Friday Funding: 'Help Preserve Kukla, Fran And Ollie'

Each Friday, we highlight one television or media-related crowdfunding idea we think deserves your support. This week, it's an effort to save a bit of our television past: the classic children's TV show "KUKLA, FRAN AND OLLIE.

Here's the pitch:

In 1947, Burr Tillstrom created "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" - a beloved television puppet show that was watched by more adults than children. It counted Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Tallulah Bankhead, and Marlon Brando among its many adult fans, and James Thurber once wrote that Burr was "helping to save the sanity of the nation and to improve, if not even to invent, the quality of television."

I've been working as a volunteer producer of DVDs of this classic show for The Burr Tillstrom Copyright Trust since 2010.  Happily, we've been able to release over 80 show s and excerpts since then:  http://kukla.tv/dvd.html

Unhappily, over 600 shows remain untransferred.  Worse, in my last round of transfers, I found that a number of these 16mm films had begun showing signs of deterioration.  Since they are over 65 years old, that's to be expected.  But I worry if we don't transfer them soon, they may be lost forever.

I'm hoping fans can pitch in to preserve what we can. $18,000 would be enough to transfer all the remaining shows, but we will start transferring when we reach $1,000.

I cannot now say when they will be released, but I'm hopeful that once they are transferred, some way can be found to make them available, either online or on television (more DVDs are unlikely at this point).

$30 can cover the cost of transferring an episode.  For those who donate $50, I will arrange a private link to a newly-transferred show, and anyone who donates $100 will be able to choose a show and get a private link to view it (these private shows will not be available for download).

Can you help?  Let's preserve these wonderful episodes before they are lost forever!

Click here to visit the GoFundMe page. There is so much television that is already lost forever, so let's not let the same thing happen to these episodes.