Lost Media: Doug Live! and the Fate of the Stage Show

Historians and cyber-sleuths enjoy dredging the past for anything lost or forsaken, but these investigations are usually limited to the primary categories of media—movies, games, music, and TV. But what of dinner shows and stage plays and comedy skits and acceptance speeches and concerts and commercials and radio dramas and sporting events and amusement park rides…and…and…

There’s a great cartoon called Doug that premiered in 1991 on Nickelodeon. Although not as outrageous or commercial as its contemporaries Ren and Stimpy and Rugrats, the show gained enough esteem and popularity to eventually entice Disney to purchase the show’s studio, Jumbo Pictures. Ultimately, Doug became Disney’s Doug and proved to be an even bigger success on the ABC network. So big, in fact, the cartoon was given its own musical stage show (DOUG Live!) at Disney’s MGM Studios (now Hollywood Studios) in 1999. It’s this final fact, however, that’s the tragedy: How can fans of the TV show enjoy this so-bad-it’s-good addendum to the Doug canon?

Well, they can’t. Well, not really.

There’s a great YouTuber called Disney Dan who covers this very topic, examining and reconstructing the DOUG Live! production and plot points as best he’s able—culled, likely, from random Handycam videos of the show scattered across YouTube and the web. It's well worth a watch, especially for fans.

But DOUG Live! remains just one illustration of a widespread problem. How does one preserve the disposable? How does one protect what the creator itself (Disney in this case) is happy to toss?

So many shows…so many stories…buried by their own makers. It’s almost perverse, isn’t it? Certainly the subversion of preservation.

Dan

Thanks to extinctdisney.com for the image