a film collector who had died in 2004. Here's the article... http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/...e_of_the_century_pie_fight_reel_is_found.html