I think the best chances of the episodes being found is through raw footage than the other possibilities. Of course it doesn’t look like there’s many inserts that only appear in these (and they probably have separate copies of the inserts, outside of the episode master tapes).
I was going to ask how it was known for sure that these are lost/missing from the vaults, but then figured it’s probably the same suppliers of the scripts and episode tapes that were able to confirm it.
The page on lost Sesame Street episodes led to me wondering if it’d be good to have other lost Henson works. I wonder if there’s enough that are just not in Henson’s archives (or other appropriate archives or storage). I know there’s most of the ‘50s stuff (most episodes of Sam and Friends, likely all episodes of the other local Washington, DC shows), I recently read that NBC doesn’t have a copy of the Muppets first performance on Today in their archives, probably most Tonight Show appearances from two decades (including the historic first national appearance by the Muppets). I remember hearing about a television guest appearance that screened some commercials that otherwise don’t exist in the Henson archives.
Any word on whether Sesame Workshop has copies of all five of the test pilots or if some/all of the ones past the first are missing (I know that the Bert and Ernie D segment from one of them has surfaced online somehow)?
As I was reading about episode 1814 likely not being the final aired script, I foolishly thought it had a full guide page (Even though I know episode 2806 also only has the street scenes for the same reason). I clicked on the page, saw that recent icon to turn on/off inserts, and kept pressing it, wondering why it was still only showing street scenes. I should have known better.
I wonder if any of these street stories were repeated later. The page currently doesn’t Nite any of the street stories being repeated, but I guess it’s possible that those with the trusted scripts just haven’t looked at those scripts yet.