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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 14, 2023 8:39:03 GMT -5
Looking through other obits, its a very big family. 6 uncles & aunts & 14 cousins on just that one side of the family spread out all over Wisconsin and Minnesota. Its not too much of a stretch that you wouldn't see one of your cousins at an event planned well enough ahead of time to remember to bring a VHS tape with you for 4+ years.
I myself am part of a group of 9 cousins (coincidentally also in MN & WI, besides me down in FL) and there are a few I haven't seen for more than a few hours once every 5 years.
Edit: Just pinned him down. The cousin lives in Madison. Alex lives in the Twin Cites, so a ~4 hour drive. So not surprising he doesn't see him very often.
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Post by ds_36 on Dec 14, 2023 9:02:14 GMT -5
Plus, I've offered him hundreds for the tape or digital file at least thrice. He hasn't asked about getting paid or even acknowledged that I've offered. I think this alone makes it safe to say it's not a scam. If he doesn't at least believe this to be K03 it would be a very weird scam or practical joke on someone.
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Post by ds_36 on Dec 14, 2023 9:53:57 GMT -5
It just goes to show that if you buy VHS tapes as a collector, you should at least own a working VCR. This would be the most logical reason he's been holding on to this for four years without saying anything. He doesn't have a VCR so no way to see what's actually on the tape. He doesn't want to start posting about what he has because he has no real way to back it up. His cousin has a working VCR so that's the easiest way to figure this out but they don't get together for a while and the tape isn't particularly important to anyone. I'd probably want to figure out a way to view the tape immediatly but maybe Alex and his cousin used to love watching the show together. Anyway there's probably no specific reason for any of this timing and things just happened to work out now.
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Post by jocksinclair on Dec 14, 2023 11:17:57 GMT -5
It just goes to show that if you buy VHS tapes as a collector, you should at least own a working VCR. I'd probably want to figure out a way to view the tape immediatly When I was working on my restoration of "The State" a few years back, there was a guy who paid over $1000 at auction to buy VHS master dubs of season 1 (6 episodes on 6 tapes). This included 2 episodes which were technically unreleased, as MTV had rejected them and said "re-edit these two into one episode". Despite him being interested enough to pay four figures for the tapes, he sat on them for more than a year, and didn't recognize that the two episodes were unreleased. He even thought one of the fake commercials was real. And here's the amazing part -- the guy's wife worked in some sort of video post house where at any time she could digitize VHS tapes.
To be clear, I'm not knocking or mocking the guy. If anything, I'm the weirdo who is still interested in "The State" 30 years after it aired. But in the area of fan-done media preservation and restoration, the best sources are always people for whom it's not that big a priority, because if they really cared, they would already have shared. That's not even the craziest weirdest random story from that restoration, just the most relevant.
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Post by jocksinclair on Dec 14, 2023 11:21:39 GMT -5
To clarify, I take it that it was Alex himself that was holding onto the tape for 4+ years and only recently got around to getting it to his cousin, who then digitized it in late November to confirm what it was, then his dad almost immediately died in the car wreck. The way I read it, I thought that it had taken him a while to get the tape to his cousin, and then it took the cousin a while to digitize, and they hadn't seen each other in the interim so this was the first he'd heard about the results, but it is a bit vague, and your interpretation would make more sense overall.
I say that if this does work out, before distributing it to fans in general, somebody should add a little bit at the beginning saying something like "Dedicated to the memory of (uncle's name). Keep circulating the tapes."
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 14, 2023 11:22:34 GMT -5
I'd probably want to figure out a way to view the tape immediatly When I was working on my restoration of "The State" a few years back, there was a guy who paid over $1000 at auction to buy VHS master dubs of season 1. This included 2 episodes which were technically unreleased, as MTV had rejected them and said "re-edit these two into one episode". Despite him being interested enough to pay four figures for the tapes, he sat on them for more than a year, and didn't recognize that the two episodes were unreleased. He even thought one of the fake commercials was real. And here's the amazing part -- the guy's wife worked in some sort of video post house where at any time she could digitize VHS tapes. To be clear, I'm not knocking or mocking the guy. If anything, I'm the weirdo who is still interested in "The State" 30 years after it aired. But in the area of fan-done media preservation and restoration, the best sources are always people for whom it's not that big a priority, because if they really cared, they would already have shared. That's not even the craziest weirdest random story from that restoration, just the most relevant.
Exactly. The people that don't know what they have are paradoxicaly usually the ones that have the best stuff. They're not sure what it is/what it's worth, so they hold onto it for deacdes and forget they have it until someone randomly asks and they remember. Or they need a little extra cash and sell it at a garage sale (or trade it for a case of beer on Facebook marketplace), As opposed to the people that DO know what they have, who will sell stuff to private collectors who will then hoard it and it'll never see the light of day again. Like Wade Williams.
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Post by CrowTrobotfan92 on Dec 14, 2023 13:03:21 GMT -5
I'm a big VHS guy who has certain preferences with entertainment in that format (for instance, I feel more cozy watching a Disney movie on VHS) so not having a working VCR would drive me crazy.
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Post by BoB3K on Dec 14, 2023 13:29:48 GMT -5
The details seem to be all confirmed as real. My only BS detector is that looking at the picture, you don't have to 'recreate' the scene, you can just photoshop it. The picture itself looks legit, but all you would have to do is pick one of the labels and photoshop just the name of the ep. And, I notice it is the only KTMA ep listed. All the rest say Episode #___ and it says KTMA #3. Also, it is a rather big coincidence that among the 16 labels shown, that one just happens to be the lost holy grail. And it's the only KTMA shown.
