Bury Your Art

"...in terms of that film I was embarrassed. I was ashamed of the work, and I was grateful that I had the power to contain it all, and never let anyone see it."

— Jerry Lewis, when asked if he'd ever release The Day the Clown Cried

Creator Backlash is bound to happen to any creator who's around for long enough. Many works, whether decades-old or released yesterday, may not best represent what they can accomplish now. It may seem embarrassing or regrettable now, but, for a lot of people, the old adage of "Live and Learn" rings true.

However, what if they can't live with it? It's one thing to publicly dismiss your work, but if one can go out of their way to act like it never existed, then it could be like it never happened. This is where Bury Your Art comes into play.

This can be done in multiple ways. They can refuse to re-release it on any physical or digital format. They can remove all traces that they worked on it on their websites and social media pages. If it's on a video platform, they can make the videos private or even delete them so no one would have a chance to see them and some would even delete them on their hard disks and other backups to ensure they'll never see the light of the day. They can have it erased from ever having existed In-Universe, spawning a Play-Along Meme of fans ceasing to notice, remember, or recognize it and "correcting" anyone who does.

With fans being inherently curious, this can sometimes lead to people being more inclined to check the work out. People want what they can't have, and if someone tells them no, it's the perfect motivation to Keep Circulating the Tapes. Because of this, many examples here are infamous and may have garnered fanbases exclusively because of the creator's attempted suppression.

May overlap with Banned Episode, Missing Episode, Denial of Digital Distribution or Distanced from Current Events. Sometimes can cause the Streisand Effect if done poorly. Compare with Canon Discontinuity, if it's the series itself that refuses to acknowledge a work within its own timeline, and Torch the Franchise and Run, where a creator attempts to end a work in a way where no one else can touch it. An attempt to modify a portion of a work to get rid of something they are not proud of would fall under Orwellian Retcon instead. If a character is given this treatment, it might be a reason the character is Exiled from Continuity. If someone does this with their work In-Universe, then it belongs in Old Shame.

Note: Please keep in mind that this isn't just any work that happens to be out of print or not easily available. There needs to be external factors, usually statements from the creator that they are trying to suppress the work, to count as an example.

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Examples:

Advertising

• The official Cryptoland YouTube channel briefly took down their promotional videos due to their hugely negative reception from viewers.

Anime and Manga

• act-age was becoming a surprise hit for Shonen Jump, to the point that it even had a stage play adaptation planned. However, following the arrest of the manga's writer, Tatsuya Matsuki, for groping minors in August 2020, publisher Shueisha immediately cancelled the manga and withdrew it from circulation; both they and illustrator Shiro Usazaki additionally removed all references to it from official documentation and their social media accounts. The planned stage play was also cancelled. In her final word about the subject, Usazaki mentioned the decision was also taken out of respect for the victims, who might be reminded of their trauma every time they’d hear of the series or see a cover of it in stores.
• Berserk chapter 83 was printed in the manga magazine; however, Kentaro Miura subsequently chose to suppress it from being reprinted in tankoubon volume 13 because he decided it gave away too much information about The 'Verse's cosmology too early.
• The 2004 manga adaptation of Haruhi Suzumiya was only released in Japan, and only saw a limited print run, to where a physical copy is hard to find even with the help of the internet. The artist of this particular iteration got fired, either due to the artist drawing and selling unauthorized hentai for the series he was drawing for, or the artwork seen in this series being less than stellar (most likely the latter). Either way, the publisher would rather forget it ever existed, going as far as to commission a completely new manga series to another artist rather than reprinting this one once the anime got popular.
• The original broadcast of the fourth episode of Lost Universe saw a significant drop in animation quality due to the episode being hastily outsourced to a South Korean studio following a fire at E&G Films destroying its master negatives. Reception of this episode was so overwhelmingly negative that, following an official apology from TV Tokyo, the episode was remade from scratch for home video releases. Part of the episode's name, "Yashigani" ("Coconut Crab") has also become Fan Speak in Japan for cheap and ugly-looking animation.
• The second season of the 1990 anime adaptation of The Moomins, Delightful Moomin Family: Adventure Diary, was maligned by the show's own producers, with Dennis Livson stating that they ran out of material to adapt and that the season should never have been made. Consequently, the second season was never dubbed into English ^note  it did receive few dubs in other languages, such as Arabic, Italian and Spanish and remains in No Export for You status, with the official YouTube channel for the anime stopping firmly at episode 78.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • When Netflix picked up the series in 2018, Studio Khara (founded by series creator and director Hideaki Anno) pulled the original English dub by ADV Films from circulation and instead retranslated and redubbed the show with a new cast. Consequently, the original English dub by ADV Films was indefinitely pulled from circulation. In 2021, Amanda Winn-Lee, who voiced Rei Ayanami in the ADV dub, revealed that the redub was the result of Khara seeking greater creative control over the series' English releases, with the Netflix dub's script being identical to the one that Studio Gainax attempted to use before Matt Greenfield forced them to go ahead with a less literal translation. Later subverted with the 2021 Blu-ray release of the series, whose Collector's and Ultimate Editions include the original dub alongside the new one.
  • Due to its negative critical reception and perceived poor audience reception^note sources vary as to whether audience responses were genuinely poor or simply misinterpreted by Khara, Studio Khara had Funimation re-dub the third Rebuild of Evangelion film, You Can (Not) Redo for its home media release in 2016; the theatrical dub has never been officially re-released, and became lost media outside of a few low-quality theater recordings until a screener DVD was found in 2023. Khara would also re-dub it and the previous two films again, this time with Dubbing Brothers USA, when they were picked up by Prime Video in 2021.
• By order of Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, the Pokémon: The Original Series episode "Electric Soldier Porygon" was permanently removed from circulation after its one and only airing, which infamously caused 685 viewers in Japan to be hospitalized for epileptic seizures.
• The Rose of Versailles: An alternate version of Episode 24, titled "Portrait of a Burning Rose", was put together and broadcast in 1980 as a Gecko Ending for the anime adaptation in territories that cancelled its broadcast due to scheduling issues. The episode hastily recaps everything up to Episode 35, ending with Oscar and André affirming their love for one another. Because of the circumstances with its making, everyone involved with the anime withheld the episode from further release after its broadcast, never re-airing it or including it on home media releases; for a while, many people weren't sure if it even existed until screencaps from a VCR recording surfaced online in 2020.
• The original DiC Entertainment/Cloverway English dub of Sailor Moon was pulled off the air after the license expired and was never shown again on television, nor has it appeared on any streaming service, largely as a result of DiC themselves going bankrupt and getting bought out by Cookie Jar Entertainment (with the whereabouts of DiC's copies of the show unknown) and criticism of the dub itself as well effectively buried it into the realm of non-existence. While Viz Media's 2014 dub was well-received — even making it up to the Sailor Stars season that was never originally dubbed — it also created a Streisand Effect and sparked interest in the older dub.
• Warriors of the Wind, the 1985 English dub of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, has never been re-released since New World Media's rights to the film expired in 1995. The dub was loathed by director Hayao Miyazaki for its heavy edits, leading Studio Ghibli (formed by Nausicaä alums in the wake of its Japanese success) to institute their famous "no cuts" policy for later English dubs of their works. Fittingly, Disney would put out a more faithful English dub of Nausicaä in 2005.

Art

• W. Eugene Smith's 1971 photograph Tomoko and Mother in the Bath, a Pietà Plagiarism depicting Ryoko Kamimura and her severely deformed daughter, Tomoko, was withdrawn in 1997 at the Kamimura family's request. While the photo was highly acclaimed and is credited with raising international awareness of Minamata disease, which caused Tomoko's deformities, her parents came to believe that its use was exploitative and disrespectful towards their late daughter's memory.
• In 1944, the painter Francis Bacon destroyed many of his early surrealistic works, thinking that they didn't express his worldview.

Comic Books

• The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future received plenty of backlash for its character depictions. Master Wong is a stereotypical proverb-spouting elderly kung-fu master, his daughter Lan has no real personality outside of being the love interest for Ook, and both of them have dashes for eyes. Author Dav Pilkey eventually recognized this, apologized, and pulled the book from publication in the wake of increased hate crimes against Asian-Americans in early 2021.
• The Finder arc "Torch" was abandoned partway through by Carla Speed McNeil and all the online chapters were deleted from the website and never printed in hard copy. One of its plot strands was later rewritten and redrawn, expanded and completed as the "Chase the Lady" arc.
• Tintin in the Land of the Soviets had a very primitive art style (being the first Tintin story) and was horribly inaccurate, based off of a single anti-USSR propaganda work. After its original 1929 publication, it wasn't republished until 1973, and then only because there were so many bootleg copies being sold. Unlike his other very early stories, Hergé refused to redraw or color the comic so it could be published in book form, with a colorized version only being published in 2017, long after his death.
• The Unfunnies hasn't been in print since the comic ended in 2007, and writer Mark Millar has removed all references to the comic from his website (including not listing artist Anthony Williams as a collaborator), doesn't answer questions about the book, and even left it out of The Art of Millarworld, a compilation of the covers of every book that Millar wrote that he owned the rights to. Williams also refuses to talk about the book. Millar has also scrubbed any acknowledgment of his very poorly-received Marvel teen romance comic Trouble.

