Wheel Episodes Removed From RuTube

Darn it. NOW where am I gonna get my seasons 23-25 recaps from? Dailymotion and YouTube aren't of much help.

You really think Sony only cares about episodes from a certain point onward? I don't really see how that could be the case. Surely they would care about the whole series. I remember plenty of retro WOF episodes getting removed during the big YouTube WOF/J! purge in 2011 by uploaders who didn't have modern episodes.

During our pre-tape briefing, they emphasized multiple times to not post our shows on Youtube after they air. I wonder if that was foreshadowing what was happening in this case.

Do you think we should start recapping Google Groups episodes now?

No, because they don't have the individual turns or most of the other details relevant for a recap, just the puzzle answers. I wouldn't mind a directory of which episodes were recapped back in the day on alt.tv.game-shows, though.



Scattered ones dating back as far as 1994.

^ No, alt.tv.game-shows pretty much died in 2003 when they moved to what is now Game Show Forum. And they never did full-episode recaps there, and definitely not of Wheel, since very few people on that forum like Wheel.

I have a handful of mid-2000s episodes on tape, but I think most of them have been recapped already. (For instance, May 7, 2008, when I was in the audience, has been recapped.)

Hello everybody!

I am a truly dedicated life-long Wheel Watcher (been watching regularly literally since I was a year old when I was in a walker, and I'll post the photo of me watching when it turns up). My memories of the show become more vivid around Season 6, and I can remember when the jazz theme was first used for Season 7 and how my stations pre-empted Goen Wheel in favor of a talk show on one channel and the syndicated Combs Feud on the other. As a result, I've fondly remember much of the show's history for the past 25+ years or so, along with catching Season 2 in reruns on GSN. That said, I feel that what gets the green light in terms of uploads shall depend. Game Show uploads in general provided there's no copyrighted music (Name That Tune) generally have a good chance of staying on, with some exceptions. The first is simply if the episode is current or recurrent (the previous season), and those are obvious no-nos unless if there's a great clip to post or if an episode gets pre-empted in which a temporary posting (around a week or two) is allowed. If the show is currently in first-run production, I'd say wait at least five years before posting, though ten is a safer bet. Another is that if the show currently is on that current lease on GSN, those episodes should be uploaded until a couple months after the lease has expired for those episodes. Third is that if DVDs of those episodes exist publicly, they shouldn't be uploaded unless if the DVDs are very hard to find and well out of print.

Many episodes from the late '90s to mid-2000s have been turning up lately on YouTube, given that was the last era in which VHS recording was common, and these episodes are too old to be recurrent enough and come before the recaps. If anything, stuff from before the edition of the Million Dollar Wedge is now fair game provided that the third party content is acceptable. RuTube is different being Russian-based so they may have different laws regarding posting, and Kingship should have just migrated over there or to Dailymotion. It's helpful to save the videos you uploaded on a DVD so that they don't get lost. The truth is that trader Ryan Rinkerman has over 1,000 Wheel episodes in his tape collection which shows that there's lots of stuff to be covered. Seasons 2, 6, 7, 10, 12, 14, and 21-27 are especially well accounted for. Then you have some former contestants who occasionally upload their episodes. The truth is that more people hopefully should discover that dubbing a videotape onto a DVD and in turn digital isn't that difficult to do. I've recently uploaded some old It's Academic episodes (a local quiz bowl) from 20+ years ago, and while some simply had bad picture quality when recorded, others turned out fine. The premise is that you can only share/trade these, in which video sharing sites do, and not buy/sell. It helps if some people download some of these videos and then save them somewhere as insurance in case it gets pulled down, in which case someone else can re-upload it in case someone's channel closes due to something outside of Wheel or simply doesn't want it there anymore.

As for the Wheel/J! purge of 2011, which episodes/seasons in particular got removed, and how many of them have resurfaced since then?

Welcome, Pannoni.

I'm aware of Ryan Rinkerman's very large collection. I E-mailed him quite a while ago persuading him to join this site since his collection could help us historians, puzzle archivists, and retro recappers a ton (he also has the only episode from Season 26 onward that does not have a full recap on this forum), though he never replied. However, feel free to contribute any Wheel stories or memories of your own.

In 2011, some of the YouTube channels affected included well-known game show trader David Downs, kingskip of course, rashad1428 (who uploaded every episode of Season 28/27 of WOF/J! the day after they aired. He continued with Seasons 29/28 on DailyMotion before he was blacklisted there too), "pestomo" who uploaded several episodes of Seasons 13-14 IIRC, and Wolfman12395 who originally uploaded some viral WOF clips including the montage of Kevin's three missolves in Chicago in 2008 and the end of the "SETTING UP BEACH CHAIRS" round from 2006. I remember that one of these uploaders (I believe Downs) uploaded the episode from S13's Seattle College Week where Pat swatted a fly on the Wheel, but I have only seen that episode listed in one collection all over the internet (I don't recall it in Downs') and forget who. I really would like to see that episode again...

Obviously, the originally-viral clips have resurfaced, as have a few select episodes and clips from S28, and a few retro ones here and there, though many have never been recovered.

MarioGS: What's that missing post-S26 episode?