Elusive Shows Make ‘Most Wanted’ List

The search began when several lost episodes of “The Honeymooners” were found and thousands of Jackie Gleason fans lined up to see “The Great One” portray bus driver Ralph Kramden again.

After the success of its Gleason screenings, the Museum of Broadcasting in Manhattan set out in earnest to find other missing television programs whose images are central to America’s culture.

Now, the museum has developed a “most wanted” list patterned after the FBI’s, and curators are looking for Lucy.

On the list of lost shows are the pilot episodes for “I Love Lucy” and “All in the Family” and Johnny Carson’s first appearance on “The Tonight Show” in 1962. Also among the missing is complete coverage of the 1948 election.

Programs Thrown Away

Some programs were thrown away to save shelf space. Old kinescopes were gutted for their silver content. “Early on in television, if you talk to people who were involved in it, there was no sense that they were involved in a major historical development or one of the great cultural movements of our time,” said Robert Batscha, the museum’s president. “The issue was, ‘How do we get the program on the air?’ ”

“Also, it wasn’t clear, once a show went off the air, there was a market . . . for those programs. Syndication wasn’t then what it is today.”

After the invention of video tape, programs were often erased and the tape used again, particularly during times of budget cutting. Many sports producers believed no one was interested in seeing a game once the score was known.

“We got two programs recently. One, was Super Bowl III and the other was the 1955 World Series,” said Batscha. “A lot of sports is missing.” The museum particularly would like to find a copy of Super Bowl I.

Staffers Unearth Episodes

In 1984, museum staffers found four episodes of “The Honeymooners” originally made in 1954. The programs were in a vault at CBS but were not properly marked.

“They had dates, and out of curiosity we checked the dates and they happened to be the time of ‘The Jackie Gleason show,’ ” Batscha recalled in his offices in the museum, just off 5th Avenue near Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. “We called up the programs and found there were not only ‘Jackie Gleason Shows,’ but ‘The Honeymooners’ episodes were part of them.”

When Gleason, who died Wednesday night, learned of the museum’s find, he began his own search and turned up other missing Honeymooners segments. The museum now has in its collection the comedian’s first Honeymooners sketch, in which Art Carney plays a policeman.

The museum has about 15,000 television and 10,000 radio programs, and, unlike most other broadcasting archives, makes all the material available to the public.

The audience is diverse. David Letterman’s comedy writers regularly visit the museum to study technique, as do actors. Fledgling symphony conductors view tapes of Arturo Toscanini. Students of fashion come to study clothes in different decades. Thousands of youngsters each year ask to see the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” or television’s coverage of the death of President John F. Kennedy--events that happened before they were born. Batscha takes his 5-year-old son to see the “Lassie” show.

Diverse Wanted List

There are plenty of programs on the most wanted list. Curators would like to have the first television address from the White House delivered by President Harry S. Truman on Sept. 30, 1947; Mike Wallace’s interview show “Nightbeat,” and network television’s first successful children’s program, “Small Fry Club,” shown from 1947 to 1951.