Fan Works

• SaoirseParisa got so much backlash over her handling of issues such as rape, victim-blaming and disability in Twilight Pretty Cure that, despite initially trying to fix the story, she came to dislike it to the point where she ended up deleting all but the first chapter from Fanfiction.net. Her profile on the same site states that she bitterly regrets writing the fic and would rather not talk about it. She also changed the fic's summary to "Abandoned. Don't read it."

Film — Animated

• Disney is infamously known to do this to their less successful movies starting with The Black Cauldron, with The Great Mouse Detective and Oliver & Company rarely ever discussed (while these two movies were far more successful than we thought, you can blame their obscurity on The Little Mermaid (1989), whose success blew these two movies out of the water), along with retroactively, The Aristocats (at least outside of Japan), Robin Hood (1973), The Rescuers, and The Fox and the Hound as well (in other words, basically most of their "Dark Age" movies aside from Winnie the Pooh). When considering Disney Renaissance movies, this applies to The Rescuers Down Under, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney), Hercules, and Tarzan (basically every movie in the renaissance that is neither a Disney Princess movie ^note  consisting of The Little Mermaid (1989), Beautyandthe Beast, Aladdin (Jasmine), Pocahontas, and Mulan, Esmeralda, along with Tinkerbell were originally both official members at the time the franchise was first launched, but were quickly removed for this very reason nor The Lion King (1994), although Tarzan's case is simply due to copyright reasons, and thus cannot allow references to this movie without getting into legal trouble). And for the early 2000s, every movie that isn't Lilo & Stitch,^note Fantasia 2000, Dinosaur, The Emperor's New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, Home on the Range, Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, and Bolt and basically all of the wartime package movies.^note Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music (which for that matter, remains the only Disney Animated Canon movie to not be available on Disney+), Funand Fancy Free, Melody Time, and The Adventuresof Ichabodand Mr Toad Strange World is notably the latest victim in the canon to suffer this fate because of this trope.This may also explain why their Villains franchise has more characters included than their Princess franchise, which only has 13, as of Moana and Raya and the Last Dragon (Elsa and Anna are not counted as official Princesses). Special mention goes to Chicken Little, whose title character is a summon in Kingdom Hearts II. Both came out in 2005, the only year in which a Disney product would acknowledge Chicken Little in such a significant capacity, given its generally awful reception. However, this trope is mostly averted with Pixar... Mostly, that is.
• DreamWorks Animation often tends to do this to any of their movies that isn't part of a Cash-Cow Franchise (in other words, any movie that isn't Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, Trolls, The Boss Baby, or The Bad Guys), especially their earlier movies.
• Illumination is famous for the movie franchises Despicable Me, The Secret Life of Pets, Sing, as well as making animated films off of Dr. Seuss books as well as video games, but there is one movie they usually don't talk about anymore these days, and that movie in question is Hop.

Film — Live-Action

• Just before All the Money in the World was due for release, Kevin Spacey, who played J. Paul Getty, was accused of sexual misconduct by several men, leading director Ridley Scott to reshoot all of Spacey's scenes with Christopher Plummer in his place. Scott went on record stating that the Spacey cut will likely never be released as a result.
• The 1927 silent film The American was shot in an experimental widescreen process, but the results of it so heavily dissatisfied producer George Spoor that he withdrew the movie before it could be completed, much to the discontent of director J. Sutart Blackton.
• The Brave, Johnny Depp's directorial debut, was pulled from distribution in the United States after receiving a negative reception at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. Depp would not try directing again until 2023 with a Modigliani biopic.
• Brazilian movie Cinderela Baiana, which earned a following for how it could charitably be called So Bad, It's Good, earned a video by Netflix with the film's star Carla Perez responding to people wanting the film on streaming, that invoked both this and Keep Circulating the Tapes, where Perez says "it only came out on VHS, I have the last tape here, and if it isn't on HD, Netflix doesn't add it", right before repeating one of the movie's most infamous lines.
• The UK release of A Clockwork Orange provoked so much controversy over allegedly inspiring several copycat crimes that Stanley Kubrick, who had emigrated to the UK, received several death threats and had his house blockaded by protestors. In response, he requested that Warner Bros. pull all UK distribution of the film, which they did, even suing small arthouse theaters that tried to screen the film. It did not receive any sort of wide release in the UK until after Kubrick's death.
• RKO Pictures owner Howard Hughes was so displeased by The Conqueror, which he co-produced, that he bought every copy of the film to ensure that it would never see the light of day again past the rare TV airing, going so far as sending a cease-and-desist to Paramount Pictures when they tried to bring it back into theaters. It wasn't until 1979, three years after his death, that the prints were fished out from his estate and the self-imposed ban on it was lifted.
• The Day the Clown Cried tells the story of an unemployed circus clown that is hired by the Nazis to keep children distracted as they're led to their deaths in a concentration camp. The concept of the movie was blasted by the few people who got to see the finished picture, including Jerry Lewis himself, who considered this the worst, most embarrassing project he ever worked on, and for as long as he lived, swore that it would never be publicly released. Ultimately, Lewis donated a copy to the Library of Congress, on the condition they not screen it until June 2024; it was unanimously agreed that he chose that date because he was certain he would be dead by then (he would die two years after the donation).
• Disney:
  • In North America, the racially controversial Song of the South has suffered from this fate. Walt Disney Home Video has never officially released the full movie, although some VHS tapes, DVDs and Blu-ray Discs include clips. The Disney Sing-Along Songs video Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah^note released on VHS to promote Song of the South's 1986 theatrical re-release has also never come to DVD; even though it kicked off the Sing-Along series, Disney hasn't sold it in any form since 2001 (though another volume with a song from the film did see a DVD release in 2006). Disney CEO Bob Iger even vowed to investors that this film will never see a Disney+ release either, as long as he remains in charge. However, Song of the South still occasionally aired on British TV as late as 2006, just not on any channels owned by Disney.
  • Martin Scorsese's Kundun has partially suffered from this. Disney intentionally sabotaged the original release as an apology to China after the film got banned there alongside every Disney film in the next five years. Disney clearly sees the film as Old Shame, never re-releasing the film on Disney+, just like Song of the South. And the only North American Blu-ray release was sub-licenced from Disney to Kino Lorber, allowing them to wash any Disney branding off the film.
  • Similarly, when Disney Channel kicked off their 100 Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) marathon to commemorate the release of Adventures in Babysitting (2016), the press release stated that their first DCOM was Under Wraps (1997) and not Northern Lights, which was excluded from the marathon altogether. The omission caused fans to question whether Northern Lights was a real DCOM to the point where The Other Wiki removed it from their list, despite some sound evidence to the contrary.^*Granted, Adventures in Babysitting would actually be the 101 DCOM, but that's beside the point. In their defense, Northern Lights was much more mature than contemporary DCOMs as the network didn't skew exclusively to tweens back then. Since the film was a deep character-driven drama focusing on mental illness, including it in the marathon probably would be jarring for Disney's targeted demographic. Those who are interested will have to resort to difficult means to track the film down.
• The Fantastic Four is an unusual case. The film was completed and set for release in January 1994, only to be pulled and permanently shelved at the last minute, with cease and desist notices sent to the cast and crew to halt marketing. According to Stan Lee, the film was produced as an Ashcan Copy and thus was never meant to be released in the first place, but producer Roger Corman and director Oley Sassone contested this, stating that it was supposed to come out, only to be cancelled at the last minute due to executives at Marvel Comics fearing the possibility of the movie becoming a negative Audience-Coloring Adaptation.
• The Garbage Pail Kids Movie: Jim Cummings (Greaser Greg and Nat Nerd's voice actor) went out of his way to join the protest against the film's theatrical release when he saw the final product, an effort that eventually saw the film pulled from theaters.
• Going Overboard: Adam Sandler hated this movie so much that it was not put in his filmography on his official website. He even somehow got the guide listings to remove his name, making it look like he did an unusually long cameo role.
• Humor Risk was the first film the Marx Brothers ever created, which they would later disown. Depending on who you ask, either Groucho burned the only negative after a bad screening or he and his brothers obtained all the prints and destroyed them. Either way, no copies of it survive.
• After Inchon turned out to be a Box Office Bomb, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ended its theatrical run prematurely, and its ties to the highly controversial Unification Church ensured that it would only scarcely resurface over the years. It never returned to theaters, has never been released on home media or streaming services, and was only sporadically aired on the Unification Church's own TV network, ALTV. After ALTV was acquired and renamed by ComStar Media Fund in 2009, the film would never reenter the public eye outside of bootlegs.
• It's been alleged that after the release of Leonard Part 6, Bill Cosby was so ashamed of the film that he bought the TV rights to ensure it could not be shown on television. The fact that it was broadcast on CBS in 1990 seems to put this allegations into rumor territory. However, he did not buy the home video rights, so the film was still released on DVD.
• Brazilian actress and TV presenter Xuxa Meneghel bought the rights to the 1982 film Love Strange Love in the '90s to keep it away from the public. The movie centers around a 12 year old boy who lives in the brothel where his mother works and loses his virginity to a 16 year old prostitute played by Meneghel. After she became famous through the children's show Xou da Xuxa, Meneghel saw this movie as a stain on her career, not helped by the number of people who accused her of pedophilia for her role in it. Despite the self-imposed ban in Brazil, Love Strange Love was released on DVD in the United States in 2005; the ban wouldn't be lifted in Meneghel's home country, however, until 2018.
• The estate of George Orwell has pointedly refused to re-release the 1956 film adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four since its theatrical run ended. Orwell's widow, Sonia, had previously sold the adaptation rights to both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm to the CIA, who funded the 1950s film adaptations of both works and edited the stories to fit the American government's interests. While the film version of Animal Farm didn't faze her, Sonia so heavily disliked the alterations made to Nineteen Eighty-Four that she threw the book into No Adaptations Allowed status until her death in 1980 and forbade further releases of the 1956 film, with the estate continuing to uphold the latter.
• The 1959 film adaptation of Porgy and Bess was pulled from distribution after producer Samuel Goldwyn's license expired in 1974. The estate of the original opera's composer, George Gershwin, have consistently refused to let the film become publicly available again despite repeated requests to do so; it has never been released on home video as a result. Gershwin's brother and collaborator Ira called the film a "piece of shit" and reportedly ordered Goldwyn to destroy every surviving print of the film. However, the Library of Congress still kept its copy (which was submitted for copyright purposes) and digitized it for public viewing; a high-quality film print would also surface in time for a 2007 screening at Manhattan's Ziegfeld Theatre.
• The original theatrical cut of The Shining contained an epilogue where Stuart Ullman visits Danny and Wendy in the hospital and reveals that Jack's corpse couldn't be found by the police. A week into its theatrical run, Stanley Kubrick had the scene excised from all prints of the film and ordered that the footage be returned to Warner Bros., thus ending the movie with a cut from Jack's frozen body to his appearance in a photo from Independence Day 1921. Kubrick additionally suppressed the footage from appearing in any later screenings or home media releases, even as a Deleted Scene; it remains MIA to this day, with his estate continuing to withhold it from public availability.
• Star Wars:
  • The original theatrical cuts of A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi are the most notorious cases of this. While all three films are easily available, most modern versions since 1997 are of the "special editions" of the films. The theatrical cuts have not seen an official release at all since 2006 (and even so, it was only a dump of the LaserDisc versions) and are not acknowledged by Lucasfilm. This was deliberate, as George Lucas hated the original versions due to how "unfinished" they are in his eyes and wants the special editions to effectively replace and bury the original unaltered versions for good, to the point of submitting the special editions to the National Film Registry instead of the original versions (despite requests from the Registry to do so) and having it in his contract with Fox that any surviving copies of the original films be "hunted down and destroyed". This remains the case even after Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 and 20th Century Fox in 2019.
  • In regards to The Star Wars Holiday Special, George Lucas allegedly said, "If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that special and smash it." Because of this, it was never re-aired after its initial airing and has never seen any sort of official release, something that has remained true even after Disney bought LucasFilm. There are a few things he didn't mind though: The Boba Fett short was the only part of the special that was remastered and featured as an Easter Egg for the Blu-Ray release of the six films that he oversaw, also receiving a Disney+ release in 2021 and a Little Golden Book in 2022; and some worldbuilding elements, notably Chewbacca's family and the special's holiday Life Day, were imported into later canon works in both Star Wars Legends and Disney's Star Wars Expanded Universe.
• According to Tom Santopietro's Sinatra in Hollywood, Frank Sinatra had Suddenly pulled from circulation when he learned that Lee Harvey Oswald watched it just before fatally shooting John F. Kennedy in 1963. The film similarly features Sinatra playing a man who invades a home as part of a plot to kill the President of the United States. Although Sinatra previously switched to the Republican party after being snubbed by Kennedy (who bailed out of a planned visit to his house at the advice of Henry Petersen, citing Sinatra's alleged mafia connections), the latter's assassination deeply upset him to the point where he reportedly cried in his room for three days straight. The film wouldn't be distributed again until it entered the Public Domain in the 1980s.
• As a variant, Nintendo were infamously displeased that a Parallel Porn Titles parody was made for the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie, but found that due to laws protecting parodies, they could not invoke a Fanwork Ban. Consequently, they bought the rights to the film specifically so they could permanently bar it from further distribution.
• John Waters refuses to release his first three films (Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, and Eat Your Makeup) in any format, and they have not appeared since their original showings. This may be in part due to their presentation; Roman Candles, for example, consists of three separate reels of footage shown on three screens simultaneously, without sound, as a separate audio recording plays. This isn't something you can replicate on a DVD player (he did have Roman Candles transferred to videotape in the 1980s, using a 4-panel split screen, with one screen left blank, which he has shown at festival and academic screenings).
• Charlie Chaplin intentionally destroyed the reels for A Woman of the Sea as a tax writeoff before he could release it, owed to his personal dissatisfaction with the results. Together with Her Friend the Bandit, it is only one of two Chaplin films known to be lost.

