The tubes, the tubes, won’t someone think of the tubes?
Back in 2001-2002 TBS used to show a latenight block of programming from the Burly Bear network that was apparently shown on college campuses. On that late night block there was a lot of crap, but there was also one of the best videogame-related shows I’ve seen: Dave and Steve’s Video Game Explosion.
Well, Burly Bear died (apparently it got acquired by National Lampoon) and Dave and Steve was lost to the sands of time.
I can’t believe that in this era of youtube and google video that I can’t find any episodes of this show online somewhere. All I can find is archive.org’s cache of the tbs page and two lonely images:
How am I supposed to satisy my lame urge to college every videogame related program I can find, if I can’t find it?
Realistically, however, it does illistrate the difficulties of being interested in studying this kind of ephemera. If you don’t record it and keep a copy of it when you see it, it might be gone. Recently, I was able to contact MSNBC and get a copy of the episode of when Henry Jenkins was on Donahue’s MSNBC show but in a case like Burly Bear where it has gone out of business, how likely is it that National Lampoon will even know what I’m talking about, let alone be willing to help me?
The moral of the story is, RECORD EVERYTHING!!!!