If it is a photoshop, they matched the font exactly even down to the fuzzy "s used to surround the episode title, though, as another coincidence, the words STAR FORCE already appear elsewhere as ep #316 happens to being shown too and could be cut and pasted. Speaking of, it is also overly coincidental that another of the 16 labels shows is the OTHER Star Force ep, quietly letting any informed fan know that the KTMA one is "probably not mislabeled" since there's the season 3 one right there.
I did a google image search on the image and nothing came up, so it's not just a common pic that's floating around.
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Post by jocksinclair on Dec 14, 2023 14:01:25 GMT -5
The details seem to be all confirmed as real. My only BS detector is that looking at the picture, you don't have to 'recreate' the scene, you can just photoshop it. The picture itself looks legit, but all you would have to do is pick one of the labels and photoshop just the name of the ep. And, I notice it is the only KTMA ep listed. All the rest say Episode #___ and it says KTMA #3. Also, it is a rather big coincidence that among the 16 labels shown, that one just happens to be the lost holy grail. And it's the only KTMA shown. I did think about the photoshop idea, but the labels are NOT perfect copies. Some of them are correctly aligned, others were slightly misprinted so that by the end of the line, the text is touching the edge. But not all of them are. Perfectly recreating that sort of minor printer error for some but not all, getting the angles exactly right on all of the tapes, making sure to adjust the shade of white depending on how much light is hitting the tapes, those are details I find very convincing. Certainly not impossible, but it goes back to the idea of somebody putting in all of the work to fake that photo and then NOT posting the pic in the initial Twitter post.
Calling it "KTMA #3" is off-model with the rest, but they have always been set aside in that sort of way. Even when Joel released the first two, they didn't call them "Season 0" or anything confusing like that, they were K-01 and K-02.
The last point did give me pause -- it seems strange to me that the picture in the listing would show KTMA #3 and the guy would ask generally about it rather than specifically saying "I see the copy of KTMA #3 in the picture". But viewing it on a phone, maybe he couldn't read the labels? If all we had was the picture, I'd be a lot more skeptical about it than I feel right now. On the other hand, there are 17 visible tapes, 16 with labels, if the box is 160 VHS tapes, that's a one in ten shot -- worse odds than a dice roll, better than a roulette wheel.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 14, 2023 14:27:09 GMT -5
The thing that helps cement it for me are the tape boxes matching 2 of the brands that I know BBI used. And that they're 2 relatively obscure brands.
Of all my tape collecting I've NEVER seen those Target brand or the Sony Pro Grade tapes anywhere else.
And not only are they the same branding for the Sony's, the box design itself is the same. If you look online for images of the T-120PR, Sony changed the box design at some point to be blue, instead of the black and white I have from BBI and is in that picture.
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Post by ds_36 on Dec 14, 2023 14:39:10 GMT -5
May or may not mean anything but from the transcript it doesn't sound like Alex was the fan but rather his cousin was and he was looking for these tapes specifically for his cousin. It makes sense that he wouldn't really look too closely at the image given how many more tapes aren't shown. Even if he saw and asked specifically about K03 that wouldn't give any indication as to if K01 and K02 were there. The box just seems haphazardly randomly organized like what someone would do if they were trying to sell a big lot of items without much knowledge. Everyone's just overthinking these random life coincidences at this point.
Nobody among Alex, his cousin, or the original boxholder have done much to push having this episode. If it was some sort of scam or prank they would be.
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Post by ds_36 on Dec 14, 2023 15:08:19 GMT -5
The way I read it, I thought that it had taken him a while to get the tape to his cousin, and then it took the cousin a while to digitize, and they hadn't seen each other in the interim so this was the first he'd heard about the results, but it is a bit vague, and your interpretation would make more sense overall. DK may have gotten more details but this is what the quote shared on page 6 says. Alex picked up the tape 5/6/19 and then held it for around 1½ years (late 2020/early 2021) before giving it to his cousin. It's not clear when it was digitized but his cousin finally told him what was on it last weekend (almost 3 years later). I'm not suggesting whether this timeline makes things more or less likely. But if Alex's cousin was holding the tape that long it is interesting we haven't heard a peep.
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Post by CrowTrobotfan92 on Dec 14, 2023 15:17:53 GMT -5
Things like this can go unnoticed. Back in 2013 I had discovered one of my dad's Comedy Central MST tape recordings consisting of the world premiere Turkey Day '94 airing of "Kitten with a Whip" and two January 1995 recordings of "The Creeping Terror" and a 10 AM next day re-run airing of "Danger!! Death Day" had an extra "hidden" recording (it's an 8-hour tape) of a January 1995 recording of "The Skydivers" after YEARS thinking nothing else was on that tape (it was a case of the episode just not being labeled on there). So it's understandable if this might have slipped the eye.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 14, 2023 15:22:45 GMT -5
Oh, yeah I just saw that it took him a year and a half to get it to his cousin. Not sure how I missed that part.
So it's the cousin that's been dragging his feet for most of the time.
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Post by Diet Kolos on Dec 14, 2023 15:26:59 GMT -5
Which makes me honestly think that his cousin may be a relatively casual fan.
Avid enough to know about K01-K03, and tell his cousin to be on lookout for them. But maybe not enough of a plugged-in fan to know that K01 and K02 were released by Joel several years PRIOR and were no longer lost by 2019.
Like, he may be a fan hobbyist, that does this kind of stuff "in the real world" but doesn't interact too often with people like us online and it isn't as big a deal to him.
Its strange, either way.
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