Literature

• Nikolai Gogol destroyed the second half of Dead Souls after he underwent a religious crisis mixed with paranoid schizophrenia — later commenting that he felt as though the characters were too far gone to be saved.
• Following the death of Sir Terry Pratchett, the hard drive containing his remaining, incomplete Discworld manuscripts was crushed by a steamroller, as he did not wish anyone else to complete them.
• Dalton Trumbo withdrew Johnny Got His Gun from print after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. The American Communist Party, to which Trumbo belonged, openly opposed US intervention against Nazi Germany prior to the invasion due to their alliance with the Soviet Union via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the novel was used as a rallying cry for this purpose. Thus, Trumbo and the rest of the party felt that the Nazi invasion invalidated the book's goals and instead shifted focus towards supporting US intervention against Germany, so long as it included an alliance with the Soviets. The book only returned to print after the end of World War II.
• Franz Kafka burned a lot of his manuscripts and, before dying, he asked his best friend, Max Brod, to burn other works, including The Trial, The Castle and "America", which he considered of lower quality. Max went against his wishes. However, it is not true that Kafka asked that ALL of his works were burned: he published many books when he was alive, including The Metamorphosis. The primary reason Brod gave for not following Kafka's wishes was that he didn't think Kafka was serious, since if he wanted those works destroyed, he would have done it himself, something he told Kafka to his face in response to the request.
• After his novel Rage was thought to influence several real-life school shooters, Stephen King declined to re-release any subsequent editions; in the foreword to another book, he described it as "now out of print, and a good thing". Although a synopsis of the novel can still be found on King's website, it also includes the following text:
  No future printings will be made of this novel at Stephen's request due to the sensitive nature of the content.
• The harsh criticism of Robert Louis Stevenson's wife took him to burn his first draft of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He eventually rewrote it and published with great success.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • The originally-recorded version of the first episode for "An Unearthly Child" was shelved by the BBC and redone from the ground-up at the order of series creator Sydney Newman, both due to a bevy of technical errors and because he found William Hartnell's performance as the Doctor too abrasive. Miraculously, the original version (commonly referred to as "the Pilot Episode" despite not being a true one) survived the BBC's routine wiping policy, and a mislabeled routine telerecording was discovered in the archives in 1978, just after the policy ended. It eventually saw public release in 1991 as part of the home video compilation The Hartnell Years.
  • Douglas Adams attempted to do this with "Shada", a serial he wrote that was abandoned mid-production following a workers' strike in 1979. Adams disliked the story, refused to license it for the Doctor Who Novelisations (it eventually got one in 2012, over a decade after his death), and nearly would've had the serial buried completely (barring some clips being recycled for "The Five Doctors") had he not absentmindedly signed an agreement in 1992 that allowed the BBC to release a reconstruction of it - ultimately three as of 2021, in fact.^note A version of the Shada story was re-used by Adams in his novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, recycling the main characters and aspects of the plot. The Doctor was re-written into eccentric private detective Dirk Gently.
  • The original 1985 cut of the short "A Fix With Sontarans" was pulled from circulation when its host Jimmy Savile was posthumously outed as the most monstrous sexual predator ever known in the history of the United Kingdom and completely unpersoned from British society since. It will remain that way after a Savile-less George Lucas Altered Version was released in 2022.
  • After "The Dark Dimension" was scrapped, the Eastenders crossover "Dimensions in Time" was made in its place as the new 30th anniversary special. However, it was made under the agreement that it would never be re-released, and the BBC have adhered to this request to this day.
• Nickelodeon took The Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odder off both its official website and Paramount+ after 13 episodes because Fairly Odder is universally despised.
• Fans of anarchic comedy clowns The Goodies - and the three Goodies themselves - all suspect the BBC has done exactly this to erase a long-running spectacularly popular show from the 1970s that ran for the life of the decade. When the BBC has exhumed and repeated practically every other 1970s comedy show, including some which have far more spectacularly politically incorrect moments than the Goodies, this series (hailed as a serious competitor to Monty Python) remains uncelebrated and unrepeated, likely due to the show falling foul of senior executives with a lot of clout and a desire to promote Monty Python instead. One episode - and far from being the best - was grudgingly repeated on the show's thirtieth anniversary. And that's been it.
• Jerkbeast was an obscure yet beloved comedy program on Seattle public access television between 2001 to 2002, primarily centered around the titular red monster profanely insulting the viewers and openly inviting audiences to call in and try and out-swear them. Several episodes were able to be salvaged and uploaded onto YouTube, but in 2021, the show's creators began filing copyright takedowns and began requesting preservationist groups to not circulate the tapes. Based on an open post to /r/lostmedia, the show's creators felt that Jerkbeast had become increasingly popular with bad-faith "edgelords" who misunderstood the point of the show and just wanted to hijack Jerkbeast for hateful purposes, and that they want the show to fade into obscurity for the time being in order to distance the show from such audiences, only giving a vague potential promise of it ever being officially re-released again.
• The Jim Henson Company has become ashamed of the short-lived The Little Muppet Monsters due to the show's Troubled Production, to the point of retconning it from reruns of the The Muppets: A Celebration of 30 Years special from 1986, which was made before LMM got cancelled. The original broadcast of said special included cameos by the series' characters, clips from the series, and a mention of the show in a speech by Big Bird, all of which were edited out when the special was shown on Odyssey.
• Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: The "Conflict" arc, a pro-disarmament Cold War allegory made during renewed tensions between the United States and Soviet Union, stopped airing after 1996 and was never officially re-released in any form. While neither the Fred Rogers Company nor PBS ever explained why, they were adamant that the episodes never see the light of day again, to the point of withholding them from Twitch's otherwise comprehensive marathon in 2017. Material from them wouldn't surface again until March of that year, when a fan uploaded the first two episodes to YouTube; the full arc would later be uploaded by another netizen on MySpleen and the Internet Archive the following year.
• Comedy Central seems to have little regard for Mystery Science Theater 3000; this was most blatantly on display during a 13th Anniversary special the network had. Not only was the show utterly ignored, but what was the network's first major hit was ignored in favor of Politically Incorrect (the network's second major hit), which was declared the network's first big hit.
• Sesame Street:
  • Episode 847, which featured Margaret Hamilton reprising her role as the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, was pulled from circulation by Sesame Workshop after a few airings, following complaints from parents that Hamilton's performance had frightened their children. The only time the episode officially resurfaced was as part of a 2019 screening of content from Sesame Street that had been removed from circulation for one reason or another; according to lost media YouTuber Blameitonjorge, who attended the screening, Sesame Workshop is still too embarrassed by the outcry the episode spawned to re-release it. Episode 847 became a holy grail for lost media enthusiasts in the late 2010s before eventually surfacing online in 2022.
  • In 1992, the show's production staff put together "Snuffy's Parents Get a Divorce" in response to a report by the US Census Bureau which claimed that 40% of American children saw their parents split during their upbringing. However, the episode was ultimately withheld — the only installment of Sesame Street to be pulled before it could air — after test screenings indicated that children were confused by its contents, in some cases worrying that their own parents were at risk of divorcing. The episode remains in the vaults to this day, barring a few clips that surfaced at a private screening of cut Sesame Street content in 2019, and the show wouldn't attempt to tackle divorce again until 2012 as part of an information kit for children with absent parents.

