Is there a reason the original Match Game is in such poor shape? Like, I know it being in color wasn't going to be saved because of wiping, but not even kinescopes? Given the care G-T took to preserve their CBS shows (particularly the panel shows), why wasn't the same done for some of their others, particularly their poor record at NBC? Did NBC not even want to do kinescoping?
Goodson-Todman put energies into saving most of their primetime programs, starting in the summer of 1952, but seem to have been largely indifferent to doing the same with their daytime programs until 1972- note that there isn't that much in a relative way of the daytime run of the Cullen
Price Is Right, almost nothing (as far as we can tell) of the daytime
Beat The Clock, how few episodes seem to exist of
Play Your Hunch (and that a good hunk of what does exist are primetime episodes), that it appears that nothing from
Say When! is held by FremantleMedia, and that no one has found any footage from
Snap Judgment.
Even the two main exceptions to this rule aren't that big of exceptions when we consider them in greater detail- the existing daytime episodes of
Password are almost solely from the color run and were sold in syndication after the end of the run (and survive in the syndication copies, rather than as originally broadcast), and the existing daytime episodes of
To Tell The Truth also seem to chiefly be from the color run and similarly were preserved with syndication in mind (though Goodson-Todman ultimately decided just to revive the series, meaning that these episodes do survive in original format).
Ultimately, then, it seems that the fact that so little exists of the original
Match Game is not really something specific to NBC, and certainly not the product of NBC being unwilling to kinescope (there is a massive collection of NBC kinescopes at the Library of Congress, and I've seen kinescopes at both Paley Center and UCLA that have origins from NBC's reference collection), but, rather, reflects that Goodson-Todman weren't especially interested in saving daytime materials in that period unless they thought they could make money off of them later- and that, unlike with
Password and
To Tell The Truth, that day never came for
Match Game.
