[Haiku Guy]

I was doing shift work in Washington DC back in the early 1980s. A local TV station would play reruns of the old Mission Impossible! Series just as I was turning in at 2:00 AM. Every day they would cut off the last five minutes of the program to run their station sign-off.

Of course, the last five minutes of an old MI! Show was where all of the action happened. I always found it very amusing to watch these reruns, so I could imagine the ending for myself.

[TaMoDee]

Now known forever as the “Sherlock” moment vs the now superceded “Heidi” moment.

[Wally_Kalbacken]

I was watching the 1953 film The Wages of Fear on a UHF station in Milwaukee many years ago when about 3 critical minutes disappeared from the end of the film.

If you are familiar with this film, the last 4 minutes are an interplay of sequences showing the driver, listening to a radio station while driving a truck on a dangerous mountain road, and a waitress in a seaside bar miles away, listening to the same song and dancing. The film inter-cuts from scenes of the driver (portrayed by Yves Montand) and the waitress he is going to visit, after completing the dangerous mission of driving nitroglycerine(!) over precarious mountain roads to a remote jungle site for use in stopping a raging oil well fire. Now that he is done he is playfully turning the steering wheel and, in effect, dancing with the truck to the music on the radio. Cut to the waitress who is dancing and happy, then suddenly a cut to the truck, a tie-rod fails and the truck goes off the road and falls into the canyon below. The waitress has a telepathic sense of shock and loss, then the credits roll.

Except in the version I was watching on Channel 18 that night. You see the truck driver tune in the radio station, then bam! - straight to the credits. Probably some production person at the last station that had shown the film had the film break, and rather than doing a precise ob of re-splicing it, he just tacked the credits on at the end and tossed the intervening footage.

This is where technology is really great. When film was literally on film stock, this kind of unintended editing could always occur. What does “director's cut“ really mean when you can have this kind of butchering? Now when distributed on DVD's at least the director can be sure that the version they intend to be seen is actually viewed.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

So PBS is cutting out scenes? Did they have one of their interminable pledge drives going on?

Anyway - good series, this new take on Sherlock Holmes.

[miss marmelstein]

PBS has always had a history of editing British tv shows. They cut whole episodes from Upstairs, Downstairs and I had to buy the dvd to see the unexpurgated I, Claudius.

But there’s no doubt: Benedict Cumberbatch (what a name!) is going to be a huge star. A rightfully so.

[battousai]

I thought I was not going to like the new take when it first came out but have loved every episode since. I just download them in glorious HD and buy the bluray when they are out. Gave up watching PBS ages ago like most leftwing TV.

[Excellence]

I downloaded it from iTunes. Will be watching it for the 3rd time, with family who have not seen it. It is hard to keep my mouth shut about all the great scenes. Almost every minute holds a clue. This is the best so far in my opinion.