Music

• 10,000 Maniacs removed their Cover Version of "Peace Train" by Cat Stevens from American CD, cassette, and MiniDisc reissues of In My Tribe in 1989. The band cut the track in protest of interview comments Stevens (by then a Muslim convert under the name Yusuf Islam) made that were widely interpreted as supporting the Iranian government's death order against British Indian author Salman Rushdie, whose 1988 novel The Satanic Verses was accused of anti-Islam blasphemy. The band would eventually include the song on the 2004 Greatest Hits Album Campfire Songs, but it remains absent from most American reissues of its original parent album.
• Æther Realm has an In-Universe example in the video for "TMHC" when the band decides to delete the entire Redneck Vikings from Hell album in a fit of COVID-19 Pandemic-induced cabin fever.
• While The Beach Boys' career has often been described by fans and analysts as a qualitative rollercoaster, only two albums in their discography have never been reissued: Still Cruisin' and Summer in Paradise. Not only were the pair widely considered the band's worst albums by audiences (with the latter also being a commercial failure), but they were also derided by the band themselves, with even Mike Love (of whom Summer in Paradise was the brainchild) scarcely mentioning the projects in his memoir. The only representation the two albums see post-release is "Kokomo" being a Greatest Hits Album staple (and even then it was originally included on the Cocktail soundtrack) and the Title Track to Summer in Paradise being featured in their setlist.
• The Beatles:
  • The band's US discography consisted of Frankenslation releases cobbled together from their UK studio albums and various non-album singles. While this was standard practice in the '60s, the Beatles so heavily loathed it that the original cover for Yesterday and Today mocked how Capitol Records "butchered" their work by depicting the band as cannibalistic butchers. Consequently, the US albums near-completely went out of print following the 1987 CD reissues, which codified the UK albums as the official ones worldwide. Apart from the ones that were unchanged from the UK releases^note Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be, the only US album to not meet this fate was Magical Mystery Tour, as it expanded a UK EP release into a full LP. The US albums were briefly reissued in a 2014 Boxed Set, but it was recreated from the 2009 remasters of the UK albums rather than using Capitol Records' masters, and once the set went out of print, the US albums were not reissued again.
  • Producer George Martin was not fond of the stereo versions of the band's albums prior to The White Album, describing them as "very woolly, and not at all what I thought should be a good issue." Consequently, he sought to remix them for the 1987 CD releases. Due to time constraints, he only got to Help! and Rubber Soul, with prior albums being put out in mono and later ones using the original stereo mixes. Nevertheless, the remixed versions of these two albums would become standard, with the original stereo mixes only scarcely being reissued over the years.
• Björk's self-titled album as a child singer has not only never been issued outside her native Iceland, but has also never been officially released past its original vinyl pressing in 1977. Her first solo album as an adult would be named Debut, firmly exiling her 1977 album to Canon Discontinuity, and she has scarcely brought it up in interviews.
• Latino rapper Communion went out of his way to delete any and all of his back catalogue from when he went under the stage name "The Cacaman", as he is no longer comfortable with looking back at his old career as a parody musician specialising on Toilet Humor following his confession and his later stint at seminary school.
• David Bowie:
  • While Bowie expressed open regret for much of his output during the '80s, he reserved his strongest, yet least-vocalized vitriol for the Never Let Me Down track "Too Dizzy", banning it from ever seeing the light of day again after the album's original 1987 release. This had the effect of ruling out any attempts to improve the song on the 2018 Remix Album for Never Let Me Down, which redid the songs' instrumentation to fulfill Bowie's years-old desire to redo the album. Bowie's labels and his estate have adhered to his request to this day, not even including it in the otherwise comprehensive Boxed Set Loving the Alien (1983-1988), which includes both the original version of the album and the Remix Album, the latter of which was specifically made for the boxed set. Bowie himself dismissed "Too Dizzy" as a throwaway song and described it as his least favorite track on his least favorite album, while biographer Nicholas Pegg attributes the self-imposed ban to the song's unintentionally creepy lyrics, being a jealousy song that accidentally came off as a stalker anthem.
  • A big factor in Bowie's departure from RCA Records was his belief that they were "milking" his back-catalog, which included several compilation albums that were put out without his consent (both before and after his Channel Hop to EMI America Records). When Bowie reclaimed the rights to his old material at the tail end of the '80s, he had all of RCA's compilations withdrawn and put out Changesbowie in 1990 as a replacement. The album combined songs from Changesonebowie & Changestwobowie, which were made with his permission, plus some of his EMI America hits. In turn, Changesbowie would be deleted in 1999 in favor of various other greatest hits albums. While Changesonebowie and Changestwobowie eventually went back into circulation following Bowie's death in 2016, the other RCA compilations remain out of print.
• For decades, The Doors did not reissue Other Voices and Full Circle, the two albums they recorded without the late Jim Morrison out of record label obligations. In 2011, the band relented and gave both albums official reissues on digital platforms, followed by reissues on physical formats a few years later.
• Eminem's debut album Infinite has never been rereleased since its initial print run due to sounding almost nothing like his major label work and his dissatisfaction with it. However, Eminem would rerelease the title track of the album to commemorate its twentieth anniversary.
• Genesis had their entire catalogue remixed in 2007-2008, with the intention that the original mixes would be "gone forever" from that point forward. In practice, however, while all new releases of the albums since then have been the remixes, many of the original mixes are still available on digital download/streaming services in some countries including the United States, and the 2014 compilation Boxed Set R-Kive, though mostly featuring the remixes, featured original mixes of most tracks from 1981-1986.
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor refused to re-release All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling for the better part of three decades thanks to its major Early-Installment Weirdness, being a de-facto Efrim Menuck solo album done in a noise-folk style rather than their more distinctive brand of Post-Rock. Because the album only had one print run, consisting of just 33 cassette tapes, the album was widely thought to be lost altogether before being leaked on 4chan in 2022, after which Menuck officially reissued it via the group's Bandcamp page.
• Dave Grohl's 1992 album Pocketwatch, recorded under the pseudonym Late!, was released via an obscure indie label that manufactured cassette copies on demand. According to Grohl, the label repeatedly asked him to put out a CD release of the album, but he refused to do so because "it was never intended to be a big thing;" Grohl would never reissue the album after the label went under. This and the dubious fate of the master tapes^note the album was recorded directly onto cassette, resulting in the master tapes already deteriorating by the time the label requested a CD reissue resulted in original copies and bootleg CDs becoming highly sought after; Grohl would joke that one of his goals with the album was to deliberately drive up secondhand prices to ludicrous levels.
• Infogrames once spent $50,000 making a song to promote their games, "Infogrames Rocks My World". It was such an embarrassment that they fired everyone involved and made sure the song never saw the light of day. It was eventually leaked in 2004 by a programmer for Driver 3 who was fired.
• Michael Jackson: Jackson's first posthumous album, 2010's Michael, became embroiled in controversy shortly after release due to allegations from both fans and family members that the vocals for "Breaking News", "Keep Your Head Up", and "Monster" were recorded by soundalike Jason Malachi rather than Jackson himself. After years of debate, the Jackson estate eventually pulled the songs from digital services and physical reissues in 2022. A spokesperson for the Jackson Estate stated:
  The Estate and Sony Music believe the continuing conversation about the tracks is distracting the fan community and casual Michael Jackson listeners from focusing their attention where it should be — on Michael's legendary and deep music catalog.
• Japan:
  • According to Mick Karn in a 1996 interview, he and the rest of the band were "really ashamed" of, and "would absolutely hate anyone to hear", their early demos for the German Hansa record label (at the time "basically a disco-oriented label with Boney M. and people like that"), which Karn describes as the result of "spend[ing] quite a long time in the studio to convince [the label] that we were not a disco band — that we weren't very good at disco music". The demos have never been released as a result.
  • "Some Kind of Fool" was recorded and intended for release on Gentlemen Take Polaroids, only to be abruptly replaced with "Burning Bridges" at the last minute due to David Sylvian believing that it wasn't fit for release. Sylvian eventually re-recorded the vocal part and released the results on his 2000 rarities collection Everything and Nothing, but the original version remains unreleased, with Sylvian personally vetoing every attempt to get it out to the public.
• Jean-Michel Jarre:
  • Jarre's first two albums, Deserted Palace and the soundtrack to The Burned Barns, went out of print by the time Oxygène released and were never reissued for decades. Jarre himself chose to ignore the existence of both records, instead treating Oxygène as his true debut album. Dreyfus Records would eventually reissue The Burned Barns on CD in 2003, but Deserted Palace remains AWOL.
  • Enforced as an artistic decision for Music for Supermarkets. Jarre printed just one copy of the album and auctioned it off before destroying the master tapes and pressing plates, intending to treat the album like a work of fine art (as it was based around music Jarre composed for an art exhibit). Keeping in line with this intention, Jarre refuses to re-release the original album apart from reusing the multitrack recordings in other songs and including a demo version of "Music for Supermarkets Part I" on the Greatest Hits Album Planet Jarre, instead encouraging the circulation of pirate copies sourced from a single radio broadcast in 1983.
