Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

17 Mar 2010, 10:11 a.m.

In Which I Offer To Do Research For You

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2010 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

So far, no one has suggested things for me to look up at the NYC TV/radio archive. Leonard and I added two items to my list. Frank's Place is a well-regarded eighties dramedy that used a bunch of great music and thus is unlikely to ever come out on DVD due to licensing issues. And the "Persistence of Memory" episode of Cosmos is up on Hulu, and has an anachronistic computing-related montage near the end. Specifically, although Cosmos dates from 1980, the montage includes a Shoemaker-Levy 9 webpage as viewed in Netscape. So Leonard is interested in learning what the original montage featured.

Any other suggestions?

Comments

Zed
http://www.mememachinego.com/
17 Mar 2010, 12:45 p.m.

I've got one! Do they have this episode of Playhouse 90? Don't really have any questions about it; just want to know if it exists and this is potentially viewable, even if it takes an archive visit.

Dan
http://www.kith.org/poi/journal
17 Mar 2010, 17:50 p.m.

What can you do with these, once you've looked them up? Can you make a quiet copy?

Sumana Harihareswara
http://brainwane.net
18 Mar 2010, 14:20 p.m.

Zed, I searched and it looks like they have several Playhouse 90 episodes, but I don't see that one in particular. Take a look and check for yourself, in case my search fu failed me?

Dan, I would just watch and take notes. I find it unlikely that I could make a copy, although I haven't done quite enough reconnaissance with regards to the room layout, surveillance, media type & logistics, etc.

Dan
http://www.kith.org/poi/journal
20 Mar 2010, 23:47 p.m.

<br/>I actually had a hope that you could verify what color (of artist's chalk) was used for Ged's skin in the first adaptation of Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea that I'm aware of, a segment on the 80's PBS book-teaser show called Story Time. (Actually, I'd like to re-watch the whole thing, some twenty-plus years later, but just the fact of whether or not they whitewashed him would be interesting background information for the debacle that was the recent adaptation.)

Sadly, it doesn't look like the search page you linked has any love for "Story Time," so no luck there.