404 Not Found: The New Age of Lost Media
August 2022. A new school year was around the corner, and I still had some free time to kill during those last days of summer. Thanks to NYU’s free HBO Max, I’d finally made progress on my gargantuan watchlist. The latest? The critically acclaimed Cartoon Network original Infinity Train. I scarfed down my popcorn, retinas burning from binging all of season 1 in a day. I was ready to continue the wild ride, to see what else the crazy train would bring. I clicked the “Next Episode” button, when to my horror, three words flashed across my laptop screen:
“404 Not Found.”
After fruitlessly refreshing my page and rebooting my internet, I did what any normal person would do when their show refused to play: I ran to Twitter. The words “HBO Max” were under the trending tab. I figured it was an app-wide glitch, nothing to worry about. I scrolled through the timeline to join in on the hullabaloo.
The headlines made my head spin.
“Infinity Train, Summer Camp Island, and other shows wiped from HBO Max”
“Without Warning, HBO Max To Slash Dozens Of Animated Series From Its Service”
I scoured the timeline. More and more animators popped up, with novel-length Notes app memos decrying the sudden removal of their award-winning, widely-watched works. What has HBO Max done? Why would they nuke so much content like this?
For context, HBO Max and Cartoon Network are both owned by Warner Bros. For years, these subsidiaries have been doing their own thing, making content under the WarnerMedia umbrella, but still generating bucketloads of dough. In April of this year, however, Warner Bros. merged with Discovery Inc., and is now called Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD). This is only the most recent merger in an increasingly consolidated media landscape, with Disney swallowing Fox in 2019, the current ViacomCBS-Paramount alliance, and the NBC-Universal package. The industry has become a series of hyphenations, and now Warner Bros. Discovery is the next mouthful to be added to the list.
Needless to say, this merger wasn’t cheap. CEO David Zaslav has garnered the ire of streaming stans worldwide for his ruthless business decisions. Since his tenure as head of the new conglomerate, Zaslav has made some baffling moves to cut costs, including, but not limited to: canning the the Batgirl movie at its final stages of production, cutting down on scripted content to make more room for reality TV, and proposing to do away with HBO Max altogether for a new streaming service with Discovery+ programs. In retrospect, I should have known animation was next on the chopping block.
The West. Hates. Animation.
In the eyes of the general public, the medium is either relegated to children’s stuff, or crude adult comedy. There’s no room for nuanced, dramatic, hard-hitting stories, like something akin to Breaking Bad or Succession. In the eyes of film awards, it’s boxed in its own category, serving more as a de facto “Disney-Pixar Movie of the Year” trophy than truly honoring the best animation has to offer. While Cartoon Network (and by proxy Adult Swim) are holding the animation industry afloat on the TV side of things, if you want more diverse content, you gotta look in the nether regions of streaming. Admittedly, Netflix and HBO Max have been upping their game, with gems like Arcane, Love, Death and Robots, and Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal garnering awards and acclaim in recent years. However, since animation is freaking expensive, and the western market is unfortunately very niche, a few Emmys does not generate enough profit to keep shows like Infinity Train afloat. Thus, when WBD found out they were bleeding money due to disappointing box office returns, they figured something had to give. Sadly, it’s cheaper to order another season of Heartbreak Island than it is to greenlight a future animated classic.
The distaste for the medium is palpable. It’s disheartening to see people’s eyes glaze over when you mention how a show about a talking horse can be one of the most profound pieces of media you’ve ever consumed, or how a show about a boy and his stretchy dog living in a post-apocalyptic fantasy land literally shaped fundamental aspects of your personality and attitude toward life. When people mention “prestige television,” they mean the acclaimed political epic featuring sex, dungeons, and dragons (Game of Thrones), not the acclaimed political epic featuring sex, dungeons, and dragons (Berserk). And God forbid you mention anime. While admittedly, it’s more widely embraced now than in years past, xenophobia still hangs over the entertainment industry like a storm cloud. Good luck pitching something like Neon Genesis Evangelion to a WBD executive.
