Here's a few clips from Winchell-Mahoney Time, a show I enoyed watching when I was a kid. It was on from 1965 to 1968 and it featured one of my favorite performers, Paul Winchell, and his little stock company of dummies and puppets. If you do a search on this site, you'll find lots of pieces I've written about Paul and what his work meant to me.
Winchell-Mahoney Time was his longest-running series of many, and it was also a show that made him a helluva lot of money…and not in the usual way. 288 shows were taped and a few years later, someone at the production company — Metromedia — decided the programs had no future commercial value and it wasn't worth the shelf space to store all the videotapes…so they discarded them. Winchell sued on the grounds that since he was a profit-participant in the show, he had a contractual right to be consulted on that decision and should have been given an opportunity to get the tapes. A jury awarded him a big check. Wikipedia says it was $17.9 million. I recall it as seven million, which is still a nice piece o' change. Maybe they awarded him $17.9 mil and it got whittled down to or Paul eventually settled for the seven. However much it was, I recall it made him awfully happy. Here's one of the few bits that survives of that series…