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Star Wars despecialized edition.
In 1997 George Lucas updated the original trilogy with new special effects, and every release since then has been the new special edition.
Fans have gone through a painstaking archival effort to track down the "despecialized" original release in as high quality as possible.
Look up 4k77 if you haven't already. Team negative1 has been transferring and restoring copies of the original reels. The are also working on 4k80 and 4k83. I believe that 4k77 and 4k83 are completed and there are rough copies of 4k80.
There's also a great 35mm grindhouse scan of Empire floating around, reaaaaaal 80s cheap movie theater nostalgia vibes
Sorry, this is longer than I thought it would be. Bear with me...
At some point iTunes "upgraded" to include artist avatars that you couldn't switch off or choose your own images for. Anyone it couldn't find had a placeholder grey microphone icon, which was bad enough. If you had some obscure artist that happened to share a band name with a more popular act, it would default to their image. Unforgivable.
It pissed me off enough to seek another option and I eventually settled on Foobar2000, which was everything I had loved about Winamp and OG iTunes in one. Also, fully customisable, albeit with a learning curve. Moving everything into Foobar, I realised I needed to redownload all album cover art, for my 40,000+ song collection, in as high a resolution as possible (discovering albumartexchange, and Advanced Google Image Search, in the process).
Halfway through this task, I realised I should probably also redownload anything I had that was less than 192k bitrate, and maybe in some cases I should go flac, just to "make sure". Fast forward a year and I have about 70,000 songs, mostly meeting those requirements, and mostly totally replacing the collection i had been building since 2001. God bless Soulseek and RuTracker.
Now, in answer to your actual question, on this journey I found (or, rather, didn't) a whole bunch of stuff that I have from the early 2000s which doesn't seem to exist online, anymore, or only does in poorer quality than I already had it, most of it old UK HipHop from that time. It was a real validation of one of the most important reasons for piracy, though I can't claim it as the reason for my original (or ongoing) obsession!
Look at Music Brainz Picard.
One of the many reasons I switched away from using iTunes to manage my collection.
If you're on windows, MusicBee is the most iTunes-like without being terrible. Otherwise, you're better off sticking with foobar.
The original DVD release of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 riff of Godzilla vs Megalon. MST3K licensed the film from a company that did not actually own the rights to it, and only discovered when Toho sent out a cease and desist following the release of MST3K volume 10. Production was stopped, but a few hundred copies were still sold.
Funnily enough some of those copies were actually sold to Blockbuster, who somehow were allowed to keep renting them out even after the C&D went into effect. I made sure to rent a copy ASAP once I found out.
Gotta love old school MST3K! Our favorite is I was A Teenage Werewolf. He's going for the milk!
Maybe not what you're looking for, but fanedits are that thing to me. No body will ever see them on any streaming service or in a DVD bin at the store. They're like treasures I can share only with other people who truly love movies as much as I do.
Also, I have the original special edition slip-case DVD of Dogma, which currently goes for as high as $19.95 on eBay!
For a short period of time GTA 3, VC and SA were removed from storefronts... replaced with the "GTA Definitive Edition" which was essentially a buggy mobile port, ported back to PC, not supporting any of the existing mod ecosystem.
During that time the only way to get your hands on the real "definitive" versions of these games was the high seas.
I believe the originals are restored now, but IMO Take2/Rockstar have fully lined pockets already so 🏴☠️🚢
I believe the originals are restored now
Nope. They temporarily made it so that buying Definitive Edition on the Rockstar Launcher granted the originals until outrage died down, but the original versions of the games still require either a disc or piracy now that they seemingly removed even that. I can confirm that the PS4 versions of the games that were the PS2 versions in an emulator are still missing, too.
In the same vein, dark souls prepare to die edition.
The original dark souls is impossible to legally acquire (other than managing to snag a physical copy, which is quite rare these days) as from soft removed it from storefronts in order to maximize profit on the remaster.
*Other than original hardware/discs
I assume game ROMs, especially the ones by nintendo, who are notorious of letting their own history getting deleted and lost, are up there on that list.
The gigaleak proved quite the opposite, they are great at archiving, they just don't like releasing it to the public.
The vast majority of game roms from ps2/gamecube/xbox and older are on IA.
ive got the full run of Columbo... show spanned like 30 years if you include specials
im not special enough to get into private traakkers so most of my uniques are due to age... i have mp3s i downloaded with napster
I don't know anywhere you can watch Max Headroom legit. The original show was great; not so much the later iteration that lost its identity as satire against corporate dystopia and became a vessel for advertising.
oh yeah this one took me a bit to find. i found it ~ 8 years ago... def out there. has not aged very well, but the nostalgia kept me invested.
Damnatus, it's a warhammer 40k fan movie that GW, being GW, blocked being released. It was "leaked" after a while onto bittorrent.
star wars holiday special? it was hard to watch even the one time.
Rare? Perhaps. Hidden gem? Not so much.
But it does deserve to be propagated if only to haunt George Lucas until the end of time.
It's on youtube.
Fantastic Four Batgirl (I can dream 😂)
can you explain more?
Batgirl refers to the film that was in post production that Zaslav canceled so that HBO could get a tax write-off. If I'm ever in the room with Zaslav, my partner understands I'm going to spend the night in jail.
Fantastic Four had a 1994 film that was made but never released. It's able to be pirated tho.
The Ulysses cut of Waterworld! It's a masterpiece of an apocalypse movie!
I fear none of these are exactly gems… but they were definitely not available at the store:
Abducted By The Daleks/Daloids (2005) - Basically a softcore Dr. Who knockoff that appears to have been made with actual BBC props.
Probably already well known around here: Kung Fury (2015) is a very cool 80’s style short film. If somehow you have not seen it, please do so now. I think it’s a free download.
TV
Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity (2011) is a BBC 3-Part series covering early pioneers/inventors from the Bagdad Battery up through modern power grids.
Speed with Guy Martin (2013) is another good BBC miniseries. This is just kind of fun, each episode is separate challenge to set a speed record with a unique form of transportation ranging from cycling endurance to turbo charged racing vans.
I once found a torrent of every programme that Fred Dibnah ever made, managed to download it over the course of a month or two. Reupped it when someone on UK Reddit asked where they could find his stuff, and next thing it had 20 seeders or so.
It's still going strong, and Fred's memory lives on
Dixie Dregs' 1975 debut album "The Great Spectacular", for some reason it is not considered a proper release, more like a demo, and is extremely rare in physical copies as well as online. Luckily I found what I believe is the only high quality rip in existance a couple years ago, it was a long search! Worth it, it's their happiest and most delightful work, just half an hour of Steve Morse's great and eclectic guitar work
I recently looked into Buffy the Vampire slayer rips and there is a fan made AI upscaled version that seemed like currently the best option besides original DVDs.
I have a somewhat large collection of digital Rammstein bootlegged concerts. I think at one time many years ago I may have had one of the largest collections in the world. That's definitely no longer the case, I stopped collecting them around 2002 or so.
You werent coinceally seeding a Völkerball (the Rammstein live Tour-Movie) special edition (3 CD box)? This was the music history i was talkung about in the OP
I'm not currently seeding it, no, but I do have that one.
a big collection of art courses that I downloaded before it got dmca'd off the internet. Nowadays as I understand it, the collection is around but usually distributed in pieces on request if someone happens to have it. Many courses got lost (or are only on cgpeers which I do not have access to so idk)
Sounds really interesting and like a good piracy use case