• Following the release of Surviving R. Kelly in January 2019, which recounted allegations of sexual abuse and manipulation that surrounded him for decades, several artists who previously collaborated with him removed their collaborations with him from streaming services, including:
  • Lady Gaga removed the version of "Do What U Want" in which he is featured in from her discography, apologized for ever working with him and pledged to remove the song from sale and streaming services. The song was also retroactively deleted from the track list of her 2013 album Artpop. The only version of the song that is now readily available is an alternative one that Gaga had recorded with Christina Aguilera a few months after the Kelly version was issued in 2013.
  • Chance the Rapper pulled his 2015 song "Somewhere in Paradise", which featured Kelly, from streaming services as well, and publicly apologized for ever working with him.
  • Céline Dion had "I'm Your Angel", her 1998 #1 hit duet with Kelly, removed as well. Unlike Gaga and Chance's examples, however, the removal only affected instances where the song was attributed to Dion, such as her album These Are Special Times and greatest hits packages. It remains available on albums that are attributed to Kelly, like his greatest hits albums.
• King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's 2011 debut EP Angelesa was out of print for a long while, with Stu Mackenzie saying on the band's website that he considers it "fake" and non-canon. It wouldn't return to print until 2020, when it and various pre-2011 songs were included on the Bandcamp-exclusive Teenage Gizzard compilation.
• At the height of The KLF's popularity in 1992, they abruptly announced their retirement from making music and deleted their entire back catalogue. The band also wiped the master tapes for The Black Room, a planned follow up to The White Room, thus ensuring that their label couldn't release it behind their backs. They did all this mostly to spite the music industry, rather than due to dissatisfaction with their own work. Decades later, in 2021, they relented and re-released their surviving material on all streaming platforms.
• Despite nonstop reissue campaigns throughout Kraftwerk's entire career, nothing prior to Autobahn has been officially re-released since 1980, due to Ralf Hütter considering them "prehistoric". Likewise, Tone Float, the lone album by the predecessor group Organisation, has never been officially re-released, period.
• Led Zeppelin were hugely disappointed with their reunion performance at Live Aid. It was the first time they had played together since their dissolution, and the result was marred by faulty guitars, technical errors, Robert Plant's voice being shot, and Jimmy Page being higher than a kite. Consequently, they prevented their performance from being put on the official DVD release of the concert in 2004.
• Brazilian musician Tim Maia recorded two albums that basically amounted to indoctrination to a cult he joined, the Rational Culture. They flopped, and once he was disillusioned and dropped the cult to return to his previous Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll life, Maia ordered the destruction of unsold copies, prohibited re-releases and discouraged re-recording of the material by other artists. In the meantime the albums found a following that ignored the lyrics to admire the impressive musicianship of a great band delivering soulful funk, along with Maia's voice sounding clean after dropping the drugs, and thus surviving LPs were highly sought. Only 9 years after Maia's death the Racional Vols got a CD re-release that put them in wide circulation again.
• Morrissey: Miley Cyrus recorded backing vocals for "I Am Veronica", and Morrissey described his working relationship with her as amiable. However, she later asked that her parts be removed; Morrissey blamed the decision on Creative Differences with "a key figure in 'the circle,'" while others speculated that Cyrus backed out due to Morrissey's controversial statements on immigration and Islam. The issue became a moot point when Capitol Records chose to block the song's parent album, Bonfire of Teenagers, from release.
• In 1976, Mike Oldfield remixed Hergest Ridge for the Boxed Set Boxed due to his dissatisfaction with the original 1974 mix, which was rushed. He then made sure that the new version was the only one used on future reissues across formats until the 2010 remix, which featured the original mix on a bonus disc.
• Pantera's pre-Cowboys From Hell albums, which had a Glam Metal sound and image far removed from their trademark Groove Metal sound, have never been reissued and are not treated as an official part of their discography.
• The Alan Parsons Project recorded The Sicilian Defence in 1979 as an Ashcan Copy while the band were renegotiating their contract. The band never intended to release the album and kept it in the vaults for nearly four decades. In 2008, a shortened version of "P-QB4" titled "Elise's Theme" was included as a bonus track on the expanded edition of Eve, and in 2014, the band finally released the full album as a bonus disc on the Boxed Set The Complete Albums Collection.
• Pink Floyd recorded the songs "Scream Thy Last Scream" and "Vegetable Man" during the sessions for A Saucerful of Secrets with the intent of either including them on the album or putting them out as two sides of a non-album single as a follow-up to "See Emily Play". However, due to the tracks being too openly reflective of frontman Syd Barrett's mental decline (which got him kicked out of the band midway through the album's production due to him becoming too difficult to work with), the band elected to withhold them from release, to the point of shooting down an attempt to include them on Barrett's 1988 compilation album Opel. The songs would consequently become popular bootlegs and even saw Cover Versions by other artists before eventually seeing an official release on the 2016 Boxed Set The Early Years 1965-1972.
• Elvis Presley:
  • Elvis recorded the occasional track that he felt was either too low-quality or too silly to be commercially released, and with a few exceptions was successful in preventing many of these songs from being officially released during his lifetime. Chief among these was "Dominic" from the 1968 movie Stay Away, Joe, sung to a bull who won't mate, which he talked RCA out of releasing at the time (it finally came out in 1994).
  • Having Fun with Elvis on Stage was unilaterally put together and released by manager Colonel Tom Parker as a cash grab. Designed to feature no material that RCA Records could possibly hold the rights to, it consists entirely of out of context snippets of Presley chatting with concert audiences. Presley loathed the album and personally had it withdrawn from store shelves; ironically, RCA would end up gaining ownership of the album anyways thanks to a technicality in Presley's contract, and they briefly reissued it after his death in 1977. However, once that print run was completed, the album would never officially return to store shelves again; Presley's estate has continued to suppress it in subsequent decades, never making it available on CD or digital platforms.
  • The posthumously-released television special Elvis In Concert, depicting one of his last performances, has never received an official home video release due to depicting Elvis in visibly poor health. The closest his estate has gotten to rereleasing the special have been allowing the use of archive footage in documentaries and the biographical film Elvis (2022), as well as keeping the soundtrack album in circulation.
• Prince recorded a deliberately untitled album, popularly known as The Black Album after its all-black sleeve, in 1987 as a Darker and Edgier follow-up to Sign o' the Times, aiming to rebut criticisms that he'd lost touch with his Black audience. However, he cancelled it at the last minute after a drug-induced mental breakdown led him to believe that it was spiritually evil; in the wake of this, he quickly recorded and released Lovesexy as a Lighter and Softer replacement album. The Black Album became a popular bootleg in the wake of its cancellation before Prince eventually and reluctantly gave it an official release in 1994 to complete his contract with Warner (Bros.) Records sooner. He still disowned the album, however, and removed it from store shelves again the following January; it remains physically out of print to this day, and didn't see a digital release until after his death in 2016, when it was officially uploaded on Tidal.
• Queen:
  • David Bowie recorded backing vocals for "Cool Cat", but ended up dissatisfied with the results and asked the band to remove them. As this happened just days before Hot Space's planned release date, Queen had to undergo a bit of Schedule Slip to comply with Bowie's request. This early version of "Cool Cat" would become a popular bootleg among Queen fans and Bowie fans alike after it was discovered on an Elektra Records test pressing of Hot Space.
  • Robert Plant's performance of "Innuendo" was one of several segments from the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert that were omitted from the VHS and LaserDisc releases due to time constraints. When the band sought to restore these songs for the DVD release, Plant himself asked them to leave "Innuendo" out thanks to his dissatisfaction with his performance.
• Radiohead:
  • After regaining the rights to their catalog, the band withdrew the non-album single "Pop Is Dead" — which they openly regretted making — from circulation. It was last seen on the 2009 collector's edition of Pablo Honey, which, like the other collector's edition releases of their first six albums, was put out by Parlophone Records without the band's consent. "Pop Is Dead" currently stands as their only officially-released song not available on digital platforms.
  • An Animated Music Video for "Let Down" was created by Simon Hilton, only to be rejected by the band because they didn't like how it turned out, with Thom Yorke outright calling it "shite." Hilton eventually made the video available on his website, but eventually took it down for unspecified reasons; despite this, fan reuploads can be found online.
• Remo Drive is notorious for this:
  • First they took down their debut EP Remo Drive EP 1 and any singles released the same year after releasing a follow up, Away, containing re-recordings of a few songs from the era.
  • Then a few months after releasing their third EP Stay Out Longer, they took that and Away down and replaced them with Demos 2014 (basically both releases remixed and combined into one) and basically said that their previous releases didn't count when they called Stay Out Longer's follow-up, Wait for the Sun, their "first EP".
