On Lost Stories

In April of this year, a story will become lost forever after ending. Originally releasing in 2021, Nier Reincarnation was created for mobiles, which in the gaming scene are notorious for leaving little to nothing behind them. This got me thinking about lost stories. Not just "lost media" in the modern sense of mobile games going offline and programs being removed or edited on streaming services without a physical equivalent to compare it to, or film print originals being altered (looking at you, Star Wars Original Trilogy). I have encountered some elements of this, pieces of the history of narrative that are either in danger of being lost, or have been lost.

The most obvious examples, and the ones with no recourse for recovery, are the plays and poetry of Grecians and Romans from antiquity. The lost tragic plays of Euripides, the vast number of comic plays that have been lost apart from the dozen or so surviving from Aristophanes, the Roman historical accounts and poetry that wasn't preserved for whatever reason, and most prominently the lyric poetic writings of Sappho and her contemporaries. In Sappho's case, the loss is particularly painful and tantalising as we have some fragments from her work. Despite her being highly regarded in her day and in the immediate aftermath in Classical times we have...drum roll please...a whole four debatably complete poems, and somewhere around six fragments. But oh my, those pieces are so evocative.

Those are the biggies, the ones that are the most obvious examples of lost stories. They were lost due to the passage of time, the archaic style of writing, and the already shaky ability for historical manuscripts to be preserved. It's sad, but sadly unavoidable, and not without hope. Many of the Sappho we do have was rediscovered through recent archaeological and scholarly work. Originally it was only one or two bits that we had. But there are cases where the reason for loss is...less misty and nostalgic. During the early television days, video tape was expensive and so television networks and stations had a policy of reusing video tape. Or they were broadcast live, so no recording happened in-house. Many surviving programs we have exist because of copies onto 16mm film. Many people will point to Doctor Who, but there we actually have the entire run intact as audio recordings, not something that can be said for most of the Paul Temple TV series, a lot of early Avengers, the first Quatermass serial, the original A for Andromeda, and so many others. All we have are tantalising glimpses through stills, clips, script fragments.

These were, for a long time, the most painful, but also quite understandable. There wasn't a strict policy or atmosphere of preservation for future generations. This was semi-disposable material, very understandable. But there is another type of lost media that's more insidious, and I think should be treated with the utmost caution. Following the scandals surrounding Savile and Harris, programs featuring or referencing them went through a session with a pair of scissors. That didn't just mean programs hosted by them were culled (completely understandable), but spoofs of them were also removed. I completely understand this approach, as what those men and others like them did is unforgivable. And then some pieces of media have been removed/disappeared because of offensive stereotypes. Again, understandable. But if you just remove them without leaving a suitably signposted way of finding them again for curiosity or serious research, where are you? You enter the realm of historical revisionism, which...you know...is what Stalin was doing. Being cautious and considerate is commendable, but clumsy damage control which harms media preservation and sets a precedent of sweeping away the unhelpful and unhealthy as 'it didn't happen' is...wrong.

Now we come to a very modern type of "lost story". Those who could release it have it in good quality, they have the means of releasing it...but they don't, for whatever reason. This is particularly noticeable with children's television like The Basil Brush Show, The Magician's House, The Worst Witch, and others. They might receive small releases, or be rebroadcast, but they seldom get a release in any form that allows preservation. Documentaries are also beset by this issue, but the one that stands out is the series that may have been serviceable, but doesn't get any kind of later attention because it didn't really take off. One I caught by chance just on the cusp of its age demographic was Galidor. Basically designed as a tie-in with Lego's action figure line of the same name, it had an interesting sci-fi premise, and did what it could on a smallish budget with a goal of using a combination of live actors, puppetry and CGI--not a common combination at the time it was made in the early 2000s. But both series and toy line flopped, and outside a repeat in 2004 which I happened to catch, and a cancelled game that got released through Lego Game bundles, it's only accessible through legally grey online recordings. Is it a series worth preserving? Maybe, maybe not, it's not the best thing around. But it's a unique concept, and you'd be surprised how many notable directors and writers cut their teeth on it.

I feel torn about this concept of stories, whether they be books or films or shows or games, being lost or altered. It feels, particularly when the change comes from a modern moral mandate, like a slap in the face. "You're too delicate to have this, so we're taking it away, neh-neh!" It makes cases where these elements are kept with suitable warnings more noticeable, and in many ways laudable. They release the media as is, but they still acknowledge elements that would offend or upset. But when it's a case of Sappho's poetry lost to the ages, a mobile game vanishing, physical media degrading with no digital equivalent, then it's sad. All the sadder when the only means of actively preserving them treads into a legal grey area and can have publishers and distributors coming down with the ban hammer and leaving their audience with literally nothing.

If this was rambling, I don't apologise. This is a topic that can't be covered easily in a single post. Lost media, lost stories, are something that's been with us for millennia. And when they happen in the present day, it can be anything from sad to unsettling. Because whatever people say, those are still stories. And if we're kept from experiencing them and learning from them and more specifically what to avoid in them with suitable context, then how can we learn at all?

Image credit: Nier Reincarnation Season 3 - The People and the World key art - alterations done by me to illustrate the article's theme.