So, the animation stigma makes it not only some of the last things to get greenlighted and funded, but also the first to get cut when profits look low. And, if it’s not enough to get canceled, HBO Max has moved to erasing animation from the archives completely. The official Infinity Train YouTube page has disappeared, and all mentions of it on social media are now gone without a trace. The only way to reliably watch the series online now is through illegal streaming websites. If one doesn’t have the DVDs (which shot up in price upon the terrible news), they must turn to the digital seven seas to watch. Such is the fate of Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart, Summer Camp Island, and dozens of other cartoons.
One must wonder, what’s the point? Is there not enough space on the HBO hard drive? Why twist the knife and spit on the work of hundreds of animators, voice actors, and crew members? Why erase all existence of their contributions? The outright deletion of canceled projects is unheard of in this new age of streaming. In fact, many canceled cable shows have breathed a second life thanks to streaming, like Arrested Development and Lucifer. Thanks to long-term Netflix contracts, new fans were able to continuously engage and interact with these shows, and thus generate enough momentum to successfully campaign for another season in a new home.
The optimism for the streaming age was that shows could remain in the public consciousness indefinitely, rather than being bound to the whims of a TV guide or praying for the gift of syndication. Now, fans of Infinity Train have no choice but to speak about it in hush-hush terms, effectively locking out a new demographic of potential fans and squashing the potential to fight back against its sudden removal. HBO Max is setting a dangerous digital precedent here. It’s basically saying to viewers, “Don’t even try to revive this.” It’s saying to creators, “Don’t step out of line. We can make you disappear in an instant.” It breeds an air of uncertainty, distrust. Why trust a company that can render your work invisible? Why support a show that never actually existed in the first place?
Historically, lost media was a point of tragedy. Large nitrate fires routinely incinerated years worth of silent film archives, master music recordings, and TV tapes, as shown famously with the 1932 Fox Fire and the 2008 Universal Studios Fire. Fans of Doctor Who made it a point of pride to try and restore pieces of nearly 100 missing episodes of the TV programme due to the BBC’s lack of preservation techniques in the 1960s and 70s. But now, with established film preservation protocol and the digital age, there are plenty of avenues for media to be routinely accessed. With the intentional suppression of select projects, the media market has been thrown into disarray. A creative’s worst nightmare is no longer just getting their project canned, but being given the opportunity to showcase it and getting the rug pulled from right under their feet. When a creative is at the cusp of getting their work out there, what’s stopping a company from pulling the plug at the end of production? If it can happen to Batgirl, it can happen to anything.
Unfortunately, HBO Max shows no signs of stopping. As of this article, it seems Westworld and Minx are the newest targets. In the case of Westworld, the decision to delete is appalling. It was one of HBO’s most successful original shows, scoring record high ratings and being routinely thrown in the “prestige TV” conversation with the aforementioned Game of Thrones. Minx was renewed for a season 2 and had gotten to the end of its production for it, when HBO reversed its renewal and announced the removal of season 1 as a double whammy.
With the animation purge, those shows were first aired on other networks, leaving them slightly more vulnerable to the demands of the streaming platform. But Westworld and Minx were HBO originals. Many had deemed them completely safe, but it seems not even original programming can escape the threat of the lost media label. The modern day binge-watch model is not helping things, either. Show production has accelerated, and there is now exponentially more “must-watch TV.” Content is being shoved down people’s throats so fast that they don’t even notice another gem has been taken away. There is no time to mourn those “underrated cult classics” because HBO renders it impossible to create that cult organically. They can get away with shelving anything they deem to be “not worth it.”
As consumers, we can’t let this happen. Word of mouth goes an extremely long way. Hell, that’s how Infinity Train bloomed from a viral YouTube short to a multiseason-long adventure. Westworld stans, take a page from the animation book. You guys were looking down on us then, but now look. We’re all in the same boat here— you never know what title could be vanquished next. No matter how many reality shows Zaslav tries to throw at us in the future, we have to remember what he stole from us. I say we go back to our roots. Hoard those DVDs. Hold onto those vinyls. Don’t throw away your DVR just yet. Buy those CD burners in bulk. Because in an age where the internet is no longer forever, we have to keep the media we love close to our hearts.