  • Then they removed Wait for the Sun, the "Breathe In" single, and all of their split EPs shortly before Greatest Hits was released, leaving only Demos 2014. Frontman Erik Paulson was embarrassed of Wait for the Sun despite its critical acclaim, and the rest of the songs he was dissatisfied with the production and wanted to re-work.
  • Finally, Demos 2014 was taken down around the time Pop Music was released. When Erik said he wanted to re-work his older songs, only one song, "Heartstrings", was re-recorded with slicker production and released on Pop Music. No other older songs were re-done. Erik is openly critical about the band's older work, and sought to steer the band away from their old sound with Natural, Everyday Degradation.
• The Rolling Stones recorded the non-album track "Cocksucker Blues" as both an Ashcan Copy and a Contractual Obligation Project, wanting to complete their contract with Decca Records sooner while also never intending to give the song a public release. The track surfaced anyway on the German Boxed Set The Best of the Rest due to an oversight, which resulted in the set being recalled and reissued without the song.
• SiIvaGunner had a large number of rips removed over the years. While some were taken down due to violating YouTube's policies, the following were taken down by the team themselves:
  • The "Green de la Bean" rips, a series of Bait-and-Switch videos^note "Stages 1-4 Intro - Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine", "Coffee Break - Mother 3", "MROB-6720m - Mother 3", "Green Hill Zone (Unused Mix) - Sonic the Hedgehog", "Ground Theme (Super Mario Bros.) - Super Smash Bros. Brawl", "KILL A - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle", "Kirby Collecting (Unused Mix) - Kirby Mass Attack", "Puzzle Room - Kirby: Planet Robobot" (2nd Version), "Unnecessary Tension - Undertale", and "Deus Machina (Main Theme) - Deus Machina Demonbane" whose punchline was a Sensory Abuse video of a cartoon green bean, were all pulled after one of them ended up being flagged. A few of these rips would be remade without the Bean or at least with the Sensory Abuse removed. SiIvaGunner reluctantly retired the character with a somewhat Backhanded Apology in "An Ending - Undertale", which was itself deleted due to having been uploaded on 9/11 (see below). It didn't quite stop the character and Running Gag from appearing occasionally in subsequent rips, though usually without the Sensory Abuse (which was also downplayed in some Bean rips released shortly before the apology video).
  • The 9/11 event in 2016, featuring 9/11 jokes, The Jetsons, and America-themed rips, was canceled partway through due to extreme backlash (not helped by this occurring directly after the poor backlash from the Bean rips). Several of the rips created for it never made it onto the channel itself. All rips from that day were deleted, including a few unrelated to the event.
  • "Ashley's Song - WarioWare: Touched!" was pulled thanks to an edited line that joked about engaging in anal sex with Ashley; since she's canonically a minor, the team felt that the joke had unintended pedophilic implications.
  • "Final Boss - Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles" was removed due to the team disliking its soundfont, which they described as "a midi slap with an inaccurate Genesis soundfont that we didn't expect anyone to actually like."
  • "Puzzle Room - Kirby: Planet Robobot" was removed due to it being a shock video that was uploaded unilaterally by Le Ruse Bird without the rest of the team's consent. The video would become a Role-Ending Misdemeanor for Le Ruse Bird, who was swiftly fired from the collective.
  • The first version of "Title Theme - 7 GRAND DAD" was made as a joke video consisting entirely of rips and Running Gags that the channel's fans disliked. It was taken down by the team after the second version of the video, a proper Grand Finale (at first), was published.
  • "Theme Song - Caillou" was removed after a ScareTheater video revealed that one scene in the rip (the man taunting a screaming kid locked in a shower) was sourced from what appeared to be a pedophilia ring, noting its similarity to another, verified child pornography video. The members of SiIvaGunner left a comment on the ScareTheater video stating that the team took the clip from 4chan's /x/ board without any knowledge of who made it or why.
  • "Environmental Noises - Super Smash Bros. Brawl" was removed due to it being a troll video of a pigeon being punched that was unilaterally uploaded by an unidentified member of the channel, who was promptly fired.
  • "abc_123_a - Undertale" was unlisted as an intentional artistic decision. The video parodies the Goner characters from Undertale, who, at the time of the rip's release, could only be found by hacking the game as part of a hidden metastory about the secret character W.D. Gaster. Keeping in line with its inspiration, the video itself was hidden so that it required a similar kind of deep snooping to discover.
  • "Giga Bowser - Super Smash Bros. Melee" was unlisted due to fan backlash towards its poor quality. A second, higher-quality version of the video was publicly uploaded in its place.
  • "Mute City (Multiplayer Mix) - Super Smash Bros. Brawl" was unlisted and replaced due to the team disliking its quality, particularly singling out the fact that it was off-key.
  • The original version of "Title Screen (Demo) - Super Mario 3D Land" was removed as an artistic decision, with the replacement video being edited to tie in with the lore surrounding Mr. Own and his murderous hatred of mashups.
• Talking Heads swiftly cast No Talking, Just Head, a 1996 reunion album without frontman David Byrne, into Canon Discontinuity after its critical and commercial failure, and refused to re-release or even discuss it for over two decades. It would eventually surface on streaming services in 2018 and see a CD reissue in Europe in 2020. In an interview promoting his 2020 memoir Remain in Love, drummer Chris Frantz stated that the album's making is still a raw wound for the band members, to the extent where the book deliberately omits it.
• Talk Talk: After the band successfully sued EMI to get out of their contract, the label responded by putting together both the 1990 Greatest Hits Album Natural History and the 1991 Remix Album History Revisited. The band begrudgingly accepted the release of Natural History, but were so incensed by History Revisited that they sued EMI again and successfully forced the label to permanently remove the album from print. The only song from it to resurface after the court case was the dub mix of "Happiness Is Easy", which was taken from the original 12" release of "I Don't Believe in You" in 1986 and reappeared on the 1998 compilation Asides Besides.
• Tame Impala withdrew the original single version of "Borderline" from circulation after the release of its parent album, The Slow Rush, due to frontman Kevin Parker's dissatisfaction with its mixing (specifically describing the bassline as not being prominent enough). As a result, the reworked album version of the song is the only one officially available.
• Tears for Fears: The band loathed the original music video for "Mother's Talk", hastily withdrawing it from circulation and shooting a No Budget replacement video at the last minute. The latter would be featured on the home video releases Tears Roll Down (Greatest Hits 82–92) and Scenes from the Big Chair before eventually being supplanted on the band's YouTube channel by the video for the 1986 re-recording, while the first video would never see an official re-release.
• The Velvet Underground's final album, Squeeze, has never been reissued on a physical format and didn't appear on streaming services until 2014, owed to it being a de-facto Doug Yule solo album that Polydor Records rushed out the door to capitalize on the success of former frontman Lou Reed's Transformer the year prior. Yule dismissed the album in 1995 as "the blind leading the blind," and the other band members have refused to discuss it to this day.
• Scott Walker permanently withdrew The Moviegoer, Any Day Now, Stretch, and We Had It All from print after The Walker Brothers reunited in the mid-70s, thanks to the poor critical, fan, and personal reception of them. The four albums marked a severe Audience-Alienating Era for Walker, nicknamed "the Wilderness Years", where, thanks to a Creator Breakdown, he exclusively performed Easy Listening covers far-removed from the moodier and more experimental original material that marked his earlier and later output.
• Wu-Tang Clan: Enforced as an artistic decision for Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. In response to the low royalties generated by streaming services and a perception that the platform was devaluing the artistic integrity of music, the group made exactly one copy of the album. It was then auctioned off by Paddle8, with a ban placed on any commercial releases of the material — including by the band themselves — until 2103, 88 years after its 2015 release; however, the album's owner was permitted to play the album at listening parties. The album would change hands over the years, and as of 2021 is owned by PleasrDAO, an NFT firm, with only a few tracks leaking online.
• While "Weird Al" Yankovic hates most of his material recorded before his first album and hasn't re-released most of it out of personal shame, he has gone extra lengths to make sure his uncharacteristically blue song "Orgy on My Own" remains suppressed. It was deemed lost for decades and was almost treated as an Urban Legend until a version of the song was leaked online in 2012. It has since been exchanged hands many times, but the caveat was that the version of the song leaked was sung by co-writer Joe Earley and not Al himself. However, in 2018, a Weird Al podcast got hold of a version from a concert in which Al sang the entire song. They played around a third of the song on the podcast, but they will never share the full song without Al's blessing, which they have made clear will never happen.
• Despite being a fan-favorite and an influence on numerous Alternative Rock musicians, Neil Young was heavily dissatisfied by the 1973 Live Album Time Fades Away, calling it his worst album in a 1987 interview, and withdrew it from circulation after its initial run (with international copies eventually going out of print in 1982). Young would later clarify that most of his hatred stemmed from his bad memories of the tour it was taken from, but nonetheless, his dislike of the album was so strong that the Greatest Hits Album Decade (which includes no material from Time Fades Away) was originally planned to feature a blurb in the liner notes elaborating on how much he hated it, and songs from it were rarely, if ever, played live. It wouldn't be officially reissued until 2014, and wouldn't make its debut on Compact Disc until three years later.

