Sneak Previews – 1978
A Wedding, Interiors, The Boys from Brazil, Somebody Killed Her Husband, Death on the Nile
The Wiz, Who’s Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, Girl Friends, The Big Fix, Days of Heaven
Paradise Alley, Magic, Midnight Express, Watership Down, Comes a Horseman
The Wild Geese, A Dream of Passion, Goin’ Coconuts, Slow Dancing in the Big City, Violette
Superman, Force 10 from Navarone, Moment by Moment, Oliver’s Story, King of the Gypsies
Honestly, I really wanna see their OG reviews of Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN and Bakshi’s LOTR. (No idea why that episode is missing.)
When iMDB first uploaded their episodes, one was mislabeled as the Halloween/LOTR. What does that mean? Very good chance that episode is lost, possibly (gasp) taped over, with the tape still showing that Halloween/LOTR description, but with something else on the actual tape. Considering Halloween’s prominence and the fact that Ebert gave it four stars in his print review, it’s possible that the tape was borrowed to take a clip from that episode, and then either not returned or (gasp again) taped over before being returned. We are lucky that we have nearly all of those later PBS episodes, and it’ll be a big surprise if any more of those missing early ones from the 70s show up, ala that Saturday Night Fever episode that turned up a year or two ago. Not that many people were taping back then, and the PBS station obviously doesn’t still have the missing episdoes from that period or they would have been part of the block that went to iMDB.
It appears that all the Sneak Previews videos have been taken down from IMDB very recently. I hope this is only temporary. At least some (if not all) videos have been backed up on YouTube.
That’s very frustrating and disappointing. I helped put in the direct links to all the IMDB videos on this site to save on the site’s storage space. The history of S&E videos disappearing from official sources is not good. They never come back. Like you said, many of these seem to be on YouTube, but some have had watermarks and graphics added to them. I spoke to Larry and he says he does have IMDB videos saved to disk, but he won’t be sure if he has them all until he goes through them. I believe we will try to find a way to host these videos and get them back on the site. But it could take some time as there were 112 of them listed on IMDB according to the Internet Archive. Unfortunately the videos can’t actually be viewed in the Archive as far as I can tell.
It’s been a couple years now since Chaz’s brief mention that an official Siskel and Ebert website was coming soon. It’s been quite a delay (and hopefully just a delay and not a cancellation), but it could be that they have been waiting for some rights to clear up before launching the site. I think there is a good chance that the site will have the Buena Vista reviews and all the reviews that were previously hosted by the IMDB. Matt Singer’s book on Siskel and Ebert is scheduled to be released 10/24/23, less than 3 months away. Could the timing on that release be connected to a launch of the official site? Well, we don’t have long to find out!