The earlier thread on the WAM on Turkish TV got me thinking. This forum must have thousands of members and hundreds of people that actually post stuff (as opposed to just lurk). Do we catch all the WAM that happens in the mainstream throughout the world?

We seem to be well represented in America and England obviously. People post Japanese stuff fairly regularly. And stuff from India. But what about........ I dunno........ Bulgaria? Norway? New Zealand? Etc etc. I would think those countries must have WAM of SOME kind in their mainstream shows.

I guess my question is this -- Could there be a scene as awesome as the Great Race pie fight out there that we have missed because that part of the world is underrepresented on this forum?

OMG, I can't IMAGINE how much stuff has been lost to the ages thanks to poor technology!

--There's dozens, if not hundreds, of mainstream clips from America AND England that have been "lost" simply because people didn't have access to recording technology... and the tapes haven't surfaced. These include everything from the fabled "Playboy Bunny pie fight" on the Steve Allen Show (which is confirmed to have been erased by the network) to the female "Masterjoke Theatre" clips from Captain & Tennille (where the "official box set" somehow left out ALL these episodes).
Will some of these surface eventually? Probably. Will some of them turn out to be letdowns once they actually appear? Probably. That said, you have to assume a large chunk of WAM scenes from the early 1900s through the 1970s are gonna stay lost forever.

--There's dozens, if not hundreds, of clips from other countries from that same era (and beyond) that also haven't surfaced, probably because folks from those countries don't post here. Just one example: Every single pie clip from the short-lived American show "College Madhouse" is out there, because a lot of us had VCRs by 1990 and taped the show every week. But in Latin America, "Passa ou Repassa" NEVER stopped running from 1992 on... and yet, there's only a tiny handful of those clips out there. (Mostly the same ones recirculating on YouTube, plus some that WAMTEC collected via satellite.)
Either NO ONE in Latin America owned a VCR in the 1990s (unlikely).... or the folks who recorded those clips don't know about this forum. That's a lot of material that still hasn't surfaced, and probably IS out there, somewhere. As much as people love to obsess over the current (terrible) version of PoR, it would be nice if some of that energy was spent tracking down the hundreds of (much better) 90s episodes instead. (Especially the handful of Latin American users on here, who could probably track them much better.)

--Most stuff coming out now IS getting caught... if not immediately, then eventually, when someone types the right combo of words into Google or YouTube. Of course, this is only online stuff. Anything airing ONLY in Turkey, or Venezuela, and not put online... is probably gone forever. But still, it's easier now to find clips from around the world than at any point in history. Unfortunately, this is also the WORST time for mainstream WAM anywhere in the world. (I mean, let's be honest. Mainstream WAM in English countries has fallen off a cliff. The Japanese resurgence has basically been over for years. Same with the Latin American countries. If there's another territory where WAM is getting more popular, we don't know about it.)

--There's still plenty of mainstream WAM in a LOT of countries (English speaking and otherwise), but all of it violates the ToL in some respect, so again.... All of that is out there, but you're not gonna see it posted on the UMD.

I've been wondering about this myself.
I used to know some Eastern European movies but those were often really hard, if not impossible, to get. Also, many scenes and skits that used to be available few years ago e.g. on youtube were removed and cannot be found anywhere anymore (my current profile pics is from one of these lost clips). All the links stopped working and without a proper description the scenes were lost.

Region-wise, even though this community is heavily US and UK focused I pretty sure there are plenty of old (and new) English movies and clips that still remain undiscovered (Head over Heels, Best Man Down, ... are perhaps some of those).
Also WaM and this messy slapstick culture is way less widespread outside of US/UK (which in itself poses an interesting question).

It might be prudent to build a catalogue of all messy TV/movie scenes here. Something like that extensive (yet far-from-complete) wamtec list, without any links, but with more detailed descriptions and better search options.

There is a hope, however.
E.g.: Long time ago I saw a clip where 3 women get splashed with paint during a minor traffic accident. It was short but rich scene - I'm sure many of you've already seen it. Initially I was unable to identify it and when I did I couldn't get the original movie. Since then someone has posted the whole movie on youtube. It's a Hungarian movie A Miniszter Felrelep (1997). Now we can watch it if we want (the scene starts at 6:49 btw).

One day when I hopefully find the time, money, resources, or actual fuckin effort to do so, I'd like to do a deep dive into the Soviet film industry since it was so heavily influenced for a time by American slapstick comedy (as was perhaps already alluded to above about Eastern European movies).

Its been kinda mentioned before here, namely some Eastern Bloc era Czech films from the Glasnost period which have some quite frankly half decent pie fights in them and my mentioning of the book by Owen Hatherly called The Chaplin Machine which looks into Soviet Avant-Garde and slapstick comedy during the time of Lenin and Stalin (which I'm told I successfully recommended to someone on here, woop woop).