Theatre

• Chicago author Maurine Dallas Watkins sold her rights to the work to the condition it should be released after her death.

Video Games

• Ashes Cricket 2013 had been released on Steam for less than a week before publisher 505 Games removed it and subsequently issued an apology, likely because its poor quality was a disgrace to its licensors.
• BoxxyQuest: The Shifted Spires, the first of the Boxxy Quest duology, was taken down by the creator and is not publicly available due to the creator considering it dated. The sequel, BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, which new players are encouraged to start with, contains a summary of the original with a download so players will not get lost with the references to it in this game.
• Glowstick Entertainment, creators of Dark Deception, announced in September 2023 that they would be delisting the crossover DLC with Yandere Simulator, a few days after allegations of grooming a 16-year old girl were made against the latter's developer YandereDev.
• Old Spice took down Dikembe Mutombo's 4½ Weeks to Save the World because the game presumes that the player is familiar with a number of events that happened in 2012, including the South Korean dance craze caused by PSY's "Gangnam Style", voting irregularities in the U.S. election, the closing of Hostess Foods, the glut of vampire-themed teen movies being released in that year, Kate Middleton's pregnancy, the 40th anniversary of Pong, and the U.S. fiscal cliff situation.
• Dong Nguyen, creator of Flappy Bird, took it down from the App Store merely two weeks after its release due to being overwhelmed by the attention it had given him.
• Wales Interactive deleted all promotional material of their Interactive Movie game Gamer Girl just months prior to its intended release, following the backlash given to its initial trailer for mishandling its themes of online abuse.
• danmaq's third Touhou Project fangame, Kekkai Gensou Roku Kyou ~ mythical mirror, was poorly received and widely seen as wasted potential at best — while the presentation was good, the gameplay was rough and felt unfinished. The game has since been buried and is not even mentioned on the developer's website, despite their older Touhou games (The Alternative Age and Concealed the Conclusion) still being listed.
• After fully regaining their rights to their flagship The King of Fighters franchise, SNK was saddled with the problem of K9999, a character created by Eolith for 2001 who had so many similarities to Tetsuo Shima from AKIRA that they could have been easily sued. Their response was to go completely scorched earth on the character: kicking him out of 2002's Updated Re-release to replace with the more sympathetic Nameless, editing him out of archived artwork in the gallery of XIV, declaring in response to questions about him that he was "gone for good", and, as post-2016 reports suggested, making it unofficial company policy that even alluding to K9999 was forbidden. This lasted for two whole decades until the character was redesigned and reintroduced as Krohnen in XV, with one of their community managers confirming on Discord that the whole thing was orchestrated for shits and giggles.
• The Legend of Zelda CD-i Remasters were taken down by the games' creator, Dopply, a few days after their release in order to avoid the possibility of legal action from Nintendo. A Spiritual Successor, Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore was later made by the same person.
• The Philips CD-i games based on Nintendo's IPs, Hotel Mario and The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games, have never been reissued since they came out. Much of this is due to their staunchly negative reputations among not only fans and critics, but also Nintendo themselves, who refuse to acknowledge the games' existence.
• Developer Next Level Games refused to acknowledge the existence of Metroid Prime: Federation Force on their website until 2020, four years after the game's release, due to the immense levels of vitriol that the title saw from the Metroid fanbase upon its announcement.
• Running With Scissors were not pleased with neither the Troubled Production and eventual underperformance of Postal III nor the Executive Meddling of Akella, and not only rendered it All Just a Dream in one of Postal 2's expansions, but also refuse to sell it online. Case in point: RWS released a franchise bundle titled "Every POSTAL (But That One) Collection". Take a wild guess which installment was nowhere to be found.
• Ride to Hell: Retribution was de-listed on the websites of both developer Eutechnyx and publisher Deep Silver mere months after it came out and from Steam a year after its release, following a deluge of uniformly godawful reviews.
• ZUN discontinued the PC-98 era Touhou Project games in 2002, shortly after the release of Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, which acted as a Continuity Reboot for the franchise. Exactly why he did so was never explained outside a brief mention of not wanting to return to 16-bit graphics in Akyu's Untouched Score Vol. 3. Nonetheless, the PC-98 titles were never re-released and he has actively taken down fans' attempts to Keep Circulating the Tapes.
• Creative Assembly don't mention Stormrise in their official website together with the other developed games. Understandable as the game in question was very poorly received due to being released half-finished, absolutely loaded with bugs to the point of making some missions unplayable and Its feature intended to allow the player to easily take command of their units was found to be very difficult and annoying to use. In fact, the sales and reviews were so poor that the planned updates were cancelled helped to make sure the game will be forgotten forever.

Webcomics

• Due to longstanding Creator Backlash towards it, Gigi D.G. took down the LiveJournal and Photobucket accounts for Hiimdaisy after starting work on Cucumber Quest.
• Peter and Company actually began in 1998 contrary to popular belief with a reboot occurring in 2005, but Jon erased all traces of the original comic from his side of things out of embarrassment and concern that people would remember Peter and Company as that version of the comic instead of the newer one.
• After suffering a massive Creator Breakdown in 2014, pictures for sad children author Simone Veil took down the comic's site and filed DMCA claims against people reuploading the strips elsewhere. In an interview conducted years later, Veil implied that she doesn't look back on the comic fondly and still considers the fiasco surrounding its removal, which generated large amounts of online harassment, a raw wound.
• Raine Dog was abandoned and taken down after just one page of an attempted Continuity Reboot in 2011 thanks to author Dana Simpson's Creator Backlash towards it. The comic isn't mentioned anywhere on her website, and even the blog post explaining why she abandoned it was taken down.
• Shen Comix:
  • Shen deleted "Crimes Johnson" out of personal dissatisfaction towards the results.
  • Shen deleted the "sweater comic" due to him finding the results too glurgey, citing a perceived Accidental Aesop about giving things in bad condition to the disadvantaged.

