04/04/2026
Is There History Hiding in Your Attic?
At Out of the Closet, we’re launching a special preservation initiative to save and protect pieces of television history and we need your help.
We are currently seeking VHS and Betamax tapes featuring daytime television recordings from the late 1970s through the late 1990s for educational and archiving purposes.
These recordings are more than entertainment they are time capsules of culture, history, and everyday life.
We are especially looking for!
Daytime Television
• Soap operas
• Game shows
• Talk shows
• Children’s programming
• Educational programming
• Daytime award shows (like the Daytime Emmy Awards)
Historic News Moments Captured on Tape
From everyday broadcasts to breaking coverage of
• End of the Vietnam War
• Death of Elvis Presley
• Jonestown
• Three Mile Island
• Iranian Hostage Crisis
• Reagan assassination attempt
• Challenger disaster
• Chernobyl
• Fall of the Berlin Wall
• Gulf War
• O.J. Simpson trial
• Oklahoma City bombing
• Princess Diana
• Columbine
Cultural Television Milestones
• Early morning shows, classic daytime formats
• Major TV moments like ROOTS and the launch of MTV
• Classic commercials, station IDs, and local programming
🏆 Daytime Award Shows
• Daytime Emmy Awards
• Soap Opera Digest Awards
• People’s Choice daytime categories
💡 Even partial recordings, home-taped shows, commercials, or “ordinary days on TV” are incredibly valuable to this project.
📍 Donations can be dropped off!
Mondays & Wednesdays | 9AM–12PM
33 W. Virginia St.
St. Louis UCC
Or message us to arrange pickup!
At Out of the Closet, we already work hard to source these materials but we can’t keep up with demand alone. With your help, we can preserve decades of television history for education, research, and future generations.
Whether it's a single tape of Days of our Lives with Another World from 1984 or a box of 90s news broadcasts, we want to hear from you! We can help digitize and preserve your family’s recordings while saving television history at the same time.
Don’t throw them away your tapes may be irreplaceable.
One last thing don’t forget the glitz and glamour of the night especially my all time favorite one of them all as I just happened to get lucky and grew up with the last three years of Knots Landing with my mom and her mom every Thursday night at the same time in cbs ! We are also expanding our archive to include the iconic Primetime Soap Operas of the 1980s. If you have old recordings of the Ewings in Dallas, the Carrington drama in Dynasty, or the secrets of Knots Landing and Falcon Crest, we want them. These shows defined the decade’s style and storytelling, and we are dedicated to preserving those high-stakes cliffhangers and shoulder pads in their original broadcast glory complete with the original commercials and news breaks!
Let’s save the past, together.
If I tagged your organization  it’s because throughout your guises entities hopefully VHS and Beta tapes come in as donations  and we need as many as we can get our hands on ! Thank you in advance the team at OTC!
