Update: The Kickstarter campaign was cancelled on May 6th, 2014.
Cary O’Dell, author of Women Pioneers in Television: Biographies of Fifteen industry Leaders and June Cleaver Was a Feminist! Reconsidering the Female Characters of Early Television*, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to preserve episodes of The David Susskind Show. The long-running talk show premiered locally in New York City in 1958 under the title Open End and in 1961 went into national syndication. The title was changed to The David Susskind Show in 1966. It would remain on the air until 1987.
(If you’re not familiar with Susskind, you can find a biography at the Museum of Broadcast Communications website. A selection of episodes of The David Susskind Show can be viewed at Hulu.)
Some 200 episodes of The David Susskind Show are held by the University of Southern California on obsolete 2″ videotape. The goal is to raise $10,000 to gift to USC to transfer and preserve as many of the episodes as possible. The campaign, which started on April 8th and runs through June 7th, has raised $265 so far. Obviously, it has a long way to go.
Even if unsuccessful, at the very least the campaign will hopefully raise some awareness of the preservation needs of television shows like The David Susskind Show.
*In 2009, Cary O’Dell also contributed an article about Meet Millie to Television Obscurities.
The site says that the project was cancelled about 9 hours ago. At $265, the handwriting was apparently very bright on the wall.
I guess this Kickstarter campaign didn’t make it to $10,000, but does anyone know if some of the episodes of Open End from 1967 archived and available anywhere?