Web Video

• Zarxrax, creator of AMV Hell, eventually took down the download links to AMV Hell 0 and AMV Hell Divided By 0 (which both use clips from hentai anime and have very adult, line-crossing humor) from the official website. His reasoning was that as he got older, he realized that said videos had "truly reprehensible" content that he didn't want to spread any further, and also requested that they no longer be screened at conventions.
• Arlo's "Why Pikmin 3DS HURTS me" video was his most controversial vid by far, and he ended up removing it on the grounds of the "blow" the game in question dealt being lessened in the time since its announcement, and that the video's rant-y nature didn't reflect his intended direction of the channel in hindsight.
• Brows Held High:
  • Kyle's largely turned against his pre-Melancholia reviews, feeling he was trying too hard to be funny over being informative. As such, many of them on Channel Awesome had disclaimers saying that the video is "a work of satire and does not reflect the critical opinions of the author". At the beginning of the Taxidermia review, Kyle mentions that he's been hesitant to upload his older episodes to his YouTube channel, since the show has moved away from being a straight Caustic Critic show into more analytical ground, and those early episodes don't reflect that. Save for his episode on Kenneth Branagh, most of them were not imported to his YouTube channel when it became his main platform.
  • After both episodes of his "Cinema Antifa" series on Casablanca and Triumph of the Will were subjected to endless pestering by fascism apologists, Kyle made both videos private and declared the series a mistake. The stealth pilot episode on To Be or Not to Be is still up, however.
  • Kyle's video on The Color of Pomegranates was removed after he received a scathing retort to his dismissal of the movie as a meaningless Mind Screw and his description of Sergei Parajanov as "some creepy guy" in light of his sexual assault charges. Said reply pointed out that Prajanov was a bisexual man and opponent of Soviet censorship whose charges were likely fabricated by the government to persecute him, and that the movie was explicit in its symbolic portrayal of Armenia's dying culture and history as a result of The Armenian Genocide and years of Soviet occupation, with all of this being explained in a companion documentary accompanying the film that Kyle likely neglected to watch. Kyle ended up pinning the comment, responded that he was genuinely sorry for the way he ended up portraying Parajanov in the essay, and then eventually deleted the video altogether.
• Aidan Chick privated the entirety of both Eventide Media Center and Analog Archives following backlash he faced for "Crimson Creek", an episode of the former series, in which an alien attack is covered up as a school shooting at Crimson Creek Community College.
• Chuggaaconroy:
  • Chugga's 2008 videos detailing major events from the Japanese release of Pokémon Platinum were privatized after a while, then deleted due to a mix of personal dissatisfaction and them not fitting in with his later work. Six videos from the series would resurface via fan uploads between 2011 and 2015 before Chugga eventually reuploaded all 88 installments due to fan demand following the conclusion of his proper Platinum let's play in 2016.
  • Chugga's "50 Facts" video was removed after a while thanks to much of the information in it becoming outdated as the years went on. It never saw an official reupload, but survives via fan copies.
• CinnamonToastKen announced in October 2023 that he had deleted all of his videos in which he played Yandere Simulator, in response to grooming accusations made against its developer YandereDev the previous month.
• ContraPoints' host, Natalie, deleted all of the channel's old videos prior to "Decrypting the Alt-Right: How to Recognize a F@scist" due to them triggering such intense gender dysphoria (given that they were filmed and released prior to her transition) that she can barely watch them herself, let alone feel comfortable with the thought that they're still up online for the whole world to see.
• The Dom Reviews unlisted his videos on the Harry Potter series and removed them from his main series playlist in protest of various transphobic statements made by the books' author, J. K. Rowling, wishing to avoid promoting her in any way.
• English Fairy Tales (formerly known as My Pingu TV), an Indian YouTube channel specializing in animated fairy tales, removed Dina and the Prince following public backlash over a scene where Dina, a white angel, is punished for speaking to the prince she loves by being turned into a Black woman with bumps on her face, a form that she and the narrator explicitly consider ugly.
• JonTron deleted a number of videos from his channels over the years due to either Early-Installment Weirdness or him being dissatisfied with the results in retrospect. One of these, "Apples and Breaks" (a video of him lamenting his broken Nintendo DS), became a popular "holy grail" among fans for two years, eventually leading to it being reuploaded by a fan.
• Living With Wario was pulled from the Games and Wario channel in 2019 in response to YouTube tightening its regulations on mature content after the site was caught violating the Child Online Privacy Protection Act. The videos were eventually reuploaded on a separate channel the following year.
• Mike Matei used to be embarrassed by the Minecraft With Gadget video. He deleted it and flagged re-uploads of it, and expressed hatred toward any mere mention of the video and any jokes/memes regarding it. However, around mid-2017 (corresponding with the short becoming a Running Gag in SiIvaGunner rips), he seemingly came to terms with the video and eventually embraced it, joining in on making jokes about it and whatnot. It was officially reuploaded on the Cinemassacre Plays channel in 2020.
• The Nostalgia Chick:
  • The review of the 1984 film adaptation of Dune was taken down shortly after its release, as Lindsay Ellis felt that most of the plot holes she brought up were actually addressed within the film itself, as unclear as they were.
  • Lindsay Ellis privated almost all of the series' videos thanks to her Creator Backlash towards them, believing that they helped foster an overreliance on the Caustic Critic reviewing style among content creators. The only videos still publicly available are the reviews for Freddy Got Fingered and The Lord of the Rings, which were reuploaded to Ellis' main channel.
• ProtonJon's first LP was of Kirby Super Star, and like his other early content, it was uploaded to Google Videos rather than YouTube. Jon ended up disliking the playthrough so much that when Google Videos was shut down, he only reuploaded the first part, refusing to put the rest up as well. Consequently, the other videos only survive through fan reuploads.
• Episodes 1-31 of Stampy's Lovely World were privatised for years due to Stampylongnose's regret over using profanity on a channel that turned family-friendly. While some episodes have been reuploaded and censored under the Lovely World Classic label, others remain privatised to this day.
• Summoning Salt removed his video on the history of Donkey Kong world records within a day of uploading it, thanks to the fact that the world record at the time of production got broken the same day that the video released, immediately rendering it outdated.
• The members of Super Mario 64 Beta Archive removed "1995/07/29 Build Rejected Commercial" shortly after it was uploaded. According to a post by Eric in the channel's community tab, the video was removed because some of the footage was altered before it was uploaded.
• thatistheplan, a side channel by The Needle Drop host Anthony Fantano, was shut down in 2017 to protest YouTube's monetization policies. Fantano hasn't reuploaded any of its videos, stating in a 2020 interview that he was uncomfortable with the channel's association with "toxic and problematic" internet humor.
• Unus Annus was done with this in mind. A new video would be released every day for a whole year. On the final day the channel was deleted with the intent being all the videos are lost forever. Markiplier and the rest of the team even request for the videos not to be reuploaded.

Western Animation

• Allen Gregory, a short-lived Fox animated series lambasted by critics and audiences for its abhorrent and oftentimes straight-up disgusting sense of humor and unlikable and/or wildly offensive characters, was so reviled by Fox itself that they quickly scrubbed any trace of it from any of their website and pulled it from any websites offering episodes as digital downloads. It's also the one show they most aggressively take down illegal uploads of.
• Looney Tunes:
  • Since the late sixties, Warner Bros. has made sure to bury the existence of the Censored Eleven (a series of eleven cartoons that became notorious for their offensive and racist content) as much as possible, with the cartoons not having aired on television since 1968 and never receiving any official home video release. As of now, WB have only rereleased the cartoons once, which was during the first annual TCM Classic Film Festival in 2010. There were plans to release them on DVD roughly around that same time, but WB ultimately decided to scrap those plans, preferring to keep them buried for the time being.
  • Injun Trouble (1969), the final classic-era short, has never seen a rerelease either, due to a double-whammy of having racist caricatures of Native Americans that were barely acceptable even in 1969 (the title alone should be a red flag) and being from the unpopular Seven Arts-era (the Censored Eleven were all produced during the studio's heyday), causing it to become the rarest Looney Tunes short. Notably, it was the only Cool Cat cartoon that didn't resurface on Max.
• Buzz Lightyear of Star Command was a spinoff animated series from the Toy Story franchise. Three episodes were released on VHS and DVD, packaged as Buzz Lightyear: The Adventure Begins, and nothing else. It last aired in 2008, and no plans have been announced to stream the series on Disney+. Apparently, the reason it started getting this treatment is because of John Lasseter's hatred of the show. This extended to his employer, Pixar, even after Lasseter's departure, having since released the 2022 film Lightyear as the "true" Buzz Lightyear spinoff, much to the dismay of many Toy Story fans.
• Nickelodeon:
  • Since the 2014 allegations against Bill Cosby, Nickelodeon has tried to remove all traces of Little Bill, a Nick Jr. series created by Cosby. The show was purged from the Nick Jr. website in 2014. Nickelodeon even retroactively removed the show from past schedules that originally included it (alongside Fatherhood, another Cosby series that aired on Nick at Nite).
  • A temporary example: Once accusations of statutory rape and possession of child pornography were made against John Kricfalusi in early 2018, Nickelodeon decided for a few months to downplay his creation The Ren & Stimpy Show; pulling reruns from NickSplat, dropping references to it from both their website and social media, and deleting official videos (including the show's opening theme) on YouTube featuring the series. Eventually though, the network settled on merely unpersoning Kricfalusi instead - the characters from the show slowly came back to prominence, the original show would reappear on streaming, and when Nickelodeon announced a reboot of the show for Comedy Central in 2021, they made it clear that Kricfalusi would neither be involved in production nor receive any royalties from it^note A one-time payment was made to him in order to buy out his rights.
  • In 2022, Nickelodeon posted a "complete" timeline of its animated series up to Transformers: EarthSpark. It includes Ren & Stimpy, but Little Bill is totally excluded from the canon.
  • Nickelodeon also buried Rugrats Pre-School Daze. After pulling the series from reruns in 2010 (when it last aired in the United States), they subsequently removed it from iTunes. It remains unavailable outside of the Tales from the Crib DVDs, which included the episodes as extras.
  • The X's is the single most obscure and hardest to find of the (official) Nicktoons with an almost non-existent fanbase. Nickelodeon has removed all evidence that the show existed on its official website.
• For a very long time, Disney was very embarrassed by the existence of Runaway Brain for its completely off-kilter take on Mickey Mouse and abundance of Nightmare Fuel, to the point that one crew member was reportedly reprimanded for wearing a shirt based on the short in public and the short was being held as an example internally at the company for what not to do with the beloved mouse, and as such scrubbed much of its existence from anywhere outside of a few scattered home video releases. Disney has since eased up on this stance due to the short's cult following (to the point that Julius, the monster featured in the short, made a surprise appearance in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance]), but even then the short has not been uploaded to Disney+.
• Walter Lantz himself personally saw to it that Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat, a cartoon so outlandishly racist that it was seen as offensive even in the 1940s when it first premiered, never aired in theaters nor on TV out of shame for how racially insensitive it was, and avoided ethnic stereotypes in his studio's cartoons going forward.
• Shortly after the Leaving Neverland documentary was released in 2019, Al Jean, the showrunner of The Simpsons, made the decision to completely remove the Michael Jackson episode "Stark Raving Dad" not only from syndication, but also all digital distribution and future home video releases, as well as intentionally withholding it from the launch of Disney+. Jean stated that he felt as if Michael used the episode as a method to groom children, thus felt uncomfortable to let it remain viewable anywhere.
• The pioneering French animator Charles-Émile Reynaud threw most of his films and equipment into the Seine river in 1910, after the cinematograph had made his creations obsolete. Only two of his shorts still survive.

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