Anyhow these films, unlike some of 'lost classics' from Yankee and Brit cinema and TV, I'm pretty sure haven't been wiped but might be a bit of a fuck on to get a hold of. Once I've finished with my uni Masters, I might try tracking them down with some bullshit PhD on Soviet cinema. Since some have resurfaced already there's a possibility enough of finding them and, like the awful Brit sex comedy's of the 70's, theres bound to be some semi decent pie fights in there somewhere.

I think most of this thread is correct, and the vast majority of the clips we miss are not in English. As Rich noted, most Americans have had vcrs or dvrs for over 30 years, so most clips from the USA get caught. That being said, I am still surprised by how few clips there are from certain European countries where dvrs are prevalent. I think Fort Boyard has been on in France forever, and there are not a ton of clips from it on youtube. We got about 1 good clip each from Italy and Germany a year.
As for Asia, Some users caught ready stead po from India, but given how many channels(over 800) and languages there are in Indian,I am sure we have missed a ton. Plenty of countries have done their own versions of killer karaoke, but again most of it just never gets put online.

The series premiere of Perry Mason has some WAM play in it!

I didn't expect that at all.

For those on the west coast, you'll see for yourself. Male and female nudity, so... be careful.

There are so little messy scenes in European and Asian cinematography because this kind of slapstick humor has never been a thing in those regions. The messy part of WaM just wasn't very popular. When there was a humiliation it was almost always in the form of soaking which you can actually see very often in the movies. For example, the pie fights in those Czech films, they were put there specifically to parody old American slapstick movies not because they would've been genuinely needed plot-wise. Combine that with the fact that those countries have produced much less movies than US. It is only now due to globalization that the messy slapstick culture is spreading to the rest of the world.

Well, Its not spreading fast enough!

A shame, you'd have hoped considering the early Soviet film industries utter obsession with Keaton and Chaplin and others that they would have 'borrowed' the messy part of slapstick (to the point of pastiche since they were so heavily influenced by it and later parodied properly in the Czech films). I'd still have some hope for it in those early films until the industry found a proper identity of its own.

The early Soviet movies certainly featured some slapstick acts copied from the West. However, you have to consider the circumstances of that age. A pie fight which is, to be honest, literary wasting food for pure entertainment would've been a bit too much for 20's Russia (or most of Europe or Asia really) where food was scarce (to the point of actual famine in Soviet's case). And that just wouldn't turn out well socially nor politically.

There are some mud scenes in old Soviet movies and some of them even feature women but they are all related to wars, violence and death which makes them obviously (and hopefully) unusable for our purposes.

Based upon absolutely NO evidence & based ONLY upon my "gut instinct",
I think you all are way over-estimating the amount of mainstream wam that has existed.
I mean, it IS an expensive endeavor, as we all know.

Counterpoint: In the early days of cinema (and TV, for that matter), messy slapstick WAS a special effect. And given that there were no stuntmen jumping from planes or armies of CGI aliens back then, it was a special effect they used a lot.
The early silent films of Larry Semon (featuring Oliver Hardy) can be found all over YouTube. At least half of them feature some kind of messy gag, often multiple ones. ALL the targets are basically men, but aside from that.... It's basically WAM material, every time. He wasn't the only one, either. Messy slapstick (or "WAM" as we sexualize it now) was a huge component of early Hollywood, and didn't really die out until the 1980s. (And really, the late 90s into the 2000s.)

Imagine a world where half the shows on TV included random pie-in-the-face gags, or water soakings, or people falling into various messy substances. Imagine WAM moments in half of all Hollywood comedies. Now imagine most of this content going lost, or disappearing forever, and that's basically mainstream WAM until 1980.

On the other hand, the number of WaM events in homemade videos and unscripted shows is rising.

And, just if it's not obvious, the language barrier plays a dominant role here. If you try to search "cake/pie in face" or "mud fight" in various different languages (Dutch, German, French, Russian etc.) you will likely find some new clips that haven't been posted here yet as many (modern) messy scenes form shows were mentioned in various local tabloids.

That describes early television, much of which, if recorded at all, was by a movie camera set in front of a TV set to capture the East Coast edition so it could be replayed for the West Coast. Not great quality.

I saw a documentary movie in a college class around 1971-72 which had a lengthy compilation of 1950s starlets on variety shows getting a pie in the face. Unfortunately I no longer remember the name of it and at the time there was no home video (at least not affordable). By the time there would have been opportunity to get that doc, I'd forgotten the name. Very frustrating.

Sounds intriguing! Do you remember anything that might help identify it, like topic, length, etc?