4 Famed Lost Films We Only Just Now Found

4

Lost Footage from Return of the Jedi

Never-before-seen footage from Return of the Jedi resurfaced on an old LaserDisc after lying undiscovered for 30 years. For those of you too young to remember, LaserDiscs were essentially the predecessor to DVDs, only they were roughly the size of a truck tire for no apparent reason. Lucasfilm used to store and edit all of their footage on them, which probably means there are stacks of undiscovered Howard the Duck LaserDiscs lying in a cursed warehouse somewhere.

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"Boy, this technology will never fail!" -Lucasfilm

3

Orson Welles' First Long-Form Movie

Before Citizen Kane ever came to fruition, Orson Welles' first attempt at a movie for a paying audience was a 40-minute film hilariously titled Too Much Johnson.

Mercury Theatre
"Will you just look at all this Johnson!"

2

Nine Old Doctor Who Episodes

Despite what the sea of Tumblr GIFs may suggest, Doctor Who has been going on for the last 50 years, starting back in the era before humans invented color. In the '60s and '70s, the BBC started destroying the original transmission tapes of the cult classic's earliest episodes, because apparently they thought they were all haunted or something. As a result, several of the original episodes are completely lost.

BBC
While others were recycled as avant-garde vacuum cleaner ads overseas.

1

Jerry Lewis' Holocaust Movie

Notorious undead comedian Jerry Lewis once made a movie about the Holocaust called The Day the Clown Cried, which ended with Lewis, as the titular clown, walking into a gas chamber with a group of children, juggling stale bread in a desperate attempt to make them laugh and distract them from their impending demise. This is another way of saying that Jerry Lewis vowed to never let anyone see the finished film. And if a movie is so bad that Jerry Lewis deems it unfit for human consumption, you pretty much need to throw that thing into a fucking volcano.

Ammit/iStock/Getty Images
"Not big enough."

Recently, however, scraps of footage from The Day the Clown Cried were unearthed by a Flemish TV documentary and subsequently uploaded on YouTube, because the Belgian Dutch apparently couldn't resist opening this Pandora's box of horribly misguided melodrama:

Jerry Lewis
Lewis presumably still makes this same face when people ask him about this movie.

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