These cartrivision... puppets? cartoons? CAN SEE INTO YOUR SOUL

"Making Things Grow" was a PBS show she ran from 1966 to 1969.
I think this was maybe a one-off episode or special aimed at children?

apparently this show never made it to VHS/DVD.
there's a blogpost from 2009 where someone excitedly talks about having found a recorded-off-the-air VHS tape of the show (from a rerun) and they only got that from a television producer.

this show seems to be lost.

and now there's an episode or special of it, on ebay... in a format no one can play.

BTW, that episode on the VHS tape?
it got uploaded to youtube:

Since then they managed to find two more episodes, which are embedded here, and completely fail to play because Flash:
https://michaelweishan.com/gardenblog/?p=3265

god I love the technology industry.

we've got shows we can't watch because they stopped going on reruns and fans rarely recorded them, on bad VHS copies, and the few published copies were in a format that barely lasted a year and you can't play anymore...

but then someone went to a lot of work and managed to rescue and convert THREE EPISODES of a show that run for 3 years and they happily put it on their blog... in a format that browsers just deprecated and won't play anymore

BOY WE SURE ARE PRETTY DEEP DOWN THIS HOLE OF LOSING MEDIA
WELP, TIME TO BUY A NEW SHOVEL.

anyway if you want to know more about cartrivision, check out my last thread on it, which links to some of the other ones: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1290348053476413440

The tl;dr about it is that it was a home video tape format released in 1972, which lasted only 13 months of poor sales.
The players were only sold built into (huge!) TVs, so very few of them survive to today, and none in simple working condition.

there have been semi-successful attempts to resurrect a player, and a media recovery company was able to get video off a single tape, but it was very difficult and expensive, and they only went to the effort because the tape was so important.

the other big weird gimmick of the format was that many of the pre-recorded tapes you could get (the movies, as opposed to TV shows, mainly) came in special red tapes that couldn't be rewound. So they were play-once rentals.

anyway, it failed, and it's personally very interesting as a format because unlike a lot of the other past formats, you don't really see it getting covered by all the "usual suspects" of retrotech.
and part of that is that it's TOO dead.