Read on Twitter
on losing story history, a lil thread: guiding light is the oldest soap opera in America. it began as a radio play. The only way to watch the whole series has been through digitized tapes on YouTube uploaded by dedicated archivists
during the quarantine, a professional publicist called Alan Locher decided to host virtual q&a chats with longtime guiding light cast members on YouTube. a dedicated group of fans attended, including my mom, who watched as a child with her mom through the years we were growing up
it was so exciting to be able to have this new context for these characters and their actors, some of whom have been playing the roles for more than 30 years! unsurprisingly the reunions also caused a surge of new interest in old guiding light episodes on YouTube...
I live an ocean away from my family and I canβt visit them right now, but watching the soap we grew up with became a way to stay connected and cope with pandemic stress. And to delight in the history of genre stories: just look at this!!
anyway, the renewed interest in old guiding light episodes on YouTube means that rights holder @ProcterGamble noticed people enjoying something of theirs for free. All the old Guiding Light episodes now seem to be taken down.
GL probably is worthless as a network television property in 2020. But @ProcterGamble seems to have no ability or interest to make available - or even preserve! - the archive of the oldest, most iconic soap in American history. This seems like itβll leave a huge hole in media
and in my heart. Imagine two generations of storylines in a small town with a lighthouse: the fake deaths, the evil twins, the mysterious fires, the family empires, the 11th-hour hospital scenes β 60 years of human fanfic for lonely after school kids and their families - gone.
the online interest in guiding light reveals yet another archiving crisis caused by absent corporate rights holders. surely there is a way to address this that will be beneficial for all involved. Please ask @ProcterGamble to #saveguidinglight ! #guidinglight 
video games people: we face an archiving crisis as well! the preservation of old content formats for the sake of history and love should be important to all of us, please RT this thread
(special thanks to @alanglenn66 for the online chats, my family has loved them!)
